http://www.lrb.co.uk/ Literary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkers en-gb LRB (London) Ltd. Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT 20160 ben@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) registrar@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif http://www.lrb.co.uk/ London Review of Books logo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/john01_.html current affairs The sequence of events that produced the current deadlock in Zimbabwe began on 11 March last year when Morgan Tsvangirai and a number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year's elections. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/holm01_.html current affairs The anti-globalisation movement suffered a dizzying setback on 9/11. Symbolic gatecrashing into the well-guarded meeting places of the super-rich suddenly seemed a much more sinister activity than before. Busting up branches of Starbucks and other Seattle-style antics became anathema in an atmosphere of injured and vindictive patriotism. But Naomi Klein, the combative theorist and publicist of anti-globalisation, was not about to accept such guilt by association. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/wood03_.html literature, theory and criticism An old woman leans out of her window and, 'because of her excessive curiosity', leans too far: she falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. A second old woman leans out of her window to see what has happened to the first - and also leans too far, tumbling to the same fate. More women follow suit (a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth), a chain that ends only because the narrator of this story, 'sick of watching them', breaks off to go to the market. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/mack01_.html economics Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks' headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund's St James's office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/soar01_.html current affairs http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/wood01_.html film http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/ande01_.html europe Enlargement, widely regarded as the greatest single achievement of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU's new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, one that neither fits the uplifting narrative of the deliverance of captive nations from Communism, nor furthers the strategic aims of Union diplomacy, indeed impedes them. Cyprus is, in truth, an anomaly in the new Europe. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/mant01_.html biography You may fear, from the title of this book, that they've found yet another 'Boleyn girl'. The subject of this biography has already been fearlessly minced into fiction by the energetic Philippa Gregory. But there is no sign so far that another inert and vacuous feature film will be clogging up the multiplexes. In reworkings of the Tudor soap opera, Jane Boleyn is more often known as Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, sister-in-law to Anne the queen. There are some lives we read backwards, from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and Jane's is one of them. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/clar05_.html art Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions - one exploring Nicolas Poussin's role in the invention of the genre we call 'landscape', the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet - are happening a few corridors apart. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/wood02_.html fiction Like Welch's work, Pilcrow gets nowhere very elegantly. Adam Mars-Jones has been celebrated for the slenderness of his work, increasingly for its non-existence, as if his career were an exercise in negative theology. Pilcrow is not only very long; it measures its length in such tiny units that at times you feel that a version of Zeno's paradox will stop you from ever reaching its end. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/camp01_.html art http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/jone01_.html current affairs http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/letters.html Correspondence The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 9 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/contents.html Table of contents Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 9