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The illicit nuclear trade flourishes because governments let it

Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies. By David Albright. Free press; 304 pages; $27. Buy from Amazon.com

EVER since the atom was split, governments have struggled to control a force with potential for good that can also wreak awful destruction. Some argue it is impossible to stop technologies that can keep the lights on from being used to make bombs. That is a sobering thought in a world ready to re-embrace relatively carbon-free nuclear power. But David Albright, a respected chronicler of undercover nuclear shenanigans, tells a more alarming story: just how little most governments have done to halt the bomb’s spread. ...

Encircling the globe

Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. By Bruce Cumings. Yale University Press; 641 pages; $38 and GBP30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

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How not to write “state-of-the-nation” fiction

Solar. By Ian McEwan. Nan A. Talese; 304 pages; $26.95. Jonathan Cape; GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

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Why are Nordic detective novels so successful?

THE neat streets of Oslo are not a natural setting for crime fiction. Nor, with its cows and country smells, is the flat farming land of Sweden’s southern tip. And Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, is now associated more with financial misjudgment than gruesome murder. Yet in the past decade Nordic crime writers have unleashed a wave of detective fiction that is right up there with the work of Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and the other crime greats. Nordic crime today is a publishing phenomenon. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy alone has sold 27m copies, its publishers’ latest figures show, in over 40 countries. The release this month in Britain and America of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, the film of the first Larsson book, will only boost sales.

The transfer to the screen of his sprawling epic (the author died suddenly in 2004 just as the trilogy was being edited and translated) will cement the Nordics’ renown. The more unruly subplots have been eliminated, leaving the hero, a middle-aged financial journalist named Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), and an emotionally damaged computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, pictured above), at the centre of every scene. The small screen too has had a recent visit from the Swedish police. Starting in 2008, British television viewers have been treated to expensive adaptations of the books of Henning Mankell, featuring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander. The BBC series has reawakened interest in Mr Mankell’s nine Wallander books, which make up a large slice of his worldwide sales of 30m in 40 languages. ...

A new biography highlights the life and work of a British artist and the women he loved

Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown. By Angela Thirlwell. Chatto & Windus; 328 pages; GBP25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

THE Pre-Raphaelites and their “stunners”, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti called his models, have long been the object of fascination. Perhaps that is why so little has been written about Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), a painter who, though closely associated with them, never joined their fraternity. With his upbringing and early training in France and Belgium, Brown was always the outsider. Angela Thirlwell’s “Into the Frame”, a carefully researched and sympathetic biography of Brown and the four women he loved, helps fill that gap, while making a valuable contribution to the growing literature about women who have figured in the lives of prominent men. ...

A new exhibition expands what we know about how Matisse worked

ON A trip to Chicago to give a lecture, John Elderfield, then chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, dropped in to see how conservation of Henri Matisse’s monumental painting, “Bathers by a River”, was coming along. He was hooked. The result, five years later, is an exhibition that dramatically changes established ideas about the artist’s work and working methods.

A scholar, Mr Elderfield has always been attracted to questions that are hard to answer. He is from the tough former mining county of Yorkshire, which may have shaped his conviction that if an undertaking is easy, it isn’t worth doing. During his more than 30 years at MoMA (he retired in 2008), there were many thorny problems to engage him. Quite a few concerned Matisse. His 1992 exhibition, “Henri Matisse: A Retrospective”, was a tremendous popular and critical success. He imagined he had probably given the subject everything he could. But not at all, it turned out. His “Matisse Picasso”, the first major exhibition devoted to these two giants, opened in 2003. Only a couple of years later, in Chicago, he was enmeshed again. ...

Andrew Rawnsley's political vivisection

The End of the Party: the Rise and Fall of New Labour. By Andrew Rawnsley. Viking; 802 pages; GBP25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

LABOUR under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has ruled Britain for longer than any non-Conservative government in the past 100 years. With an election due in the next three months, there is a real chance that the last days of Pompeii are upon us. How will history judge New Labour—as an idealistic attempt to improve lives through a blend of free-market economics and social justice, or a cynical sucking of power from longstanding and broadly functioning institutions to a small group of media-hungry, manipulative politicians? ...

