However, for the best part of a decade, around the turn of the 20th century, his creator Arthur Conan Doyle struggled with a marital dilemma that pitched passion against duty against fate. Conan Doyle found himself in a classic threesome. In 1897 his meek and amiable wife Louise (known as Touie) was dying of tuberculosis when he fell deeply in love with another woman, Jean, who was younger, more attractive and altogether better equipped for the demands of life with a bestselling author who prided himself on his fitness and energy.

This was not merely sexual infatuation. He introduced his girlfriend to his family and tried to incorporate her into his life. But while his doting mother was prepared to countenance this ménage, other relations (notably his brother-in-law EW Hornung, the creator of Raffles) were outraged.

The author of Sherlock Holmes was not expected to behave like this. For while Conan Doyle was never a stern moralist, he guarded his reputation, having forced his way into English society from a standing start in Edinburgh. When he met Jean he was living in some style in Hindhead, Surrey, where, four years later, following his work promoting the Boer war, he would be knighted and made deputy lieutenant of the county.

So his affair had to be discreet and any mention of it expunged from the record with the ruthlessness of Holmes's arch enemy, Professor Moriarty. There are no references to his trysts with Jean in his diaries. The couple's love letters were solemnly burnt by their son Adrian after she died in 1940.

In the past three years, however, a new biographical resource has become available. For more than seven decades after his death in 1930 Conan Doyle's papers were kept under wraps as family members squabbled over ownership. Then suddenly, in May 2004, they were put up for sale at Christie's. Not everyone was happy: Richard Lancelyn Green, the leading Sherlockian scholar, was adamant that Conan Doyle's daughter, also called Jean, had wanted this treasure trove preserved at the British Library. He became so upset by his campaign to stop the auction that he almost certainly took his own life.

With grim inevitability, the sale went ahead. Luckily, much of the best material was bought by the British Library where, within months, I, as Conan Doyle's putative biographer, was able to read most of the items that had escaped the family cull, including around 600 letters from Conan Doyle to his mother. I chased up additional papers that had been acquired by collectors elsewhere, mainly in the United States. As a late bonus, I gained access to Lancelyn Green's own archive of work, which he had bequeathed to Portsmouth, the city where Conan Doyle wrote his first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, while working as a general practitioner in 1886.

By piecing together information and reading between the lines, I have managed to flesh out the story of Conan Doyle's affair. There are three stages. The first centred on Edinburgh, where Conan Doyle was born in 1859. He did not have an easy childhood as his father, Charles, a clerk in the Office of Works, was an alcoholic who had to be institutionalised. His mother, Mary, coped as best she could, imbuing Arthur with a keen sense of literature and history.

With financial help from his wider family, he went to Stonyhurst, the leading Roman Catholic public school, where he often found himself forced to stay over holidays such as Christmas, so tense was the situation at home. His mother later revealed how her husband used to steal from his family, drink furniture varnish and crawl around the house like an idiot.

The second stage of the story took place in Portsmouth, where Conan Doyle settled after qualifying as a doctor. It was a struggle and, as he was also trying to forge a subsidiary career as a writer, he was often lonely. He frequently wrote to his mother about his longing for a woman round the house.

In March 1885, one emerged in the petite form of Louise Hawkins. He had taken in her brother Jack as a live-in patient. When Jack died from cerebral meningitis, Conan Doyle alighted on the emotionally distraught Louise, whom he married in Yorkshire five months later.

There is no evidence of great passion. I am not convinced she even accompanied him on his so-called honeymoon (a cricket tour to Ireland), as he managed to write a poem about the holiday without mentioning her. But he did have an easy-going wife, who ran his house while he developed his practice, extended his contacts and wrote more stories.

By early 1890, he was feeling restless. He took Louise on mercilessly long bicycle rides, once covering 100 miles on a tandem. He began visiting other women, writing knowingly about marital jealousy (in the joint novel The Fate of Fenella), and in one remarkable poem, "Blue Eyes", bewailing the attractions of a beguiling mistress over the woman (his wife?) always at his side. (His largely unknown verse, published in three volumes, provides the most direct insight into his personality.)

Then, in October 1893, he was devastated to learn that Louise had contracted tuberculosis. Somehow, he had been expecting this. The disease ran in her family (her brother Jack's meningitis was almost certainly tubercular) and, as a Victorian doctor and son of an alcoholic, he had a morbid fear of inherited characteristics. Despite the disruptions, he did his best to accompany Louise to healthy winter resorts in Switzerland and Egypt.

The third act opened suddenly when he met Jean, the striking, rather vapid daughter of a well-off City trader, who was training to be a singer. He later would say their relationship began on March 15 1897 - a date he commemorated each year with the gift of a single snowdrop. The first evidence of the affair appears in the diary of Conan Doyle's soldier brother Innes, who recorded Jean's frequent appearances at the family home in Hindhead starting that November. She was on hand one evening when Conan Doyle read from his new play version of Sherlock Holmes

Conan Doyle's emotional turmoil is clear from "The Confession", one of his non-Sherlockian stories. Written that autumn, it told of an abbess who confesses her warm memories of a love affair. A priest absolves her: "My sister, our thoughts are not always ours to command. When they are such as our conscience disapproves, we can but regret them and endeavour to put them away."

It emerges that this priest had once been her lover. He had taken the cloth after being tricked into believing she had rejected him. When she tries to comfort him with thoughts about the good they have both subsequently done, he is inconsolable. "What about our lives!" he wails. "What about our wasted lives!" This sacrilegious cry perhaps hinted at the anguish Conan Doyle knew he would have felt if he had repressed his love for Jean.

Bar the tangled matrimonial relationships in The Hound of the Baskervilles and "consumption of the most virulent kind" in "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter", one struggles to find any reflection in the Holmes canon.

Conan Doyle's dilemma is clearer in A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, his "social" novel about a married couple in the suburbs, published in 1899. His equivocation about sex is there in a scene in which newly married Frank meets a liberated former love (perhaps a prostitute) in Soho. Conan Doyle later became so worried about his suggestion of sexual infidelity - "She put out two hands and took hold of his. That well-remembered sweet, subtle scent of hers rose to his nostrils. There is nothing more insidious than a scent which carries suggestions and associations. 'Frankie, you have not kissed me yet'" - that he withdrew the book from serialisation, declaring it depended more "upon feeling and atmosphere rather than upon incident". But there was no mistaking his action when he had the completed manuscript bound for Jean.

