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, 09 Jul 2009 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/v31/n13/stew01_.html current affairs Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can - and perhaps will - be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/cald02_.html current affairs It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described 'mercenary of emergency medicine', he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato's attack on Serbia . . . Kouchner may not have invented the concept of 'humanitarian intervention', but he has been its symbol for decades. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/mart02_.html diaries and memoirs On 1 January this year, at about 11 o'clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope - a twisted yellow sheet - about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away . . . I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/wood01_.html film http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/finn01_.html economics http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/mull02_.html politics As I walked in through Speaker's Court, who should I see but Tony Blair, looking tanned and fit, surrounded by bag-carriers and bodyguards. Just like old times. He must be glad to be out of it. Even his considerable skills couldn't dig us out of the big, dark pit into which we have fallen. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/sinc01_.html towns and cities I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd's notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. 'The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,' he asserts. I carried Ackroyd's epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a series of expeditions along the permitted riverpath from mouth to source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. 'When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!' http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/mack01_.html economics The credit crisis has inured us to gigantic numbers - losses measured in billions or trillions of dollars - but we need to pay attention to its small numbers as well if we're going to understand it properly. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/camp01_.html art http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/soar01_.html politics http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n11/ohag01_.html motoring and motor racing Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others - and that's most employees, most husbands, wives, parents, most believers - will know the rhythmic, sedative pull of the motorways as the road performs its magic, pulling you back by degrees to some forgotten individualism that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void. Virginia Woolf was almost right: all one really needs is a car of one's own, the funds to keep it on the road and the will to encounter oneself within. Though most of those men aren't listening to Virginia Woolf - they're listening to Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n11/raba01_.html current affairs Following the great parliamentary expenses scandal from afar has been to view my home country through the wrong end of a telescope: so many scuttling figures, comically diminished in scale, like poor, tiny Douglas Hogg, with his flat cap and backpack, breathlessly hurrying down the street pursued by a giant fuzzy insect in the form of a microphone. 'That is not correct. That is not correct,' he told the insect, like a pedantic character in Alice in Wonderland. 'The schedule was not a claims schedule, it was a letter.' http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/letters.html Correspondence The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 31 issue 13 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/contents.html Table of contents Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 31 issue 13