The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  NICOLAS PELHAM has reported on the Arab world for twenty years and currently writes for The Economist. He has lived in, among other cities, Damascus, Cairo, Rabat, and Baghdad. He recently wrote a report about Sinai for the Royal Institute for International Affairs entitled “The Collapse of a Regional Buffer.”

  JERZY POPIEŁUSZKO (1947–1984) was a Roman Catholic priest and political activist. An outspoken champion of the Solidarity movement, he was murdered in 1984 by agents of the Polish Communist government. More than 250,000 people attended his funeral. Popieluszko was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.

  YASMINE EL RASHIDI is an Egyptian journalist and editor. She is a contributing editor of Bidoun, a quarterly on Middle Eastern arts and culture. Her book The Battle for Egypt: Dispatches from the Revolution recounts her time in Cairo during the Arab Spring.

  WILLIAM SHAWCROSS is a British writer and political essayist. His 1979 study Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Shawcross’s other books include The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience and The Shah’s Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally.

  SUSAN SONTAG (1933–2004) was an American critic, essayist, novelist, film and theater director, and human rights activist. Her work addressed subjects ranging from camp, pornography, and fascist aesthetics to AIDS and photography. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, and the novels The Volcano Lover and In America.

  STEPHEN SPENDER (1909–1995) was an English poet and essayist. As a young man, he befriended W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood, a loose gathering often referred to as “the Auden Group” or “MacSpaunday.” Spender published many collections of poetry, including The Still Centre and Ruins and Visions, in addition to volumes of literary criticism and autobiography.

  VLADIMIR TOLZ is a Russian journalist and regular contributor to Radio Free Europe.

  KANG ZHENGGUO is a Chinese scholar and poet. He is the author of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China.