David Herman
From the Prospect archive: read all of Michael Ignatieff’s past Prospect articles, now available for free online. Plus: discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog.
When Michael Ignatieff left Britain in 2000 for a new career across the Atlantic, he sent a farewell poem to his friends. The poem, by one of his heroes, Czeslaw Milosz, ended: “Time for me to play hooky. Buona notte. Ciao. Farewell.” Of course, Ignatieff wasn’t off to play hooky. He was starting a new phase of his career: high-flying academic at Harvard and then leading Canadian politician, possibly future prime minister. And he wasn’t just saying farewell to his friends. He was saying goodbye to his previous self.
How many intellectuals have had three distinguished but very different careers in three different countries? Ignatieff was a well-known broadcaster, writer, journalist and public intellectual in Britain for over 20 years. During that time he wrote two novels, one shortlisted for the Booker, and three screenplays. He was an Observer columnist and wrote for the best literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He presented prize-winning documentaries for the BBC and serious discussion programmes for BBC2 and Channel 4. He also wrote six non-fiction books, on subjects from nationalism and war to Isaiah Berlin. Arriving a young, unknown Canadian historian, when he left he was one of the best known cultural figures in Britain.
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Prospect’s “overrated and underrated” events of the year are divided alphabetically, by author surname, into four parts: click here to read parts one, two, three and four.
To comment on this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
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Prospect ’s “overrated and underrated” events of the year are divided alphabetically, by author surname, into four parts: click here to read parts one , two , three and four .
To comment on this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Trevor Dolby publisher
Overrated Strictly Come Dancing was just about the most overrated cultural and political event of the year.
Underrated 1. Philip Roth’s latest Indignation was inexplicably ignored. Beautifully written, tempered with calculated anger. The critics, those who could be bothered, suggest Roth is publishing too much and quality is suffering. Balderdash.
2. Leonard Cohen at the O2: poet, composer, singer, arranger, mystic, legend, icon. One watches and listens in wonder. Generations hence will envy us.
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Prospect ’s “overrated and underrated” events of the year are divided alphabetically, by author surname, into four parts: click here to read parts one , two , three and four .
To comment on this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Andrew Moravcsik professor of politics
Overrated The Russia-Georgian conflict. For a while it seemed that the Russia-Georgia conflict was going to usher in a new geopolitical era of Russian expansionism and Nato counter-balancing in central Asia. In fact it proved a peripheral event: An imprudent Georgian leader sought to bolster domestic stature by playing the nationalist card, and a Russian leader sought to do the same. Both overplayed their hands, Nato stayed out, and the world moved on.
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Jon Elek
Of the many great lines in Annie Hall, my favourite occurs during the scene where Woody Allen is watching basketball on television in a bedroom during a publisher’s cocktail party. His wife comes in and tells him to turn it off. Ever the smoothie, he responds by suggesting they have sex—an advance she spurns with the immortal line,”There are people out there from the New Yorker magazine! My God! What would they think?”
Allen’s wife is an unattractive caricature of the pretentious, New Yorker-worshipping American intellectual, but I must confess to feeling a twinge of sympathy. I find the New Yorker incredibly seductive. It’s not just the articles and cartoons; there’s a part of me that fetishises the magazine a little, perhaps the way Russian teenagers used to feel about Levi’s jeans, or the Japanese about Manchester United.
So it would be hard to overstate how delighted I was a few months ago when it looked as if I was about to have a letter published in the New Yorker’s notably selective “Mail” page (singular). Every week, the pages feature three or four letters from people around the world who have a beautifully articulated insight into a recent article, or who know something that the New Yorker doesn’t. Not surprisingly, most of them seem to come from anoraks of some sort or another.
