Sim, peão de obra trabalha aos domingos. Antes de iniciar a labuta e nos breves intervalos para o café (que não bebo) e o cigarro (que não fumo), fiz uma ronda de leituras pela internet. Divido com vocês. Enjoy it:

A edição deste mês da Prospect está ótima:

Christopher Hitchens

From ‘68 agitator to staunch supporter of George W Bush’s Iraq war—what explains Hitchens’s political journey? I spent three days with him in Washington trying to find out

Alexander Linklater

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.

1968: liberty or its illusion?

Anthony Giddens, Joe Boyd, Roger Scruton, Jean Seaton, Dominic Sandbrook & others

A special symposium on the legacy of 1968, expanded for our online edition. Many 68ers now feel ambivalent about their heritage. Was too much of value discarded? Were the hippies just carriers of a new strain of capitalism? Prospect writers give their views.

Is democracy winning?

Robert Kagan vs robert cooper
Is the world reverting to a struggle between great powers? Or is the democratising spirit of 1989 still alive?

Cranach’s Golden Age

A brilliant intelligence lies behind Cranach’s rhetoric of simplicity

Timothy Hyman

Cranach, at the Royal Academy of Arts, opens with a bang – or, more precisely, a thunderbolt: the miraculous shattering of St Catherine’s wheel in a seldom seen early masterpiece from the Raday Library of the Hungarian Reformed Church in Budapest. The jagged fire-from-heaven recalls Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts, but re-created with a viscous painterliness. Close-to, the figures in the overturned crowd are, puzzlingly, speckled with little grey patches, which at first sight seem to be surface damage, until they resolve themselves as grubby flakes – fallout from the explosion – scattered by the artist’s brush. In the foreground time zone, flake-free, the décolleté princess is about to be beheaded by an ogre-executioner, decked out in gorgeous skintight motley. Beyond, a cloud-capped city on a rock rises from the surrounding forest, the landscape that will reappear again and again throughout Lucas Cranach’s art.

Charlemagne
Europe’s Marxist dilemma

It is easier to influence a country before than after it joins the club

GROUCHO MARX once said that he did not care to belong to a club that accepted people like him as members. The European Union has a slightly different problem. Lots of countries want to get in, even though many of them, and indeed some that have already made it, are not fit to join. They seem to hope that EU membership will work miracles of its own, curing such ills as entrenched corruption, organised crime, judicial ineffectiveness and economic backwardness—all without their having to make painful reforms at home.

Consider Bulgaria, which joined the EU (with Romania) on January 1st 2007. The interior minister, Rumen Petkov, has just been forced to resign, after the 120th in a string of unsolved contract killings; he has admitted being in contact with suspected crime bosses. Last year the Romanian government dumped its bravely reforming justice minister, Monica Macovei, on the dubious argument that she was not a team player. Both countries do badly in the annual corruption rankings put out by Transparency International, a Berlin-based lobby group.

Javier Marías: “Sólo se puede contar cabalmente lo que nunca ha sucedido”

El novelista español realiza su discurso de ingreso en la Real Academia, donde ocupará el sillón ‘R’

Al escritor Javier Marías le gustan las paradojas y la que hoy desarrolló en su discurso de ingreso en la Real Academia Española perdurará en la memoria de los asistentes: pretender “narrar hechos reales es imposible” porque “sólo se puede contar cabalmente lo que nunca ha sucedido, lo inventado e imaginado”.

Marías lleva décadas entusiasmando a lectores de medio mundo con sus novelas, y era lógico que en su ingreso hiciera una encendida defensa de su oficio, dado que, a diferencia de “los historiadores, cronistas o biógrafos”, el novelista trabaja con plena libertad y la ficción no admite “correcciones ni añadidos ni supresiones ni desmentidos ni enmiendas”.

Por hoje chega, né? Bom domingo, meus caros!