Stalin’s violent henchman and his library may have inspired a modern classic

Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. By Rachel Polonsky. Faber and Faber; 388 pages; GBP20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

EXPATRIATE spouses living pampered lives in Moscow often think it would be nice to write a book about their time there. The material is irresistible: vastness, extremes, depths and delights. But the trite, coy and overly personal jottings that result often prove quite resistible. Rachel Polonsky moved to Moscow with her lawyer husband and stayed for a decade. Her perceptive and erudite book is the exception and sets a standard to freeze the ink in others’ pens. ...

Business and the bedroom

Beyond Business. By John Browne. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 310 pages; GBP20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

DURING his 12 years as boss of BP, John Browne was the master of many complicated briefs. He launched three big takeovers, sparking a wave of consolidation that reshaped the industry; to the horror of his peers, he admitted that oil firms had a part to play in the fight against global warming; he invested in Russia’s lucrative but lawless oil business with much greater success than other Western oil firms—and he made pots of money for BP’s shareholders, year after year. ...

Trying to tell it how it is

Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East. By Hugh Pope. Thomas Dunne; 352 pages; $26.99 and GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

PALESTINE is yesterday’s news, sighed a bored editor as he rejected Hugh Pope’s offering. It was a familiar reaction. Mr Pope, a principled and thoughtful reporter, tramped the Middle East for 30 years in a forlorn bid to decipher its subtleties to a Western readership encased in its own prejudices: moderates versus radicals; an Arab-Israeli peace process that would work were it not sabotaged by Palestinian violence; Islamic Iran as the mortal enemy of Western civilisation. After his long time on the road, Mr Pope’s sad conclusion is that all the words he wrote, and all the risks he took, had made no perceptible difference to the crude way a largely insensitive and meddling West views a dysfunctional region. ...

The short sad life of whites in Africa

Correction to this article

TWO compelling documentaries illuminate the dilemmas facing Africa’s dwindling white tribes. One is set in Zimbabwe, the other in Kenya. The Zimbabwean film, “Mugabe and the White African”, is the more straightforward and should be shown as widely as possible to help end one of Africa’s great tragedies: the ruin of one of the continent’s most successful countries and the moral bankruptcy of the governments of the nearby states (bar plucky Botswana) for failing to isolate and oust a vile dictator. ...

The centre of global gendercide

Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love. By Xinran. Chatto & Windus; 224 pages; GBP16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

DURING the past 30 years of economic reform, China has made what is probably history’s largest single improvement to human welfare, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet millions have also been crushed by the vast engine of Chinese growth—and it is among these that Xinran Xue (who uses only her first name) finds her stories. In previous works of oral history, she has rescued from the chaos that is modern Chinese record-keeping personal narratives of her grandparents’ generation (“China Witness”, 2008) and of women caught in China’s endless political turmoil (“The Good Women of China”, 2002). In her latest book, “Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother”, she turns to the relationship between women and their daughters in tales of loss and often unthinkable heartache. ...

The difficulties of an American doctoral student

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. By Louis Menand. Norton; 174 pages; $24.95 and GBP17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

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A serial fornicator with a powerful, paradoxical intellect

Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. By Michael Scammell. Random House; 689 pages; $35. Published in Britain as “Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual”; Faber and Faber; GBP25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

LONG before today’s fashion for counter-intuitive polemics, there was Arthur Koestler. An early Zionist who later tried to debunk the very notion of a Jewish people; a communist whose novel “Darkness at Noon” is one of the most powerful demolitions of communism ever written; a lover of science who later championed the paranormal; Koestler was one of the 20th century’s most powerful and controversial intellectuals, whose works still shape our thinking. This is the first authorised biography of the Hungarian-Jewish writer and it is a majestic achievement. ...