Correspondence confirms that, although both Conan Doyle's mother and his sister Lottie liked Jean, others in his family were less sure. When Innes broached his extramarital interest in 1899, he replied defensively that there was no need to worry as he would never cause Louise any pain. "She is as dear to me as ever, but, as I said, there is a large side of my life which was unoccupied which is no longer so." This was as near as he came to admitting his sexual passion for the younger woman.

As Louise was generally at home, Conan Doyle took advantage of frequent trips to London to meet his mistress. The following year, he made the mistake of taking her to Lord's when Hornung (husband of his sister Connie) was there. Hornung was astonished at this flaunting of an unmarried young woman in public. Conan Doyle pleaded that his relationship with Jean was platonic and this made all the difference between guilt and innocence.

Despite his protestations, when he went away on, say, a cricket tour, Jean would sometimes be found nearby. Hotel registers are difficult to track down, but the evidence of the 1901 census is incontrovertible. It shows that Conan Doyle was staying at the Ashdown Forest Hotel in Sussex. Officially, he was en retraite with his mother. But it also records that another guest at the same time was Jean, whose parents had a country house in nearby Crowborough. Conan Doyle was not always as Sherlockian as he would have wished in covering his tracks.

This explains why he took up the cause of divorce law reform. He is known for his campaigning, notably on behalf of George Edalji, a half-Indian solicitor wrongly accused of animal molestation (the subject of Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George). But he had great sympathy with people trapped in loveless marriages, saying that an unmarried woman, with her freedom, was much happier than a woman hitched to the wrong man, the worst of it being that "the poor things can never tell till they have married the chap!"

Within weeks of Louise's death in July 1906, Conan Doyle was looking for a new house around Crowborough, where he went to live after his wedding to Jean in September the following year. Mary and Kingsley, his children by Louise, were unceremoniously cut out of his life while he indulged his uxoriousness and fathered a second family. "I can't think why my father is so hard," Mary complained to her brother. "I have not had one gentle word, or sign of love from him during the whole two years since Mother died."

Conan Doyle's coldness to Mary and Kingsley shows his less attractive side, putting his affair with Jean into relief. On the one hand, a great love had triumphed, but he had shown some of Holmes's steely calculation as he counted the days until Louise died and he was able to start a new life.

· Andrew Lycett's Conan Doyle: The Man who Created Sherlock Holmes is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Andrew Lycett, The Guardian, 15.09.07

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2169433,00.html

De rares députés - tels Alexandre Lebedev, de la Douma fédérale, ou Sergueï Mitrokhine, du Parlement de la ville de Moscou - sont venus exprimer leur soutien. Mais le principal intéressé, Vladimir Grouzdev, élu de Boutovo à la Douma fédérale, n'a pas jugé bon de se mobiliser. Il avait pourtant fait distribuer aux écoliers de Boutovo des calendriers avec le slogan "Grouzdev est ton député !", rapportent les parents.

Il faut dire que le député Vladimir Grouzdev, 40 ans, membre du parti pro-Kremlin La Russie unie, évolue dans une autre sphère. Ses préoccupations sont autrement moins terre à terre que celles de ses mandants. Membre de l'expédition russe dans l'Arctique, il était, le 2 août 2007, dans le bathyscaphe descendu à 4 300 mètres sous la banquise pour planter un drapeau russe en titane. Homme des profondeurs et de l'apesanteur, il sera le prochain touriste russe à monter à bord du vaisseau Soyouz pour un voyage dans l'espace en septembre 2008. Ce privilège pourrait lui coûter environ 25 millions de dollars (18 millions d'euros). Une paille pour cet homme d'affaires qui a fait fortune dans la grande distribution.

Marie Jégo, Le Monde, 15.09.07

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3214,36-955619,0.html 

Los avatares de este trío en el año en el que cayeron las Torres Gemelas ha llevado a Claire Messud a los primeros puestos de las listas de ventas. Casada con James Wood, uno de los críticos literarios anglosajones más influyentes, sus tres libros anteriores tuvieron escasa repercusión comercial. Estadounidense, hija de una canadiense y un francés de origen argelino, criada entre Australia y Canadá, Messud ha compaginado la escritura con la docencia, el periodismo y la crítica. En su casa de Sommerville a las afueras Boston, los libros conviven con los patinetes de sus hijos. Recién cumplidos los 40, habla con soltura americana y cierta ironía británica. No tiene rubor en confesar que sus cuentos son un fracaso y que la ropa de los niños dice cosas de los padres -"hay gente en la guardería de mis hijos que viste a sus niños con ropa que cuesta una fortuna y eso es una forma de afirmación"-.

PREGUNTA. ¿Qué hacía a los 30? ¿Se sentía fuera de lugar como los personajes de su novela?

RESPUESTA. Vivía en Washington DC y daba clases pero no estaba fija. Intentaba escribir mi segunda novela. Estudié en Yale y luego en Cambridge y la mayoría de mis amigos marcharon a Nueva York, podía imaginarme perfectamente llevando su vida.

P. ¿Nueva York es la ciudad icono de los solteros de 30 años?

R. Visualmente, forma parte de todos, incluso de quienes la abominan. NY ofrece la posibilidad de reinventarse a uno mismo. Hay muchos momentos en los que piensas que cualquier cosa puede ocurrir, hay un sentimiento de que todo es posible.

P. Pero el mundo que describe en Los hijos del emperador no es lo primero que uno se encuentra al bajar del avión.

R. Es verdad. Uno de los personajes llega de fuera, tiene acceso a ese mundo y le repugnan sus valores.

P. Cada capítulo está contado desde una perspectiva distinta. ¿Cuál fue la más complicada?

P. Ella es la única inmigrante en una novela situada en una ciudad plagada de extranjeros.

P. El título hace referencia al cuento del traje del emperador.

R. El emperador es la cultura. Aunque la novela está situada en un mundo privilegiado, lo que les pasa a los protagonistas no es muy distinto de lo que les ocurre a muchos jóvenes de otros ambientes que descubren las pequeñas verdades de lo que significa vivir. El derecho adquirido o la titularidad a la que creen tener derecho es un estado mental, endémico a la cultura contemporánea norteamericana. Es eso de no saber qué hacer, de no tener prioridades. Cuando daba clases de alfabetización en Washington, una de mis mejores alumnas tenía 25 años y dos hijos. Vivía en una casa subvencionada que tuvo que dejar y abandonó las clases porque no podía pagarse el autobús, pero en su casa tenía ordenador, televisión de pago, cámaras digitales... Quería mejorar su nivel de lectura para participar en el programa de Ophrah

[Winfrey, presentadora del programa de entrevistas de mayor audiencia en Estados Unidos]. Así está América. La generación anterior sí tenía un código que guiaba sus decisiones, aunque algunas de ellas no tuvieran mucho sentido.

