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“... of newspapers and star as the dark and brooding heroes of motivational war fiction.Listen to Laleh Khalili discuss this piece with Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... On​ 19 November, a helicopter operated by the Houthi-controlled Yemeni navy hovered over the vehicle carrier Galaxy Leader, which was passing through the Red Sea south of Jeddah. Masked and armed men rappelled down to the deck, raised Yemeni and Palestinian flags, and directed the ship to the nearby port of Hodeida. Galaxy Leader has remained there ever since, becoming a selfie hotspot and a backdrop for TikTok videos by Yemeni influencers ...”

“... COP27​ was held in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh, at the tip of the arid Sinai Peninsula, just around the corner from the world’s busiest shipping lane. Ursula von der Leyen showed up early to make deals for the European Union. She signed a contract to buy rare minerals from Kazakhstan; made a timber deal – presented as a plan for the ‘sustainable development and management’ of forests – with Congo, Guyana, Mongolia, Uganda and Zambia; bought hydrogen from Egypt, and lithium and cobalt from Namibia ...”

“... laissez-faire fantasies, but see homo economicus as the last word in modern selfhood. Listen to Laleh Khalili and Tom Jones discuss ‘class warfare mercenaries’ on the LRB ...”

“... Among​ the most peculiar alibis the world’s maritime powers used for their programme of conquest and occupation was guano – seabird excrement rich in nitrogen, potassium and phosphates, sought after as fertiliser. As with other colonial enterprises, resources were extracted to feed the maw of capital in the metropole, in this case large-scale agricultural capital ...”

“... According​ to a gushing photo-essay published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters ...”

“... Rotterdam​ city centre sits a few miles inland from the North Sea, its skyscrapers and office buildings lining the New Meuse River, a tributary of the Rhine. A ferry tour takes you past ship repair yards, grain silos, terminals receiving coal and iron ore for Ruhr Valley industries, and even a massive orange juice storage facility that receives its cargo from Latin America ...”

“... The​ #IdleNoMore movement against Keystone XL – a long-planned pipeline that would have carried petroleum from the oil sands of Alberta and the shale fields of the Dakotas to refineries in Illinois and Texas – began in December 2012. Three years later there were more protests, this time against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which crosses the Standing Rock Sioux reservation ...”

“... In​ a short story called ‘The Chinese Road’ written in the 1970s by the Yemeni-Ethiopian Mohammad Abdul-Wali, a Yemeni man befriends a Chinese construction worker on the new road from the port of Hodeida on the Red Sea, ‘cutting through the mountain’, to the capital, Sanaa, more than two hundred kilometres away. Abdul-Wali describes the competent and friendly Chinese labourers who live in tents with the Yemenis ...”

“... Over​ a fifty-day period each spring, Khamsin winds from the Sahara blow transversely across the Suez Canal, making transit under sail almost impossible. Even motorised navigation is subject to the whims of the weather. That is why two experienced pilots from the Suez Canal Authority board every ship that enters the canal. Their knowledge of winds and currents reduces the chance of ships running aground ...”

“... Shah S​ulaiman, the 17th-century Safavid monarch of Iran, liked to spend his time drinking wine with his many wives. He avoided war with the Ottoman Empire and was largely uninterested in the European powers. Like many potentates on the Indian Ocean rim, however, he was fascinated by the other kingdoms surrounding this vast watery realm. In 1685, he sent a diplomatic mission to Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam, where a number of Iranian merchants lived ...”

“... When​ the conspiracy theorists, diehard Trumpers and (white) natalists gathered in London in May for the UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies ...”

“... has played a role in world-historical conjunctures and disjunctures. In Sinews of War and Trade, Laleh Khalili tells the story of the canal and of the historical and economic currents which have flowed through it and been enabled by its presence. The book focuses on the Saudi peninsula, whose centrality to questions of trade between east and west is ...”

“... Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia ...”

“... fuel companies pretend to sue for peace and greenery as they push forward with extraction. (As Laleh Khalili noted in the last issue of the LRB, ‘more than six hundred fossil fuel lobbyists, the most at any COP conference, registered as delegates’ at Sharm El-Sheikh – ‘a quarter more than the year before’, according to the ...”