home | the books | the articles | bits & bobs | biography | links and press The Site The Books "A collection of literature unequaled for style and consistency" more > The Articles "Raban's occasional journalism is like a running coversation with the world" more > Bits and Bobs Irregular short contributions from the desk of Jonathan Raban more> articles by jonathan raban Sarah and Her Tribe "I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals—right next to the mashed potatoes...." More > The Golden Trumpet No inaugural address has so thoroughly rejected the political philosophy and legislative record of the previous administration. Jonathan Raban takes a close look at Barack Obama's speech. More > All the Presidents Literature Rare is the leader who can actually write well, but those who do offer a window into their governing style. Jonathan Raban on the best presidential writers, and what Barack Obama's memoirs say about how he'll lead. More > The Prodigious Pessimist In the grand sweep of Vidal's aquiline view, American history has been a succession of tragic follies, and his essays, in their still-uncollected totality, amount to a massive prose Dunciad of literary and political knaves, hacks, and blockheads. More > grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment. More > Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. More > Crashing the Party The investment of the expatriate in his or her host country is very different from that of the roving correspondent. Though always perceived as a foreigner by the natives, you have a permanent stake in their politics and society. More > Second Nature When I was seventeen in 1959, the lake was as wild a place as I knew. My friend Jeremy Hooker and I would arrive there at around four a.m. in early summer, ditch our bikes in the tangle of rhododendrons, and pick out the narrow path by torchlight as we tiptoed, in existentialist duffel coats, through the brush. More > Just Two Clicks In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York, who had been living in the US for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian. More > My Own Private Metropolis It's chastening to realise that, since Soft City's first publication in 1974, the book's citizens, nearly all in their go-getting 20s and 30s, have moved on to the world of bus passes, if not the Great Beyond. More > How US politics got personal The presidential campaign has changed the mood of America. Voters don't want to hear about Iraq, terrorism and the fallout from 9/11. Instead, they want to talk about identity - race, religion and the glass ceiling. But how long can this holiday last, asks Jonathan Raban. More > Down and Out in America's Last Boomtown In still-booming Seattle, it’s left to the homeless to remind us of economic calamity. More > Diary: I'm for Obama I want a hero: an uncommon want When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one. Byron, Don Juan More > We are fighting the wrong battles Clinton and Obama share policies, but their administrations would differ in character entirely More > The Prisoners Speak Most moviegoers whom I've watched leaving the cinema after seeing The Road to Guantánamo have been wordless and whey-faced, numbed, as I was, by the film's distressingly vivid recreation of brutal interrogations in the American detention camp on Cuba's south coast (sequences that were filmed on location in—of all places—Iran). More > More > the books More > © 2007, http://www.webkitchen.ie/  |   info@webkitchen.ie