P. El 11-S sacude la novela, lo pone todo en su sitio.

P. ¿Qué ha cambiado desde entonces?

R. Hay algo bajo cuerda, hay una guerra. La frivolidad neoyorquina está casi definida. El sentido de que algo puede ocurrir en cualquier momento impone cierta despreocupación. El caso más extremo es la espantosa banalidad de Bush que en una de sus primeras apariciones pedía a los ciudadanos que siguieran viajando en aviones y comprando como muestra de solidaridad.

A. Aguilar, El Pais, 15.09.07 

Ernest Bai Koroma, of the opposition All People’s Congress, had about 60 percent of the 1.4 million votes counted, ahead of Solomon Berewa, the hand-picked successor to Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who is stepping down after 12 turbulent years in and out of office.

If Mr. Koroma is confirmed the winner, the succession will be the first time power has peacefully shifted from one party to another in a country whose history has been marked by strife. The election, which went to a second round after the first round failed to produce a clear winner, was one of the most competitive in the region in recent memory.

Mr. Koroma criticized the government of Mr. Kabbah and his deputy, Mr. Berewa, saying it had failed to tackle corruption and deliver a peace dividend to Sierra Leone. A tiny country on the west coast of Africa, it has considerable wealth in diamonds and timber, but has suffered through decades of misrule and violence.

The civil war, which was spawned by a conflict in neighboring Liberia and fueled by Sierra Leone’s lucrative alluvial diamond mines, ended in 2002, but many Sierra Leoneans still have not seen a significant improvement in their living standards. Their nation remains one of the poorest on earth, and efforts to reduce child deaths, malnutrition and maternal mortality have produced limited results.

The country has struggled to recover from the war, one of Africa’s bloodiest, in which boy soldiers addled by drugs hacked limbs off civilians on the orders of their commanders.

But if Mr. Koroma’s likely victory signals change, his party comes with its own political baggage: It ruled Sierra Leone during the long and deeply corrupt era that preceded, and perhaps produced, the civil war that killed tens of thousands of people and sent millions fleeing their homes.

The election tested the police and military, which were reconstituted after the war while United Nations peacekeepers patrolled the country. The peacekeepers left two years ago, and the nation’s security forces had to contend with sporadic election violence on their own. Despite some violence before the second round of elections, the voting, held last Saturday, was peaceful. 

Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times, 15.09.07 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/world/africa/15leone.html?ref=africa

PREGUNTA. ¿Qué importancia tiene la "era axial", entre los años 900 y 200 antes de Cristo, designado por Karl Jaspers?

RESPUESTA. Tiene una fuerte relevancia. La religión se asocia a menudo con la violencia y el dogmatismo, pero ambos no interesaron a los fundadores de las grandes religiones. Y, en muchos casos, una repulsión a la violencia fue el catalizador de los cambios religiosos.

P. ¿Cómo se perdieron los valores para que haya gente que mate en nombre de Dios?

R. Todas las ideologías se distorsionan por el egoísmo, la avaricia, la ambición y el egocentrismo. Somos esencialmente egocéntricos, pero, de llegar al otro lado del ego, se entra en una fase alternativa de conciencia; dios, nirvana, brahmán o sagrado. Los sabios axiales coinciden en que la compasión es la mejor forma de superar el ego. Pero la gente no quiere ser compasiva, prefiere llevar la razón.

P. ¿Cree en la verdad absoluta?

P. ¿El miedo y la sospecha han suplantado a la compasión?

P. ¿Recela de la cruzada democrática lanzada por EE UU?

P. ¿Avanzamos hacia un choque de civilizaciones?

P. ¿Cuál es su posición en el debate europeo entre integración o asimilación de los inmigrantes?

P. Es difícil comparar el velo y el hábito en sociedades cristianas.

R. El velo no es necesariamente hostil a la mujer. Ninguna mujer debería verse obligada a ponerse nada que no desee. Mi hábito era incómodo, caluroso y poco higiénico. Pero también liberador puesto que nunca tuve que preocuparme del maquillaje, el peinado o la ropa. Aquí se utiliza el cuerpo femenino para vender productos y hay una masiva industria que fuerza a mantener la silueta. Antes de señalar con el dedo las normas de otras culturas, deberíamos analizar las nuestras. Con el velo, la musulmana reacciona en contra de estos valores occidentales. Prefieren cubrirse en vez de revelar todo al exterior. Alcanzar la modernidad bajo sus cánones y no imitando a las occidentales. Estos movimientos religiosos están entresacando un punto oscuro de la modernidad, un aspecto de la ética moderna que no es del todo correcto.

P. ¿Es posible reconciliarse?

Lourdes Gómez, El Pais, 15.09.07

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/ensayo/violencia/intereso/fundadores/grandes/religiones/elpepuculbab/20070915elpbabens_1/Tes

At a meeting at his summer residence with the Guardian and a group of foreign academics and journalists yesterday Mr Putin praised Mr Zubkov, describing him as a "brilliant administrator and true professional". He also said his friend and former colleague from his days in St Petersburg could be a candidate for the presidential elections in March, something Mr Zubkov has said is a possibility.

With his popularity still high, the Russian press has been speculating that Mr Putin might change the constitution to seek a third term if, as expected, the ruling party, United Russia, wins the parliamentary elections set for December.

But Mr Putin insisted this was out of the question, suggesting this would be to tinker with democracy.

"I have no intention to reduce everything I've done to zero," he said. But he would still play a role in Russia's public life. "I hope to be fit enough and I have the desire to do so. Any future president will have to reckon with that."

Although he said he would "do anything" to ensure the next president's independence, analysts believe Mr Putin might want a weak one-term president so that he can return to power in 2012. Most political analysts believe that Mr Zubkov, 66 today, is too old to harbour genuine presidential ambitions.

On foreign policy, Mr Putin urged George Bush to set a timetable for a complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and said he failed to see what the US had achieved after four years of occupation.

"I believe it's better to delineate a timeframe for withdrawal," he said when asked by the Guardian about Iraq. Using the argument of many US senators he said this would "encourage the Iraqi leadership to concentrate if they know that the US will leave by a date certain.

"Without it they will have no commitment to build up their security forces."

Mr Putin, looking relaxed and confident, suggested the Americans had not brought Iraq real democracy. "What kind of democratisation can they have in the context of military action?" he asked.

He disagreed with those who recommend Iraq's partition as the best or only solution. "This would not end the Iraq problem but start a new one," he said.

