/Tag: Marxism

The Man Who Knew Almost Everything


The Nation

Eric Hobsbwam, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century. Little, Brown and Company. 213. Pp xv+319. I first read Eric Hobsbawm as a doctoral student in Kolkata in the 1980s. I started with his books on popular protest, Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969), before moving on to his trilogy on the ages, respectively, [...]

-ITE


-IAN

A friend recently described his father, who was an esteemed newspaper editor of the 1940s and 1950s, as a ‘Nehru-ite’. Since I was more familiar with the term ‘Nehruvian’, I asked why the ‘-ite’ instead of the ‘-ian’. He answered that this was conventional at that time, when—in nationalist circles—a debate raged between ‘Patel-ites’ and ‘Nehru-ites’. [...]

WRITERS AND POLITICS


The Hindu

I have been reading the correspondence of the American polymath Edmund Wilson. Wilson was the most influential literary critic of his day, whose essays and reviews could make or break a writer’s career. He was steeped in American and European literature, and taught himself Russian and Hebrew. His range was enormous; he read and wrote about [...]