Latest from Roland Elliott Brown
Batman vs. the British Empire (or, The Alfred Mystique)
From Batman’s reliance on his English butler Alfred to Gotham City’s origin in a legend from medieval Nottinghamshire, the Batman mythos offers a window into the bloody, gothic substrate of the Anglo-American relationship and the American appetite for British advice and encouragement.
Russian Intellectuals in Exile
The current wave of emigration presents an agonizing catch-22: The political thinkers and artists best equipped to analyze, criticize and hold up a mirror to the dictatorship can now see their country only from the outside and don’t know when, or if, they will be able to return.
Russia’s Orwell Problem
Inscribed in Cyrillic, and in quiet solidarity with Russian objectors to the war, are perhaps 2 million copies of “1984” sitting on Russian bookshelves, whispering the link between the past and the present.