Backlist

This page provides access to a selection of books, journal articles, and earlier journalism. Material that pre-dates the digital era uses either links to digitised publisher archives (where available) or bespoke PDFs.

A Poetics of Editing

CUP Elements Series

Slow Journalism

Prospect, February 2007
Extract: Many people in Britain write fiction on the strength of the kudos they hope to win if the work gets published. Why don’t they think there is a pot at the end of the nonfiction rainbow? The main reason is the belief in Britain that literature is, by default, fiction. Occasionally, pieces of fact-based literature get reclassified as novels once they are judged to be ‘good’.  Slow Journalism

Editors Talk About Editing

Therapy on the couch

Mindfield series, Camden Press, 1999
Extract from Introduction: In a country where therapy is still relatively marginal, the anger it provokes seems staggering. Look at it from the therapist’s point of view: hundreds of people in the UK are out there, doing something not very glamorous and usually badly paid, who think they are answering a need because people in anguish come to them for help, and at every turn they are portrayed as vultures waiting to pounce on the vulnerable, manufacturing victims and undermining society in the process. No wonder many therapists are desperate to reassure the public. They want to be loved and understood, just like us all. Therapy PDF.

The great Yugoslav failure

The New Statesman, August 9, 1999
Tito’s legacy seemed to offer a “third way” between Moscow and the west. But it was the worst of both worlds. Archived article.

The meeting is the message

Prospect, February 20, 1998
Clouds of hubris are gathering over the annual meeting of the world’s most important people in Davos. Susan Greenberg says the organisers are so fearful of offending the participants that real debate has been stifled. Davos article

Backlist in Prospect magazine

When Prospect launched in October 1995, Dr Greenberg was on the original editorial board, and had an article in the very first issue. Occasional contributions continued through to 2007 for the main magazine, and 2008 for the First Drafts blog. A partial list is accessible here.

Slovakia leads celebrations on first night of divorce

The Guardian, January 2, 1993
‘For the bleary-eyed officials at Bratislava airport yesterday morning, the first-ever international flight to Prague posed something of a challenge…’ Archived article.

Uneasy sits the Czechoslovak crown

Susan Greenberg in Prague on the state bank that stands at the eye of the separation storm. The Guardian, December 19, 1992.

Extract: If the money speculators move in, or if Prague and Bratislava diverge too strongly on economic policy, they will put a special Czech stamp on old notes and change over the entire currency within two days. Tellers are reportedly hard at work, practising their wrist action while men with stop-watches record how long it takes. They have already discovered that the stickers get stuck when the money goes through a counting machine. There’s nothing secret behind these preparations, just a keen interpretation of an agreement which spells out the grounds for any future currency split – a set of “divergence criteria”, which mirrors the monetary convergence criteria of the Maastricht treaty. Crown PDF

The reburial of Imre Nagy

A passage in the original English, from A L’Est: La Memoire Retrouvé, edited by Alain Brossat, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel, Jean-Charles Szurek, Editions La Decouverte, Paris 1990.