The remarkable Zadie Smith
by Allan Gyngell
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26 February 2009 1:29PM
The remarkable young novelist Zadie Smith gives a superb insight into the mind and political skills – and perhaps the future prospects — of President Obama in the New York Review of Books.
Her piece, Speaking in Tongues, is based on a December lecture at the New York Public Library. Read it. It is a reminder to all of us who work away diligently, stolidly, in the field of international relations of the illuminating insights that creative writers can give us into the world we try so clumsily to interpret. The particular parallels that Smith draws between Obama’s worldview and that of Shakespeare echo the talk on Shakespeare and ideology given at the Lowy Institute last year by Dr Simon Haines, Reader in English at the ANU.
