CONTENTS

1. Tariq Ali: The Colour Khaki Pakistan’s latest bout of military rule, as castle on the Pentagon’s West Asian chessboard: façade and realities of Musharraf’s dictatorship, and the complicity of clerical opposition to it.
2. Susan Watkins: A Socialist Cassandra Susan Watkins on Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. The distinctive intelligence of a continental socialist in Britain.
3. Régis Debray: Letter from America Why does a malcontent Europe not simply sue for union with the global hegemon, discarding its wisps of independence to exchange proud membership of the American Empire for today’s sullen servility? A jeu d’esprit from the 18th century in the caustic spirit of S*** and V***.
4. Bernard Cassen: On the Attack The founder of the single most successful movement against neoliberal globalization, and architect of the World Social Forum, discusses the French origins and international growth of ATTAC. Its connexions with Le Monde diplomatique and vision of the battles against financial markets and privatization to come.
5. Stephen Graham: Lessons in Urbicide Slicing through the alleys and markets of the West Bank, Israeli bulldozers as the cutting edge of today’s counter-insurgency tactics—the destruction of houses, camps and townships as condition of political and ethnic sweeps.
6. Lutz Niethammer: The Infancy of Tarzan Should collective identity be considered an essential feature of the modern world, and if so is it a neutral marker of belonging? Lutz Niethammer takes a critical look at the fables, popular and political, that the concept of identity has generated since the aftermath of the First World War.
7. Hal Foster: On the First Pop Age If Britain rather than the US, in the fifties rather than the sixties, originated Pop Art, what ingredients made it possible, and how did its pre-eminent painter Richard Hamilton tabulate the arrival of a new ‘super-fetishism’?
8. Gopal Balakrishnan: Overcoming Emancipation Gopal Balakrishnan on Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: a Philosophical-Political Profile. Bends in the thought of Germany’s leading philosopher, and its engagement with history, across half a century.
9. Benjamin Markovits: Bisexual Byron Benjamin Markovits on Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend. Sexual and political impulses in the making of Childe Harold, in person and imagination.
10. Tony Wood: The Poet of Decembrism? Tony Wood on T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography. Scouring the crust of patriotic myths from the image of Russia’s greatest poet.