Mr Putin's comments came hours after Mr Zubkov was endorsed by the Russian parliament as the new prime minister. MPs in the 450-seat state Duma voted by 381 to 47 to back his nomination.

Mr Putin was also directly critical of the US. "I don't interfere in your politics, please don't interfere in ours," he told a Washington academic referring to US funding for opposition groups and human rights organisations in Russia. He said independence was a very "expensive" thing in the modern world and only a few big countries such as India, China and Russia could afford it.

"Unfortunately, in some eastern European countries defence ministers are cleared by the US ambassador," before they are appointed, he said. "You know how decisions in Nato are taken," he said, hinting that the United States dominates the alliance undemocratically.

"Russia is a country which cannot live without its own sovereignty. It will either be independent and sovereign or it will be nothing," he said.

He brushed aside criticism of alleged pressure on independent political parties and claims that Russia had become more authoritarian under his rule. "We are developing a multi-party system. I've been thinking a lot about how Russia should be governed after 2008. I see no solution other than democracy and a multi-party system," he said. He implied Russia was following international laws. "We are not inventing our own Russian wheel or our own moonshine democracy," he said.

In a competent but uninspiring parliamentary debut yesterday, Mr Zubkov said he would like to make several reforms. But he made it clear he would leave politics to Mr Putin. "I believe our priorities should be the strategic targets - set out in the president's state of the nation addresses in the past few years," he told parliament.

Mr Zubkov said he wanted to improve pensions, keep inflation down, and help Russia's impoverished regions. He said he was keen to boost the defence industry and set up a new agency to fight corruption, Russia's most ubiquitous problem.

Mr Zubkov was deputy to the future president from 1992 to 1993 in the external affairs department of the St Petersburg mayor's office.

Mr Putin failed to mention the two men previously seen as the leading candidates to take over next spring. They are Sergei Ivanov, Russia's former defence minister, and Dmitry Medvedev - the first deputy prime minister. Ivanov was the favourite.

Backstory

Vladimir Putin's interview yesterday was during a meeting of about 40 foreign experts on Russia invited by the state news agency, Ria Novosti. Most were from the US, Britain, Germany, China and Japan. He started the meeting with a two-and-a-half hour lunch in which he took questions then invited the group to a villa where he offered drinks on a terrace with a magnificent view to waves breaking 100 feet below. In a rare view for foreigners, he led the way through his own office, past his desk where the Russian flag stood behind his chair. The group, known as the Valdai Discussion Club, has come to Russia every summer since 2004. Mr Putin has received them in different venues each time. This year's location, in the subtropical luxury of Russia's Black sea coast, was the most exotic.

Jonathan Steele and Luke Harding, The Guardian, 15.09.07

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2169659,00.html 

La télévision ne sera pas en reste, puisque Arte, sous le vocable "Maria Callas, trente ans déjà", diffuse le 16 septembre à 9 heures Maria Callas-Conversations, un entretien avec Pierre Desgraupes du 20 avril 1969 disponible en DVD (EMI Classic-Archives, vol. 2). Puis, à 19 heures, Maria Callas à Paris (gala du 19 décembre 1958 à l'Opéra de Paris et récital avec l'Orchestre national de l'ORTF sous la direction de Georges Prêtre, le 2 mai 1965). Quant au film de Philippe Kohly, Maria Callas Assoluta (en DVD chez MK2 Editions), il est programmé le 19 septembre, à 20 h 40.

En partenariat avec Arte, l'Opéra de Paris organisera une avant-première au Palais Garnier dimanche 16 septembre, à 14 h 30 et 18 heures, précédée d'une sélection d'archives permettant de retrouver Maria Callas à deux moments-clés de sa carrière. Les débuts de son histoire d'amour avec le public parisien - 1958, le récital accompagné par Georges Sébastian à la tête de l'Orchestre de l'Opéra de Paris - et la fin, en 1965, accompagnée par Georges Prêtre à la tête de l'Orchestre national de l'ORTF (tél. : 08-92-89-90-90 ; tarif : 10 €).

Outre une pléthore de rééditions, paraît un beau livre : Maria Callas, les images d'une vie, soit 160 photos (dont plus de la moitié inédites) pour retracer en images la biographie de la "Divina" (YB Ed., 260 p., 39,95 €).

Enfin, la Mairie de Paris organise, dimanche 16 septembre, sur le parvis de l'Hôtel de Ville, un hommage à Callas sur écran géant - Carmen en 1962, à Londres, le deuxième acte de Tosca, toujours à Londres, en 1964, ainsi qu'un documentaire sur sa vie commenté par Eve Ruggieri.

Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, 15.09.07

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-955627@51-955696,0.html 

About 70 leading models, designers, agents and fashion show producers gathered at a New York hotel in the first of a series of rallies designed to put pressure on the industry to face up to the problem.

Ms Campbell, who flew in from London for the meeting, repeated her recent claim that she could no longer get on to the cover of British Vogue. "Do I still want to be on the cover of British Vogue? Absolutely I do. It's not because I don't sell, because I do sell - more than many of my white counterparts."

The south London-born supermodel said there had been times in her career when she had been so exhausted she had wanted to stop modelling.

She said she had no desire for sympathy or to blame anybody, but said she had had to resort to extraordinary measures to overcome resistance.

She revealed that she had forced her way on to the cover of French Vogue only after the designer Yves Saint Laurent had threatened to break off relations with the magazine unless they did so.

The event was organised by Bethann Hardison, a model from the 1970s who formed her own agency that helped launch the careers of Ms Campbell and Mr Beckford, one of the highest paid male supermodels. "In the past decade the black image has been reduced to a category - she is not even to be seen; she has become invisible," Ms Hardison said.

The New York Times noted this week that several of the New York fashion week shows, including Calvin Klein, had featured only white models.

Several speakers at yesterday's event said the industry had become progressively closed to African-Americans through open discrimination that would be unthinkable in any other US industry.

Claude Grunitzky, editor of the magazine Trace, said that when he invited Somalia-born Iman to guest edit a recent edition with the cover line "black girls rule", a major advertiser had pulled out at the last minute on the grounds that the phrase was racist.

Iman added that she had found it difficult to persuade black models to pose for the cover. "I understood that - I didn't want to be labelled a black model when I started, but now I do celebrate it and I see the difference."

Ivan Bart, vice-president of IMG models, who arranged for Ethiopian-born Liya Kebede to become the first black face for Estée Lauder, said: "The rules have become stricter. When I first started in the business, a beautiful model of any colour could be on the cover."

