The World

Here are some interesting things I read during the holidays.

I must admit, I hesitated briefly before embarking on four pages on Waziristan in The Economist. But it is a brilliant piece of reporting, enlivened by some characters who seem to have walked straight in off the pages of a novel. I particularly liked the 92-year-old British major, Geoffrey Langlands, who is still the headmaster of a school in Waziristan. He was kidnapped about 20-years-ago and was kept captive in a freezing mountain hut, but describes his detention as “quite tolerable on the whole,”

Another great piece in The Economist, of an entirely different sort, is this sub-Shakespearean drama, based on the reign of Gordon Brown.

Trying to understand just what the Obama administration is upto in Afghanistan, I came across this interesting article on the “Nine surges of Obama’s war“, which points out that the “surge” is considerably larger than the 30,000 troop headline figure that Obama gave in his West Point speech.

I also read some (gasp) books which were not about politics. Martin Stannard’s biography of Muriel Spark was fun, although it was a bit polite. I would have preferred it if he had been a bit less reverential, and a bit more willing to dish the dirt.

I finally got round to Aravind Adiga’s “White Tiger” – and read it in one sitting, which is always a good sign. It’s that rarest of things, a truly compelling winner of the Booker Prize.