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FT
Incomparable
In recent years Sinéad O’Connor wrested her story back from a sneering media. But “if anyone truly wants to know me,” she wrote, “the best way is through my songs.”
Joanna Biggs
Acts of Accompaniment
In Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Cristina Rivera Garza collects everything that might be needed to bring her younger sister’s murderer to trial. As the older sister’s quest recedes, Liliana’s world comes alive.
Gary Younge
Arriving Without Belonging
Colin Grant’s new memoir explores the unfulfilled promises made to his migrant parents, and the limits of understanding between generations.
I’m Good to Ghost
Free from the Archives
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and its film adaptation were so centrally about “the American way of life,” wrote E. J. Hobsbawm in the Review’s February 14, 1985 issue, that audiences in the US could appreciate it “without bothering their heads about the extraordinary island the Corleones were supposed to have come from.” Puzo’s later novel The Sicilian, in contrast, “takes place entirely in the Sicilian past” and “purports to be a barely fictionalized retelling of the real life-history of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano (1922–1950), a distinctly non-American figure.” Where Puzo casts Giuliano in a sentimental mold, Hobsbawm argues, he can better be understood against the social and political forces of his time. “For politics,” he writes, “is what even Robin Hoods live by.”
E. J. Hobsbawm
Robin Hoodo
As an American journalist who interviewed him said, the bandit Salvatore Giuliano was a Robin Hood—a good kid, a sincere kid, with only one thing wrong with him: he liked killing people.
