Author: Douglas McLennan

The lives of two of Britain’s most revered writers, father and son Kingsley and Martin Amis, are due to cross paths in May with the release of the father’s collected letters and the son’s long-awaited autobiography. “To have Kingsley’s chronic hatred of phonies, philistines, tight-fisted drinking companions, bullying officials, mouthy women, pompous barmen, and pretentious artists and have all his opinions raw, unconstrained by any shreds of tact, and his pungent stories about his peers unmediated by the filter of fiction, is a treat. To have the inside story on Martin Amis, the writer who has influenced more prose styles than any other in the last two decades, runs it a close second.” – The Independent (UK)

A new book documents the CIA’s “promotion of a non-Communist left” through lavish post-war funding of American intellectuals and artists. “The most disturbing revelations of the book are not so much what the CIA did as whom it persuaded-openly or under cover-to do the dirty work of propaganda.” The roster includes some decidedly unusual suspects: Stephen Spender, Mark Rothko, Mary McCarthy, Dizzy Gillespie, Robert Lowell, Peter Matthiessen, and many others. “Such people were foot soldiers in a cultural cold war. For two decades they accepted grants, travel stipends, and commissions from a wide variety of CIA front organizations designed to win the hearts and minds of intellectuals tempted by ‘neutralism.'” – Chronicle of Higher Education