Pounding flat pieces of silver into beautiful vessels

HIROSHI SUZUKI’S work in silver is sensuous, beautiful and coveted. His pieces, hammered up and out from a single flat sheet of silver, have been praised for their “sublimely flowing” quality. No one else is doing anything like it.

His retrospective, “Silver Waves”, is at London’s Goldsmiths’ Hall (though only until March 6th). Nearly all the 71 pieces on show are loans. They come from museums across the world: the (anonymous) private lenders include collectors from Hollywood, Wall Street and England’s stately homes. The Goldsmiths’ Company, which put on the exhibition, owns four pieces. ...

Essays on New York by St Clair McKelway, taken from the New Yorker

Reporting At Wit’s End: Tales from The New Yorker. By St. Clair McKelway. Bloomsbury; 619 pages; $18 and GBP10.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN she learned that the bank was about to foreclose on her mortgage, Katherina Schnible, a slightly lame 72-year-old, remained in her third floor apartment in a little frame house in Brooklyn, refusing to open the door to anybody but her son. Then came the day when she heard a heavy footfall on the first landing, heard somebody running frantically up the first flight of stairs, heard a man’s voice shouting something. The footsteps came closer and then, right outside her door, the voice yelled “Fire!” Mrs Schnible opened her door and hobbled into the hall. “Hello, Mrs Schnible,” said the man standing there. “Here’s a summons for you.” ...

An authoritative account of Timor-Leste's birth

“If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor. By Geoffrey Robinson. Princeton University Press; 317 pages; $35 and GBP24.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

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A reporter who explored China’s bigger and lesser roads and found treasure

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. By Peter Hessler. Harper Collins; 432 pages; $27.99. Canongate; GBP14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ROADS, and with them cars, are changing China faster than any dictat from the Politburo. Within a few years a motorway network has been built that is fast catching up with the length of America’s interstate highways; China has already overtaken America as the world’s biggest car market. Yet most foreigners, even long-term residents, have glimpsed this only partially. They curse the gridlock of Chinese cities caused by a new middle class hitting the roads in ballooning numbers, and at the mayhem these reckless novices create. They bemoan the transformation of rural peripheries by businesses catering to day-tripping car-owners: guesthouses, restaurants and theme parks. They fret about the fumes. ...

A couple of productions that make a compelling case against ageism

SIR PETER HALL, a renowned director of Shakespeare’s plays, has observed that the older you get, the more like yourself you become. At 79, Sir Peter is demonstrating the artfulness of his own adage with a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” which is a concentrated version of his best work: loyal to the text, the verse, the romance and the humour of the play. To bolster Sir Peter’s case, his fellow director Peter Brook, whom Sir Peter refers to as the stage’s greatest innovator, is exhibiting his revolutionary credentials at 84 with “11 and 12”, a moral tale set in Africa.

Sir Peter’s star is Dame Judi Dench, the leading lady of the English theatre. It is 47 years since they first worked together on the “Dream”, and the shared experience illuminates her performance as Titania, the Queen of the Fairies. The verse is spoken with clarity and meaning and her lust is tempered by a mature woman’s experience and affection. Dame Judi’s Titania, richly dressed with a wig of flame-red hair, looks like the Virgin Queen herself, as if Elizabeth is appearing as Titania in a court production of the play, a harmless little conceit. ...

How the siege of Dien Bien Phu changed the modern world

Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War. By Ted Morgan. Random House; 752 pages; $35. Presidio Press; GBP25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

DIEN BIEN PHU was an isolated outpost in the mountains of Vietnam, a 20th-century colony where the French were at war with the national liberation movement, the Vietminh. No longer ragged guerrillas, the Vietminh by the early 1950s were armed by the Chinese with the latest weaponry. In the spring of 1954, as the leaders of East and West—John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov and Zhou Enlai—met in Geneva to decide the future of French Indochina, Dien Bien Phu was garrisoned by 10,000 soldiers of the French Republic. ...