MixedNew Statesman (UK)But what is Wooldridge’s recipe for meritocratic reform? He is not easy to pin down. His last chapter is a slalom, veering at moments towards the positively eccentric...and then drifting leftwards ... All sorts of other ingredients are thrown in. Get rid of referendums, take away power from the rank and file of political parties, tax the digital platforms. These may be desirable but they look like hasty add-ons to his main arguments. But is meritocracy really on the ropes? Wooldridge’s desire to ameliorate it is the starting position of nearly all politicians, including many on the left, even if they don’t frame their rhetoric in these terms ... We don’t have a political and media culture that asks politicians about ideas—what do they actually mean by fairness, or equality of opportunity, or meritocracy? And so they can duck the difficulties that Wooldridge learnedly and entertainingly grapples with. More’s the pity.
Ismail Kadare, Trans. by John Hodgson
PositiveThe Financial TimesThe violent and corrosive nature of state repression assails you, gnaws at you and depresses you on every page. The state in question is the Ottoman Empire of the 1820s — a sprawling multilingual, multinational tyranny ... a severed head — actually several severed heads — takes centre stage. Those that the sultan decrees are special traitors merit special treatment. Their heads are put on public display in The Traitor’s Niche, set in a wall in a forbidding Constantinople square: \'Perhaps nowhere else could the eyes of passers-by so easily grasp the interdependency between the imposing solidity of the ancient square and the human heads that had dared to show it disrespect.\' ... It is a fable while also a portrait of subjugation. Kadare, however, will not have all traces of spirit defeated, whether individual or collective. Albania will not be undone.
