Alexander Scrimgeour

From The Blog

Product Placement

3 December 2010

Ever since the reports of October’s foiled ink-cartridge bombings mentioned that a book was in one of the boxes along with the printer, I’ve wondered what it was, and if it had some symbolic meaning. It was impossible to make out in news photographs, but the mystery is solved in the November issue of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s English-language magazine (via Christopher Hitchens in Slate), which published pictures of one of the bombs being made and a close-up of the book:

Letter

Warmer, Warmer

22 March 2007

John Lanchester wonders why people don’t go about keying SUVs. One reason is that there’s a better way of letting SUV owners know how you feel about them: let the air out of their car tyres. This was the strategy adopted by a French group called Les Dégonflés (‘The Deflated’, or, in argot, ‘The Scaredy-Cats’), who have inconvenienced many Parisian owners of ‘quatres-quatres’. The...

A Leap from the Bridge: Wolfgang Koeppen

Alexander Scrimgeour, 12 December 2002

Between 1951 and 1954, Wolfgang Koeppen published three scathing, disillusioned novels ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. At the time, perhaps as many as 80 per cent of public officials, including many judges and senior civil servants, were former members of the Nazi Party. Most people didn’t want to be reminded of this and when The Hothouse was...

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