The event was conceived as the first of a monthly series of meetings. The participants are planning to lobby the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and there was brief discussion of the possibility of bringing a class action law suit against the most blatant discriminators.

Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, 15.09.07

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2169876,00.html

The decision to return appears to have been made without her reaching a formal power-sharing agreement with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, party officials said. But in an indication that there was some understanding between her and the government, a presidential spokesman said there were no restrictions on her returning, implying that it was not likely that she would be threatened with arrest upon her return.

On Monday, another exiled former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who is a political rival of both Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf, was threatened with jail on corruption charges and then deported within hours of landing in Pakistan to attempt his own return to run in the elections.

Ms. Bhutto similarly faces a number of court cases in connection with corruption and money laundering, and she has demanded in negotiations with General Musharraf that the cases be withdrawn if she is to support his rule.

But not long after party officials announced the date of her return, Ms. Bhutto told Pakistan TV, “Our talks with General Musharraf are going nowhere, so we have decided to go ahead with our own plans.”

General Musharraf is expected to announce the schedule for his own re-election in the next few days. If he decides to run for another five-year term as president, he needs to file papers and be voted in by an electoral college of the national and provincial assemblies between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15. It appears that Ms. Bhutto, 54, will return just after the presidential vote as Parliament is dissolved in preparation for general elections.

Officials of Ms. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party made the announcement of her return at their party headquarters in Islamabad, which was decorated with banners and a vast poster of their leader, who at 35 became the first female prime minister of a Muslim country. “I wanted to give the good news to millions of Pakistanis — I want to give you the date, the date is 18th of October,” the vice chairman of the party, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, told party workers. Ms. Bhutto will arrive in her home city of Karachi, he said.

Ms. Bhutto has been living in London and Dubai since her second government was dismissed in 1996 and corruption charges were brought against her. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who spent seven years in jail on corruption and murder charges, is undergoing medical treatment in New York.

Mr. Fahim said Ms. Bhutto was ready to face any consequence on her return. “We don’t have any assurance from any quarter,” he said when asked if they had reached a deal with the government to guarantee her a safe arrival.

But a presidential spokesman, Rashid Quresihi, said there were no restrictions barring Ms. Bhutto’s return, according to a local television channel, Dawn News.

The Pakistan Peoples Party press secretary, Sherry Rehman, said that Ms. Bhutto had left the country with the permission of the courts and that she should not face any legal problems on her return.

Talks over a power-sharing deal between Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf have gone on for months, nudged by the Bush administration, in hopes of finding a way for moderate elements in Pakistan to join forces, and for General Musharraf to stay in power and for Ms. Bhutto to return and serve as prime minister. Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Pervaiz Kiyani, traveled to London last month with aides of General Musharraf as the deal came close.

But the talks stalled 10 days ago, amid strong opposition from members of the governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League, which backs General Musharraf, as well as opposition from members of Ms. Bhutto’s own party, who feel that any deal with the unpopular general will harm their electoral standing.

The two sides had gotten as far as discussing changing the Constitution to allow General Musharraf to run for president again, and for Ms. Bhutto to serve a third term as prime minister. But the talks broke down over Ms. Bhutto’s demand that a constitutional amendment allowing the president to dissolve Parliament be scrapped, and General Musharraf’s insistence on holding dual posts as president and army chief of staff.

Instead, what seems to be agreed on is that Ms. Bhutto be allowed to return to Pakistan free of court cases. In return, her party will not resign from Parliament during the vote to re-elect General Musharraf, as some other opposition parties have said they intend to do. In Pakistan, the president is elected by the national and provincial assemblies.

Resigning from Parliament would deny General Musharraf a quorum and invalidate the vote. Instead, Ms. Bhutto’s party will abstain, according to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, president of the governing party, and other senior members of the party.

General Musharraf is expected to face several challenges in the Supreme Court once he files his papers for re-election in the next few days, in particular over his eligibility to run for another presidential term while also holding the post of army chief of chief. Ms. Bhutto has said that she opposes his re-election in uniform, but that delaying her return until the general has pushed his election through a compliant Parliament will help him. After that, she will take the gloves off, one of her supporters said. 

Carlota Gall, The New York Times, 15.09.07

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/world/asia/15pakistan.html?ref=asia

Le texte proclame "le droit à l'autodétermination" des peuples premiers et réclame pour eux, le cas échéant, "des réparations". Il vise notamment à protéger la spécificité de leur culture, l'intégrité de leurs terres, et à les prémunir contre toute discrimination.

Seuls les Etats-Unis, l'Australie, le Canada et la Nouvelle-Zélande ont voté contre la déclaration. Les quatre pays abritent de larges populations indigènes et craignaient que le texte n'ouvre la voie à de nouvelles revendications de ces minorités, au détriment d'autres groupes ou des lois nationales. Onze pays, dont la Russie et la Colombie, se sont abstenus, tandis que 143 pays ont voté pour.

Le document reconnaît aux peuples premiers le "droit d'être autonomes et de s'administrer eux-mêmes" et "le droit de ne pas subir d'assimilation forcée ou de destruction de leur culture". Ils doivent aussi pouvoir "contrôler leurs propres systèmes et établissements scolaires", avoir "leurs propres médias dans leur propre langue" ou encore ont "droit à leur pharmacopée traditionnelle".

"Les peuples autochtones privés de leurs moyens de subsistance et de développement ont droit à une indemnité juste et équitable", affirme par ailleurs la déclaration. Des mécanismes "de réparation efficaces" sont demandés pour ceux dont les terres, les ressources, les biens religieux ou culturels ont été spoliés, ou dont les populations ont subi un "transfert forcé".

Selon des sources diplomatiques, la France a longtemps été réticente vis-à-vis de passages clés de la déclaration, "en raison du principe d'indivisibilité de la République" et "par refus de reconnaître des droits collectifs en matière de droits de l'homme". Mais sous l'impulsion de l'ancien président Jacques Chirac, qui attachait un intérêt particulier aux peuples premiers, ces réticences ont été surmontées.

Jeudi, Paris a voté en faveur du texte, tout en semblant, à travers une "déclaration interprétative", limiter sa portée nationale "aux autochtones des collectivités territoriales d'outre-mer". Le droit à l'autodétermination ne peut s'exercer que "conformément aux normes constitutionnelles nationales", a aussi précisé la France.

La déclaration, qui n'est pas un traité, n'a "pas de conséquence juridique", affirme un expert français. Faute de consensus, le texte, promu principalement par les pays latino-américains, ne définit notamment pas ce qu'est un peuple autochtone. Ban Ki-moon a toutefois appelé les gouvernements à faire en sorte que "la vision derrière la déclaration devienne une réalité".

