Sweden

Good women and bad men

Just in case you hadn’t guessed after nearly 1,800 pages of the ‘Millennium’ trilogy, the late Stieg Larsson has his alter-ego hero Mikel Blomkvist spell it out. Just in case you hadn’t guessed after nearly 1,800 pages of the ‘Millennium’ trilogy, the late Stieg Larsson has his alter-ego hero Mikel Blomkvist spell it out. ‘This story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies,’ he says. ‘It’s about violence against women and the men who enable it.’ Larsson’s three Millennium books, which feature adult reboots of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s characters Pippi Longstocking and Kalle Blomkvist, are slow-burners in the crime fiction charts. In almost every country in which they

The Swedish-Israeli War of Words

I am just back from holidaying in Sweden. And while I dutifully kept away from blogging, I did follow the news and the developing Swedish-Israeli dispute, the implications of which may yet become global. For those of you who have yet to read up on this story, it all started last week. In an article for Aftonbladet, Donald Bostroem recounted Palestinian allegations that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians to harvest their organs, and implied a link to the recent arrest, in the US, of organ-trafficking suspects. Many of the suspects were Jewish. Having read the article, the Swedish Ambassador to Israel issued a strong condemnation, saying she found the article “as