Friday, July 4, 2014

My hero / Jonathan Schell by David Hare

 

From left: Stephen B Oates, Jonathan Schell and Ethel Kennedy in 1983.

My hero: Jonathan Schell by David Hare

The playwright on the US author who wrote The Fate of the Earth, the groundbreaking book about nuclear war

Friday 4 July 2014


H

ow many people in my lifetime have published books that permanently change the terms of debate on the subject they address? Rachel Carson, yes, with Silent Spring, and going back to when I was two, Simone de Beauvoir with The Second Sex. But who else? The answer is Jonathan Schell. When, as will inevitably happen, someone lets off the next nuclear weapon, and everyone remembers what they seem to have temporarily forgotten, then the document that every citizen and politician is going to have to turn to is The Fate of the Earth.

When it was first published in 1982, arguing conclusively for the need for complete nuclear disarmament, the boot-boys from academia were dispatched worldwide, some of them by the old thug Henry Kissinger, to try to give the book and its author a good kicking. Before he became lead writer of editorials in the great days of William Shawn's New Yorker, Jonathan had already made himself a target with his terrifying 1967 expose of an American military operation in Vietnam, The Village of Ben Suc. But it was typical of his gentleness and sweetness of nature that when Jonathan asked me to read him some of the most committedly vitriolic attacks on The Fate of the Earth by British cold warriors – "Wow!" he said, "They're even stupider than ours" – he admitted that he couldn't find it in himself to be hurt. "Their arguments are just so poor."

Jonathan died in March this year at the age of 70 after a long and excruciating illness. When I was young, everyone believed overpopulation and nuclear annihilation to be the two greatest threats facing the world. I have no idea why they have slipped down the fashionable list of anxieties. In 2007, an article by four writers appeared in the Wall Street Journal arguing for "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons". One of its authors was Henry Kissinger. Jonathan had routed his critics and been vindicated intellectually within a generation. But where is the action?

THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

(PAGE 4)



(PAGE 3)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016


Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)