Philippe Bolopion, Le Monde, 15.09.07

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3220,36-955164@51-955284,0.html 

"Nunca pensé que iba a encontrar una cripta inca en esta iglesia", explica desde Cuzco Martín Rubio. "Fue sepultado bajo rituales totalmente incaicos, con algunas señales cristianas como los brazos cruzados sobre el pecho. Por lo demás, está enterrado directamente sobre la tierra, sin ataúd, metido en una orla de cantos rodados, acompañado por su amante favorita, un par de criadas y dos niños, posiblemente sacrificados como ofrenda para purificar su paso a la otra vida. Además, los cuerpos están orientados al sur, donde se encontraba el Coricancha, templo principal al dios sol".

Las primeras excavaciones han sido parciales porque el estado de la iglesia es algo ruinoso. Por eso no se sabe todavía si está acompañado de objetos a la altura de su rango. Después de extraer muestras para su análisis, está siendo sellada hasta la próxima excavación completa. "El antropólogo físico Mario Millones ha analizado los restos y ha certificado que responden a un hombre de la edad en la que Paullo murió, posiblemente envenenado", dijo ayer la historiadora. "Hay suficientes indicios como para estar seguros de su identidad, pero vamos a realizar una prueba de ADN comparándolo con los restos de su sobrino, Túpac Amaru I, enterrado en el convento de Santo Domingo, donde antes se levantaba el Coricancha".

Hasta ahora, Paullo Inca ha sido retratado en la historia como un gobernante títere, un traidor, aunque Martín Rubio considera que, por el contrario, fue un gobernante moderno, "un nexo entre dos culturas". Llegó a estas conclusiones tras encontrar el testamento del nieto de Paullo, Carlos Melchor Inca, que murió en El Escorial, pero que expresaba su deseo de ser enterrado junto a su abuelo en la iglesia de San Cristóbal, donde Paullo había construido una ermita al lado de su palacio. 

Fietta Jarque, El Pais, 15.09.07

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/tumba/hermano/Atahualpa/elpepucul/20070915elpepicul_5/Tes

Mr. Ismail turned and faced the street. “Books, books: five books for 1,000 dinars, one for 250,” he shouted, his voice thick as a tenor’s, from his years of studying acting. “Come on, come on, those who are hungry for literature!”

Exactly 15 men looked on.

Here on Mutanabi Street, the capital’s 1,000-year-old intellectual core, they had come to celebrate and witness the first Friday in more than a year in the city without a curfew from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. It was a moment of potential revival.

Before the curfew, Friday — the Muslim day of prayer — had been Mutanabi’s rush hour, a time of shoulder-to-shoulder browsing, tea, debate and meetings with friends from all over the region.

After the curfew began, the street emptied. A bombing on March 5 seemed to seal its fate, until this week, when Iraqi officials quietly ended the ban as American officials promoted security gains in Congress. The timing was risky.

Ramadan, which began on Thursday for Sunnis and on Friday for Shiites, has been among the country’s most violent periods since the beginning of the war. Last year well over 100 people were killed or found dead in Baghdad during the first week of the holiday.

And on Friday, few Iraqis seemed confident enough to test their newfound freedom. Just before noon, only a few cars could be seen on streets downtown that are typically dense with traffic. At a market named Haraj (the word means “noisy”) the only sounds of commerce came from a half-empty cafe with a growling generator. At one point someone left a small shopping bag behind, and customers panicked, fearing it might contain a bomb.

Fear kept most of the booksellers from appearing at Mutanabi. Though complaints about the curfew had been common for months, Mr. Ismail was joined on the sidewalk by only two or three other vendors, clustered near ornate Ottoman-era buildings charred black by the March 5 bombing. To the booksellers’ left, two Iraqi soldiers strolled by a scrawny gray cat and shops imprisoned by metal grates.

“It’s still new, so people are still waiting to see what will happen in the street,” Mr. Ismail said. “There’s a fear of the unknown, a paranoia.”

Mr. Ismail’s career at Mutanabi began in 1996, after he moved south from Balad to attend Baghdad University’s School of Fine Arts. He studied theater and earned money selling books among the city’s intelligentsia. He ventured out on Friday mainly because he could — he lives a few blocks away — and because he wanted to support his friend from across Mutanabi Street, Naim al-Shatry, a jolly older fellow with a thick mustache who opened his own bookshop here nearly 40 years ago.

The two had escaped the bombing in March, which killed at least 26 people, but not its aftermath. Mr. Shatry displayed pictures of the memorial service, capturing him in a moment of crushing grief, with tears soaking a striped tie and light blue shirt. Mr. Ismail lamented the deaths and the loss of so much history.

On Friday the men stood on opposite curbs but together as friends, colleagues and competitors, sharing jokes at each other’s expense and promises to keep returning until the market blossomed with shoppers. Despite the doubts of others, Mr. Shatry said, “it will, it will.”

“Today,” he said, “I am a king.” Then he smiled broadly and chuckled at the mostly empty street.

Only a few books had been sold by the time the men began to pack up for home in the early afternoon. Customers acknowledged that the market had a long way to go before matching the hustle and bustle of the old days.

“I believe in the gradual theory,” said Mr. Ismail, who had been singing to pass the time. “Everything can’t come together at once.” He said he wished he could go back to acting, but lacked faith that there would be roles for him to play. Iraq, he said, was still emerging from a time of horror.

Indeed, a day earlier, 11 bodies had shown up across Baghdad, bearing signs of torture. On Friday, mourners gathered in Anbar Province for the funeral of a prominent Sunni sheik, assassinated a day earlier, who had worked with the Americans to fight Sunni extremists.

Books, on the other hand, brought reliable joy. Mr. Ismail picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, “We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books.”

Mr. Shatry, like many Iraqis, also sought solace in words and the remembrance of sufferings overcome. He had begun his day with a group poetry reading on Mutanabi Street, a humble reopening for a market that has survived the Mongol hordes, Saddam Hussein and many other attackers. Around noon, between the deafening thwack of American military helicopter propellers overhead — twice in an hour — he recited the poem he read earlier, written by Ibn al-Utri.

Its subject: Baghdad in the ninth century, after rampaging armies destroyed the city in a dispute involving caliphate succession.

“Who invaded you, Baghdad?” Mr. Shatry said, his voice rising for the performance.

Weren’t you once as dear to me as my eye?

Wasn’t there a time when people lived within you, when being neighbors was a blessing?

Then the crow came and divided them. How much grief can you endure?

I swear by God, there are people lost who, whenever I remember them, my eyes start flowing with tears.

