Daniel Soar is an editor at the LRB.
A lot of the coverage about the ten Russian spies caught while living under deep cover in ordinary corners of America – in Montclair, New Jersey; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Arlington, Virginia – has played with the idea that they were pantomime villains, a bit of a joke. ‘More Woody Allen than John Le Carré,’ the Sunday Times said, while nevertheless doing its...
Basil Davidson, who died on 9 July, wrote 14 pieces for the LRB in the 1990s, including this record of his time in the SOE.
Jeremy Harding will be writing about Davidson here on the blog soon.
One effect of the failed Christmas Day underpants bombing on NW Flight 253 to Detroit was to reveal how hard it is for counterterrorism bureaucracies to know, or do, anything about anyone. A leaked US Transport Security Agency document briefly required not only that passengers had been to the loo 61 minutes before their flight landed, but also that – with the exception only of heads of...
There are probably more sophisticated reasons for admiring Milton, but I always liked the way his Satan was ‘involved in rising mist’. Involved. There aren’t many writers who are such literalists when it comes to the etymological uses of words: you’d have to have Latin coming out of your ears to think of making the meaning of the word a word is derived from more...
Daniel Soar talks to Tom about Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons – how it fits with his earlier fiction, the relationship between world events and private histories, and McEwan’s addiction to...
Daniel Soar talks to Thomas Jones about the sixth taste, variously translated as ‘mouthfulness’, ‘thickness’ and ‘lingeringness’, apparently discovered by the Japanese company Ajinomoto,...
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