Royal Bodies
Hillary Mantel • London
Review of Books
The author's controversial speech on the public perceptions and purposes of British royalty.
I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren't they interesting? Aren't they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it's still a cage.
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The KGB Oscars
Simon Shuster • Foreign Policy
In Putin's Russia, it's the spies that are handing out the awards for the year's best films.
The Federal Security Service, the KGB successor known as the FSB, has been ascendant in Russian society ever since its former director, Vladimir Putin, became president in 2000. Since then, the agency has been obsessed with finding ways to bring Russian movies and TV under its patronage. As early as 2001, the agency began financing Russian whodunits and spy thrillers; in 2006, it handed out the first FSB Awards -- glass statuettes embossed with its sword-and-shield insignia -- to the filmmakers, actors, and novelists who had "most accurately" portrayed the warriors of the secret front. The galas had all the pomp of a Western awards ceremony, except they were held at the FSB's notorious headquarters on Lubyanka Square, inside the hulking mass of orange stone that many Russians still associate with the KGB's interrogation chambers.
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Warrior
Petraeus
Thomas Powers • New
York Review of Books
A review of the retired
general's combat career.
It was the full spectrum of the game-the nature of modern people's war, as fought and lost by the Americans in Vietnam-that engaged Petraeus. Confronting that failure, of which the Army for years could barely bring itself to speak, has been the central work of Petraeus's life. It is the great theme of the best of the new books, Kaplan's The Insurgents, which relates the history of Army thinking about counterinsurgency. It is the reason Petraeus has attracted so much attention for so long, and it is what lends a somber note of broader loss to the recent end of Petraeus's public career, which came so abruptly last fall, for reasons so entirely irrelevant to any issue of substance, that one is almost embarrassed to cite the details.
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