Fresh from winning the International Booker, Philip Roth gives a rare interview to Benjamin Taylor and the Telegraph.
‘There are some writers who have made an indelible impression. I don’t know if they shaped me as a writer, but they shaped me as a thinker and a reader and as a literary person. When I first started out, at school, I had been steeped in Henry James and there was an “influence”, not all for the good, and there was a tone I picked up from James, that didn’t suit me at all. But it’s there in Letting Go (1962).
Kafka made a strong impression on me. His serious comedies of guilt touched me. I think Bellow, of course, has been a major figure in my mind and imagination all my life as a writer. Saul was
born in 1915, so he’s 18 years older than me. Therefore he was a figure of awe for me. When I got to Chicago in 1955 to go to grad school and I read Augie March, it was my guidebook to the
city. It all seemed so glamorous to me, to be in the city that nourishes the sky. I read Bellow’s books as soon as they came out.’
Jack Straw reviews (£) Henry Kissinger’s mammoth history of modern China.
‘I sought no verdict from Kissinger about Tiananmen. What I was desperate for was his discussion of the various forces that led to that uprising, by far the most serious since the formation of the People’s Republic in 1949. Its absence is a serious omission.
In contrast, Kissinger’s story about the Cultural Revolution is full and balanced. We know the gory details — of a society so turned upside down that it came close to an
irrecoverable collapse. He recites some of the revisionist interpretations, which are amusing, if not a little lacking in credibility.’
The Guardian tells you how to spot a psychopath with a list extracted from Jon
Ronson’s The Psychopath Test.
‘”But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said.
“Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Hare. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
It wasn’t only Hare who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. Over the following months, I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said the same. Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you’re trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was.
I met an American CEO, Al Dunlap, formerly of the Sunbeam Corporation, who redefined a great many of the psychopath traits to me as “business positives”: Grandiose sense of self-worth? “You’ve got to believe in yourself.” (As he told me this, he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.) Cunning/manipulative? “That’s leadership.”’
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