Issue No.
12
April 2008
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| Welcome to April’s Review of Books |
 Tim Black
This issue of the spiked review of books marks two anniversaries. The first is the fortieth anniversary of the tumultuous year of 1968. Frank Furedi looks back on his short career as a student radical and says he treasures ‘the feelings and experiences’ of the late 1960s. Yet he argues that probably the key driving force behind the shifts in the Sixties was not student radicalism itself, but the crisis and cowardice of the Western elites. Michael Fitzpatrick revisits Derry 1968, one of the forgotten uprisings of that year, when he says Ireland experienced a rare ‘moment of truth’. Philip Hammond traces the journeys of Bernard Kouchner and Joschka Fischer, who moved from manning the barricades in ’68 to overseeing or justifying the bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq in the 1990s and today. The second anniversary concerns the spiked review of books itself: this is our twelfth issue. We launched the review a year ago in May 2007, as a place where writers could conduct ‘thought experiments’ and ‘launch salvos in the battle of ideas’. And as it becomes clear that the questions of authority, purpose and morality that burst on to the international stage in 1968 remain unresolved, we need just such a laboratory of ideas more than ever. [Cover illustration: Jan Bowman] |
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