The New Republic

The Fear of Barbarians By Tzvetan Todorov translated by Andrew Brown (University of Chicago Press, 233 pp., $27.50) Torture and the War on Terror By Tzvetan Todorov translated by Gila Walker (Seagull Books, 68 pp., $8.50) Duties and Delights: The Life of a Go-Between By Tzvetan Todorov translated by Gila Walker (Seagull Books, 412 pp., $39.95) I. READ MORE >>

It is 1940, somewhere in Soviet-occupied Poland. A Pole is being interrogated; he has been beaten. Then a woman is called in, his wife; some torture has degraded her. She informs on her man; he will be sent to a gulag. The horror is clear, but the feeling is everyday and commonplace. As someone else will admit later in the film, we have all done terrible things. READ MORE >>

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For a brief season, Henry Hopkinson was a Tory politician of the second rank, who might have risen higher if he hadn’t famously misspoken in 1954. As a junior minister at the Colonial Office, he said in the House of Commons that Cyprus would never be granted independence. This dogged him for the rest of his life. “Never say never,” Churchill supposedly said, and Hopkinson was dropped from the government not long afterwards, quite soon departing for the House of Lords under the disguise of Lord Colyton, just before, as it happened, Cyprus became independent. READ MORE >>

“Les guichets du Louvre” is a French film released in 1974 in America as “Black Thursday.”  I recall every scene: they were withering, all of them. The movie takes place within one 24 hour period on July 16, 1942 when 9,000 French policemen rounded up 14,000 Jews (including 4,500 children) in the 4th arrondisement of Paris and transported them to the Velodrome d’Hiver on their way to the death camps. READ MORE >>

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To anticipate Argentina versus Germany or Brazil versus Holland is to again hear World Cup history whisper ever more urgently as the tournament approaches its conclusion. The coaches and players will insist that such talk is nonsense; a distraction. The game must be won on the pitch in South Africa. Eleven against eleven. The future scripts are yet to be written. What's past is irrelevant. So said the English, to a man, on the eve of being knocked out by Germany yet again. READ MORE >>

To rake Harry Reid over the coals about his “no Negro dialect” comment will bring to mind the Biblical passage about trying to take a speck out of someone’s eye when you’ve got a log in your own. Pretty much all of America black and white feels exactly the way Harry Reid does about the way black people talk – and aren’t even worried about saying it out loud. READ MORE >>

Officially, the only news coming out of Dubai on Sunday was that the central bank of the United Arab Emirates, the seven-state federation of which Dubai is a part, will extend ample credit to banks in Dubai. That should avert a series of runs now that it's pretty clear Dubai's banks have piles of bad loans sitting on their balance sheets.    READ MORE >>

This just in: A career diplomat from Bulgaria won a suspenseful and drawn-out race to lead the U.N. agency for culture and education on Tuesday, beating out an Egyptian candidate whose one-time threat to burn Israeli books had galvanized opposition.... READ MORE >>