London Review of Books

From The Blog

Free Ihsane El Kadi

, 6 February 2023

“... When I last saw the Algerian journalist Ihsane El Kadi, over evening pastries at a smart new restaurant in central Algiers, he told me he wasn’t concerned by the campaign of harassment and intimidation being waged against him – the numerous arrests, various ‘voluntary’ interrogations and three prosecutions since 2019. It was mid-December, his latest trial had just concluded, and he’d already launched a new volley in the form of an article about divisions in the regime over the upcoming 2024 presidential election ...”

On the Reservations

Ted Hughes, 2 June 1988

“... for Jack Brown I Sitting Bull On Christmas Morning Who put this pit-head wheel, Smashed but carefully folded In some sooty fields, into his stocking? And this lifetime nightshift – a snarl Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened, His helmet. And the actual sun closed Into what looks like a bible of coal That falls to bits as he lifts it ...”

In Bexhill

Peter Campbell: Unpopular Culture, 5 June 2008

“... the media-bombarded visual world Perry’s exhibition looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than ...”

Brown v. Salmond

Colin Kidd: The Scottish Elections, 26 April 2007

“... Edinburgh University Student Publications and edited by the university’s student rector, Gordon Brown. Brown did not succumb to nationalism, of course, but he attempted to reformulate the Labour agenda to take account of Scotland’s national peculiarities. The Red Paper had an immediate impact on party politics. In 1976 ...”

Tall Tales

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Jackself’, 1 June 2017

Jackself
by Jacob Polley.
Picador, 67 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 4472 9044 5Show More

“... poems was spent deciding whether Jackself was a boy or a bird. In the course of a few lines in ‘Jack Snipe’, a stocky wader becomes a teenager heeling off his trainers. ‘Peewit’ frustrates your ability to say whether it’s a child or a lapwing that limps across boggy ground: a little one drab barely skyborne, with ...”

‘Wisely I decided to say nothing’

Ross McKibbin: Jack Straw, 22 November 2012

Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor
by Jack Straw.
Macmillan, 582 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 4472 2275 0Show More

“... Jack Straw was one of the longest serving ministers in the history of the Labour Party. He spent 13 years in office, as home secretary, foreign secretary, leader of the House of Commons and justice minister. His book’s title, Last Man Standing, derives from the curious rule by which the lord chancellor (which Straw became in 2007, at the same time as being secretary of state for justice) is the last member of an outgoing government to resign ...”

Half-Timbering, Homosexuality and Whingeing

Ian Sansom: Julian Barnes, 1 October 1998

England, England
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 272 pp., £15.99, September 1998, 0 224 05275 6Show More

“... article, entitled ‘Woman in Earnest: What was on Diana’s mind as summer began?’, Tina Brown, then editor of the magazine, thought that Diana had perhaps found a place to channel all that unrequited love, and was ‘learning to be sustained by it’, while Salman Rushdie (‘Crash: Was the fatal accident a cocktail of death and ...”

Paradises

David Allen, 5 August 1993

The Culture of Flowers
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 480 pp., £40, February 1993, 0 521 41441 5Show More

“... and travellers, and wrote for a lay readership in works of captivating prose. Then came Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, total immersion in single exotic cultures and increasingly unreadable monographs addressed to fellow-professionals. And then, in or around the Sixties, well and truly purged of that earlier baseless generalising, the discipline suddenly ...”

The Forest, the Corrupt Official and a Bowl of Penis Soup

Ruth Padel, 18 March 2004

“... says is the best restaurant in town, attended by two 15-year-old girls: hand-picked, translucent brown jade. Black tree-stumps cool on the mountain, sawmills slide out planks a hundred an hour and white ash blooms over the river while the courtier treats the General to tiger penis soup, five hundred linu a bowl. I’ll paint the bare burnt mamillated ...”

Short Cuts

David Runciman: The Dirtiest Player Around, 10 October 2013

“... writing in the Mail, thinks the way to understand Damian McBride’s relationship to Gordon Brown is by analogy with the Third Reich. McBride didn’t need to take direct orders from his boss because he already understood the violence that Brown wished on his enemies. The underling was working towards the ...”

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5Show More

“... side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.’ Pincher describes the comparison as ‘my most cherished ...”

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3Show More

“... as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly during the ...”

From The Blog

Not So Red Ed

Ross McKibbin, 30 September 2010

“... and Ed Balls, who is probably to his left, could not escape from his relationship with Gordon Brown. What’s really surprising is that David should be thought to have been an inevitable successor to Brown. The older Miliband is intelligent and personable but irredeemably associated with the failures of New Labour as ...”

Miss Lachrymose

Liz Brown: Doris Day’s Performances, 11 September 2008

Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door
by David Kaufman.
Virgin, 628 pp., £29.95, June 2008, 978 1 905264 30 8Show More

“... singer for a band, before going on to work with Bob Crosby (Bing’s brother) and then with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. She accepted the name but never warmed to it and even now, it’s said, rarely answers to it in her private life. ‘It sounds,’ she once said, ‘like I’m starring at the Gaiety Theater.’ Her brother, Paul, called her ...”

An Attic Full of Sermons

Tessa Hadley: Marilynne Robinson, 21 April 2005

Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 282 pp., £14.99, April 2005, 1 84408 147 8Show More

“... out of the past of his own father and grandfather, he charts his difficult relationship with Jack Boughton in the present. Jack, who is about the age of Ames’s wife, is the son of his best friend; as a baby he was given Ames’s name and offered to him almost as a surrogate child, as if to compensate for the recent ...”

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