MARIA DUARTE recommends an extraordinary film that explores an absent father’s attempt to make up to his sons
Trump and the US tradition of despotic presidents
EMMA SHORTIS applauds a history of the US that demonstrates the historical precedents for presidential authoritarianism
Cartoon by Steven Ashman
JOHN GREEN, MARIA DUARTE and LEO BOIX review The Shepherd and the Bear, Hamlet, Twinless, and 100 Nights of Hero
GEOFF BOTTOMS applauds a version set amid the violent conflicts of the 19th century west African Oyo empire before the intervention of British colonialism
GILL PARSONS introduces the remarkable process by which her childhood experience of a convalescent home has become a new drama
SEAMUS HIGGINS introduces some basic facts about the role of sugar in driving a worldwide crisis of diet-related diseases
Japanese innovation, Costa Rican skullduggery, Glasgow Central suicide, and good deeds punished in London
The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself
Nick Bryant, Bloomsbury, £25
IF you select “virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find the same poisonous ingredients [that] percolated violently to the surface on January 6, 2021,” writes journalist and historian Nick Bryant in his new book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
Donald Trump, and the movement behind him, is both new and old; times are unprecedented but also, to historians of the US, frighteningly familiar. Bryant, a historian by training, meticulously makes sense of these contradictions, methodically unpicking the mythology of US history to clearly argue that Trump — and his support — is the product of that history.
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