Mr. Shatry’s friends milled around him. Some flipped through dry, brittle printed pages. “Next week,” he said, “we’ll have more customers.”

Damien Cave, The New York Times, 15.09.07

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/world/middleeast/15curfew.html?ref=world 

Avant d'adhérer à l'Union européenne cette année, la Roumanie a été le premier pays orthodoxe à ouvrir un dialogue avec les catholiques. En 1999, Jean Paul II fut le premier pape à venir à Bucarest quelque mille ans après la séparation entre les mondes orthodoxe et catholique en 1054. Du 4 au 9 septembre, la Roumanie a accueilli la troisième Assemblée oecuménique européenne à Sibiu, capitale culturelle de l'Europe en 2007. "Notre pays est à la fois orthodoxe et latin, a expliqué au Monde le métropolite Daniel. De par notre latinité nous avons beaucoup de choses en commun avec l'Europe occidentale. Nous ne devons pas réduire l'Europe à une union économique, financière et militaire, mais faire de la spiritualité et de la culture la base de notre communion."

L'enjeu oecuménique et le dialogue avec le monde occidental semblent être les priorités de la nouvelle direction de l'Eglise orthodoxe roumaine, qui espère trouver sa place au sein d'une UE dominée par les catholiques et les protestants. Le patriarche Daniel devra faire preuve de diplomatie pour gérer une institution divisée entre modernistes et traditionalistes. Sous le communisme, l'Eglise n'a pu continuer d'exister qu'en acceptant des compromis. Plusieurs de ses dirigeants ont été convaincus d'avoir collaboré avec la Securitate - l'ancienne police politique communiste. Le patriarche Daniel est lui même soupçonné d'avoir collaboré avec la Securitate à une époque où tout voyage officiel à l'étranger ne pouvait avoir lieu qu'avec l'accord de la police politique.

Depuis la chute du communisme, l'Eglise a retrouvé une grande influence. Dans les sondages c'est l'institution en laquelle les Roumains ont le plus confiance. Les églises sont pleines, y compris de jeunes. Dans la période de transition à l'économie de marché qu'a connue le pays depuis 1990, où il y a eu beaucoup de laissés-pour- compte, elle a été pour beaucoup un refuge.

Si elle a apporté son soutien au processus d'adhésion de la Roumanie à l'UE, l'Eglise orthodoxe est restée à l'écart des joutes politiques. En revanche, elle a toujours défendu des valeurs très conservatrices. Elle s'est farouchement opposée à la dépénalisation de l'homosexualité et aux Gay Pride organisées à Bucarest, qui ont donné lieu, à chaque fois, à des affrontements avec l'extrême droite.

Très bien accueilli à Sibiu, l'oecuménisme prôné par le nouveau patriarche commence à faire des adeptes parmi les jeunes prêtres. "Le contact avec les catholiques et les protestants nous a permis de mieux voir nos qualités et nos défauts, affirme Constantin Necula, professeur à la faculté de théologie de Sibiu. Nous nous sentions isolés comme des lépreux en tant qu'orthodoxes, mais le mouvement oecuménique nous a montré que nous avions tort et que la confiance que nous fait le monde occidental est immense. L'orthodoxie ne sera pas écrasée au sein de l'Union européenne. Au contraire, l'Europe est pour nous une chance de nous faire connaître."

Mirel Bran, Le Monde, 15.09.07

Una de las tareas más importantes para Zubkov es el desarrollo de la industria militar, lo que se enmarca en la política impulsada últimamente por Putin de rearme y modernización de las Fuerzas Armadas. Si se mira a Zubkov bajo el prisma de candidato presidencial -como ya muchos lo hacen- con esta declaración se gana las simpatías del Ejército y de los nacionalistas.

"La corrupción empapa nuestra sociedad", señaló Zubkov, que propuso crear un organismo especial para combatir ese mal. Los anteriores jefes de Gobierno siempre reconocieron que la corrupción es, quizá, el principal problema de Rusia, pero todas las campañas para combatirla fracasaron. Nadie duda de que si ahora el nuevo primer ministro logra luchar eficazmente contra ella, se convertirá muy rápido en un político popular. Además, Zubkov se ha manifestado en favor de aumentar las ayudas a las regiones y especialmente a la agricultura, con lo que ganará adeptos en provincias.

El flamante primer ministro reafirmó que habrá cambios importantes en el Gobierno, especialmente en el sector social. Zubkov dijo que la estrategia elegida en la esfera social es correcta, "pero su puesta en práctica ha sido desastrosa", lo que ha creado problemas y el descontento de la gente.

Mientras tanto, la élite política y los analistas todavía no se han repuesto de la sorpresa que se llevaron al oír el nombre propuesto por Putin para primer ministro y siguen haciendo cábalas sobre su significado. La mayoría de los comentarios se resumen en la siguiente fórmula: Zubkov puede convertirse en el próximo presidente de Rusia, pero lo más probable es que no sea así. Muchos continúan pensando que el sucesor será Serguéi Ivanov, amigo de Putin desde los tiempos en que ambos eran agentes del KGB y que seguramente conservará su actual puesto de vicejefe de Gobierno. Pero después de las declaraciones hechas ayer por Putin es muy posible que el número de los que ahora apuestan por Zubkov aumente. Sobre todo porque éste, que cumple hoy 66 años, es el candidato ideal para gobernar unos años y después devolver el poder a Putin.

El líder ruso confirmó que Zubkov podría competir en las presidenciales de marzo próximo, aunque matizó: "Como cualquier ciudadano ruso". Verdad es que acto seguido pasó a alabar a Zubkov, al que calificó de "auténtico profesional", "administrador brillante" y "persona de gran experiencia". Al mismo tiempo, aprobó el que Zubkov hubiera contestado que no excluía ser candidato en las presidenciales de marzo cuando anteayer le preguntaron al respecto.

Por último, Putin se felicitó de que ahora se incluye un nombre más en la lista de posibles sucesores suyos, pues eso significa, según dijo, que "los ciudadanos rusos tendrán donde elegir". Hasta el miércoles, los grandes favoritos en esa lista eran los vicejefes primeros de Gobierno Serguéi Ivanov y Dmitri Medvédev. Son ellos los que encabezan las encuestas que el Centro Levada realiza periódicamente con la pregunta: "¿A quién votaría usted si las elecciones presidenciales fueran el próximo domingo?".