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Alexander Linklater
Click here to discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Click here to read out-takes from the Hitchens interviews
For most of his 40-year career, Christopher Hitchens’s notoriety has been confined to highbrow journalistic, literary and political circles. In the last 15 years, he has been familiar to readers of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic, and to viewers of the American current affairs shows that invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases. His aptitude for the iconoclastic flourish—describing Princess Diana and Mother Teresa at their deaths, for example, as, respectively, “a simpering Bambi narcissist and a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf”—sustained his currency as an intellectual shock troop of the left. Then, with his support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and for George W Bush’s re-election in 2004, the left itself became a target of his polemics. But whichever side he took, he continued to file what were essentially minority reports to a specialist audience. Only God was able to promote him beyond such factional interests by providing the subject of a bestseller. While Hitchens has authored 16 books, including works on Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, the Elgin marbles, George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, his assault on religion in God is not Great was the first occasion for which a publisher had arranged a serious US book tour.
Now his proselytising atheism has granted him something like the status of a household name. But why does this insolently charismatic, upper middle-class Englishman seem to attract, and repel, so many people? It may be something about the way in which he combines a raffish, old-fashioned intellectual showmanship with an eye for the big story. His current battle against faith is the biggest of his career—it is the earliest argument he remembers having as a child, and the one that will be with him to the end.
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How did we decide who should be on this list? The criteria are relatively simple. Candidates have to be living, and still active in public life. They have to have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence debate across borders.
We want you to vote for your top five thinkers from the longlist of 100. You also have a bonus vote for one public intellectual you think has been unjustly excluded. Simply click here to see the full list and to register your vote; results will be announced in the July issue of Prospect. Our choices are not “objective” and reveal the combined biases of the two magazines. You can challenge our selection on our blog, First Drafts—and we will print a selection of the best responses.
Christopher Hitchens, the world’s fifth top public intellectual in 2005, has also written a piece for us on the uses and abuses of the term; you can read this here.
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Every contribution to our symposium can be accessed directly by clicking on the name of the individual author below. You can also discuss issues raised by the symposium, and by our latest issue, on First Drafts, Prospect’s editorial blog.
Bryan Appleyard, Arthur Aughey, Cheryll Barron, Peter Bazalgette, Vernon Bogdanor, Rudi Bogni, Joe Boyd, Samuel Brittan, Lesley Chamberlain, Stephen Chan, Robert Cooper, Emma Crichton-Miller, René Cuperus, William Davies, Meghnad Desai, Anthony Dworkin, Geoff Dyer, David Edgerton, Duncan Fallowell, Timothy Garton Ash, Anthony Giddens, Robert Gore-Langton, David G Green, Johann Hari, David Herman, Michael Ignatieff, Pico Iyer, Josef Joffe, Alan Johnson, Eric Kaufmann, Tim King, Denis MacShane, Jean McCrindle, Edward Mortimer, Onora O’Neill, PJ O’Rourke, Paul Ormerod, Mark Pagel, Ray Pahl, Jonathan Power, Gideon Rachman, Jonathan Rée, Bridget Rosewell, Bob Rowthorn, Jacques Rupnik, Dominic Sandbrook, Roger Scruton, Jean Seaton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Erik Tarloff, Tzvetan Todorov, Emily Young, Slavoj Zizek.
California dreaming
by Anthony Giddens
It is May 1968. I am not in Paris, but 6,000 miles away in California working as a junior lecturer at UCLA. When I arrive at Venice, a beach city where I have rented an apartment, I witness a scene out of biblical times. As far as the eye can see, the beach is covered with people wearing long robes, colourful but tatty and unkempt. The air reeks of marijuana. Behind them, on the sidewalk, there is a row of police cars, each with an officer dangling a shotgun out of the window. There is an atmosphere of menace. Just as I had never encountered marijuana, I had never heard the word “hippie” before that day. At that point, the word was barely in use in Britain.
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Brief biographies of the 100 men and women who made it into the Prospect/Foreign Policy 2008 global intellectuals list. This list runs from A to K; bios from L to Z here.
Click here to vote for your top intellectuals. Discuss our selection on First Drafts, the Prospect blog.
prospect
Brief biographies of the 100 men and women who made it into the Prospect/Foreign Policy 2008 global intellectuals list. This list runs from L to Z; bios from A to K here.
Click here to vote for your top intellectuals. Discuss our selection on First Drafts, the Prospect blog.
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