Anything Can Happen
The New York Review of Books | 7th October 2021
Notions of authorship, creator, and creatures, as well as of love, folly, and imagination, dominate Salman Rushdie’s and Ariel Dorfman’s retellings of Don Quixote. "I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows what Don Quixote is about."—Keith Dewhurst, author of the play Don Quixote (1982) Miguel de Cervantes concluded The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha in 1605 with a phrase in Italian from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: “Forse altro canterà con miglior plettro” (Perhaps another will sing with a better [guitar] pick). While his book was selling in record numbers, Cervantes turned to short stories and pastoral poetry. In 1614 the pseudonymous Alonzo Fernández de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote, prompting a furioso Cervantes to publish his own second volume of the novel a year later. Attributing its authorship, as he had that of volume 1, to the…
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Hush-Hush Boom-Boom
London Review of Books
Alexander Cockburn blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no…
Ruling Assange Can’t Be Extradited Is an Indictment of US Prisons
The Nation
But the British court judgment, which is likely to be appealed, also delivers a body blow to freedom of speech. My junior year high school English teacher liked to tell a story about Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson…
If Assange’s Fate Were Up To a Jury, He, Too, Might Have Walked Free
The Nation
Like William Penn and John Peter Zenger, the Wikileaks founder is fighting for our freedom. When the magistrate presiding last September at Julian Assange’s extradition hearing, Vanessa Baraitser, confined the defendant to a bullet-proof glass cage at the back of…
Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.