Putin, que se reunió en Sochi con los miembros del grupo de debate Valdái, se explayó también sobre las causas por las que destituyó al Gobierno. El problema es que los ministros "comenzaban a pensar más en su futuro después de las elecciones que en el trabajo", dijo. Estos ánimos no pasaron inadvertidos por el primer ministro, Mijaíl Fradkov, que por eso presentó su dimisión, cosa a la que Putin, según aseguró, no lo había empujado. "Yo quisiera que el Gobierno en Moscú, las autoridades regionales y los órganos federales de poder trabajen como un reloj suizo hasta las elecciones, entre marzo y mayo de 2008", añadió, aludiendo a las presidenciales.

Rodrigo Fernández, El Pais, 15.09.07 

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Zubkov/fija/objetivo/reconstruir/complejo/industrial/militar/Rusia/elpepuint/20070915elpepiint_4/Tes

Bloom’s book was full of bold claims: that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the “relativism” that had replaced it had “extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life”; that rock music “ruins the imagination of young people”; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers. For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the ’60s, when universities took on “the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war,” he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change “possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.”

“The Closing of the American Mind” hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities. In early 1988, students at Stanford held a rally with Jesse Jackson, where they shouted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go,” to protest a required Western civilization course. (The faculty quickly voted to replace it with a requirement including more works by women and minorities.) Bloom’s book shared space at the top of the best-seller list with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” (1987), which argued that progressive education had left Americans without a grasp of basic knowledge. It also inspired further conservative attacks against the university, including Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals” (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” (1991).

Although it had great popular appeal, “The Closing of the American Mind” did not go over well among academics. Bloom’s detractors criticized everything from his interpretation of the Greeks to his views on youth culture and feminism, which he saw as corrosive influences. “The amazing thing about Allan Bloom’s book was not just its prodigious commercial success ... but the depth of the hostility and even hatred that it inspired among a large number of professors,” John Searle, the Berkeley philosophy professor and former proponent of the ’60s radical Free Speech Movement wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1990. Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.

Debates over what an educated person should know go back to the 19th century in America, when teaching any literature beyond the Greek and Roman classics was still controversial. But today, there’s widespread concern that the humanities are losing ground — as well as intellectual cachet, students and financing — to the hard sciences on the one hand and business on the other. A 2006 report [PDF] on higher education commissioned by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, which raised hackles with its proposal to introduce No Child Left Behind-style standards testing in universities, hardly mentioned the humanities. At the same time, several state legislatures have debated an “academic bill of rights” that would provide a grievance procedure against “political discrimination” on campus — a measure proposed by David Horowitz, a Marxist-turned-conservative critical of what he sees as academia’s left-wing bias.

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” Nussbaum, who panned Bloom’s book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, “the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration,” Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut.” Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard’s curriculum reform committee, concurs: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.” 

But when college costs run as high as $50,000 a year, it’s harder to ignore questions like “What will this major do for my career prospects?” While humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place), the high cost of college today exacerbates a utilitarian strain that’s always made it hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America. According to the Department of Education, in the 2003-4 school year, only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates majored in English and 1.3 percent in history, compared with 20 percent in business, 16 percent in health, 9 percent in education and 6 percent in computer science.

Not all academics object to raising market questions. For Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College and the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, “the introduction of economic criteria into the university is a good thing.” During the canon wars of the late ’80s, he said, scholars had an “imperious” idea that “if we want to argue about the curriculum we’re free to do that.” But now, most realize “we have obligations to the students and the parents and the taxpayers.”

According to Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University and an occasional New York Times columnist, the conservative critique of academia connects to an economic one. “The message the neoconservatives were putting out, that universities are hotbeds of atheism, sexual promiscuity, corrosive relativism and a host of suspect philosophies being imported from France and Germany, actually took quite strongly with the intended audience,” said Fish, who was embroiled in these debates as chairman of Duke’s theory-oriented English department from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. “It’s easier for a state legislature to cut university funding when there is an unflattering view” of academia, he said.

But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. The most-assigned living authors were Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. (Roth himself may not be so pleased with the company. His forthcoming “Exit Ghost” includes a character’s rant about a library display: “They had Gertrude Stein in the exhibit but not Ernest Hemingway. They had Edna St. Vincent Millay but not William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell,” the character says. “Just nonsense. It started in the colleges and now it’s everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner.”)

But many scholars see these changes as part of a necessary evolution. To Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” (2006), the changes have been particularly beneficial in American literature, which has seen the most canon revision in part because it never had a very stable canon to begin with. “The old guard had very little to offer in the way of serious intellectual argument against the reading and teaching of ... Olaudah Equiano or Djuna Barnes or Zora Neale Hurston, so the canon of the past two or three centuries got itself revised in fairly short order,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Only the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.”

Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped. One can debate the changing fortunes of writers on the literary stock market, but it’s clear that today the emphasis is on the recent past — at the expense, some argue, of historical perspective. As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

For John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993), “The major fact that the discipline is confronting today is global English, which is a cultural corollary of economic globalization.” At the same time, postcolonial Anglophone culture is only half a century old. “I’m often impressed by this scholarship, but I’m also concerned that this new field seems to be so disconnected from the history of literature and scholarship that goes before it,” Guillory said. “I see too many scholars in the field who know very little about anything before the 20th century, and that concerns me.”

Elaine Showalter, a feminist literary scholar and a former president of the Modern Language Association, who retired from Princeton in 2003, today urges a reconsideration of some of the changes made in past decades. “This period of discovery and recovery (for example, of women writers) has been stimulating, exciting and renewing,” Showalter wrote in an e-mail message. “But now it’s time for a period of evaluation and consolidation.”

To some, another question is how to get students to read critically in the first place. “What does it profit progressives to get minority writers like Walker and Black Elk into the syllabus if many students need the Cliffs Notes to gain an articulate grasp of either?” asked Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has written on the canon wars.

The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute at N.Y.U., which examines Europe and European-American relations, said undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s.

Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Some say this kind of identity-based thinking is at odds with the true purpose of education — something canon traditionalists can misunderstand as badly as their multiculturalist opponents. “What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy and religion who just left the University of Chicago for Columbia. “That’s where the conservatives went wrong. The case for the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West.” Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is “the most alienating experience possible,” he continued. “When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.”

Bloom believed education should be transformative — that it should remove students from the confines of their own backgrounds to engage with books that open up new realms of meaning. “He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents,” Bellow wrote of Ravelstein/Bloom in his novel. “He was going to direct them to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality — anything but the arid kind.” In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Bloom himself wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with “four years of freedom” — “a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” Whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question. From Bloom’s perspective, “the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.”

Rachel Donadio, The New York Times, 15.09.07

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/books/review/Donadio-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1