Vol. 30 No. 24 · 18 December 2008

Browse other issues from this year

Cover Artist

Peter Campbell

Browse other issues from this year

Vol. 30 No. 24 · 18 December 2008

Thomas Laqueur

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction by Mark Neely. Harvard, 277 pp., £20.95, November 2007, 978 0 674 02658 2
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95, January 2008, 978 0 375 40404 7

Letters

R.W. Johnson, Terence Ranger, Matthias Tomczak, Mahmood Mamdani, Mark Gevisser, J.G.A. Pocock, Robert Picciotto, James Cuno, Edward Luttwak, Mark Bostridge, Paul Kriwaczek

Peter Campbell

At the British Museum: Babylon

Patrick Cockburn

America Concedes

John Borneman

The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore and Politics by Jennifer Heath. California, 346 pp., £12.95, April 2008, 978 0 520 25518 0

Mark Ford

Poem: ‘The Death of Petronius’

Marina Warner

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons. Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum. Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7

Alison Light

Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell. Weidenfeld, 476 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 297 84908 7

Daniel Soar

Short Cuts: Books of the Year of the Year

Elisabeth Ladenson

Memoirs by Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini, edited and translated by Sarah Nelson. Chicago, 217 pp., £31, August 2008, 978 0 226 50279 3

Mark Kishlansky

The Long Parliament of Charles II by Annabel Patterson. Yale, 283 pp., £30, September 2008, 978 0 300 13708 8

Craig Raine

Poem: ‘Those No-Doubt-About-It Infidelity Blues’

Simon Jenkins

The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and Deadly Cabinet Rivalry by Giles Hunt. Tauris, 214 pp., £20, January 2008, 978 1 84511 593 7

Seamus Perry

William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’: A Casebook edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford, 406 pp., £19.99, September 2006, 0 19 518092 5

Caleb Crain

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller. Yale, 257 pp., £35, July 2008, 978 0 300 12620 4

Caroline Fraser

Red Mandarin Dress by Qiu Xiaolong. Sceptre, 310 pp., £7.99, July 2008, 978 0 340 93518 7

Tariq Ali

Diary: Murder in the Family

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