London Review of Books

Look Me in the Eye

Julian Bell: Art and the Brain, 8 October 2009

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 4051 8557 8Show More

Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008, 978 0 300 12677 8Show More

Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008, 978 0 226 77052 9Show More

“... of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us. People can’t fake that.’ ‘Brain-Scan Lie Detectors Coming in Near Future,’ runs a news story, cued by a San Diego company press release. Will they become part of legal routine, or ...”

Home Office Rules

William Davies, 3 November 2016

“... part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the ...”

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7Show More

New Essays
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0Show More

The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1Show More

Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6Show More

“... Fielding seems to have been playing on Lady Mary’s hostility to Pope and his friends, and may have hoped through her influence to secure the patronage of the Prime Minister Walpole. There was no love lost between Walpole and the Scriblerians either, and Fielding’s fluctuating attitudes to them are sometimes inverse indicators of where Fielding stood ...”

What is what

A.J. Ayer, 22 January 1981

Sameness and Substance
by David Wiggins.
Blackwell, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 631 19090 2Show More

“... be the same something that they are, also hold that identity is relative. They think that a and b may coincide under the concept f, yet fail to coincide under some other concept g. For instance, I am the same person as won such and such a prize at school over fifty years ago, but not the same boy, for I am no longer a boy. Or again, the river in which I swam ...”

Enemy of the Enemies of Truth

Frank Kermode: The history of the footnote, 19 March 1998

The Footnote: A Curious History
by Anthony Grafton.
Faber, 241 pp., £12.99, December 1997, 0 571 17668 2Show More

“... other learned historians look illiterate beside him. Though not a great lover of footnotes, which may still in his day have seemed a shade ungentlemanly, he used them, as ‘a necessary evil’, to support his historical narrative and to confound his contemporaries: but it turns out that even he exaggerated his acquaintance with primary archives. Anyway, he ...”

Let’s all go to Mars

John Lanchester, 10 September 2015

The Wright Brothers
by David McCullough.
Thorndike, 585 pp., £22, May 2015, 978 1 4104 7875 7Show More

Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future
by Ashlee Vance.
Virgin, 400 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 7535 5562 0Show More

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

Good enough for Jesus

Charlotte Brewer, 25 January 1990

The State of the Language: 1990 Edition
edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels.
Faber, 531 pp., £17.50, January 1990, 9780571141821Show More

Clichés and Coinages
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 305 pp., £17.50, October 1989, 0 631 15691 7Show More

Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion
by Walter Nash.
Blackwell, 241 pp., £25, October 1989, 0 631 16754 4Show More

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”

Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Jessica Olin: Leaving Graceland, 5 December 2024

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir
by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough.
Macmillan, 281 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 0350 5104 5Show More

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... south of the border, and this raises two big questions at least. What would have happened had David Cameron not foolishly refused to include a third, ‘devo-max’ option on the ballot? And, whatever the result, will political self-interest and the need to survive finally begin to push the UK’s two so-called main parties in the direction of localism ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More

“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

The UN and Rwanda

Linda Melvern, 12 December 1996

“... first priority. There were howls of outrage from other members. The British Ambassador, Sir David Hannay, reviewed the options. The first was to reinforce the troops to give the peacekeepers a stronger mandate, though Hannay warned that this had been the UN strategy in Somalia. Second, the troops could pull out completely, risking a negative public ...”

Unfair Judgments

Ed Kiely: Lethal Cuts at the DWP, 17 April 2025

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence
by John Pring.
Pluto, 292 pp., £16.99, August 2024, 978 0 7453 4989 3Show More

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

Capture the Flag

Rory Scothorne: Labour in Scotland, 4 June 2026

A History of the Scottish Labour Party
by David Torrance.
Edinburgh, 314 pp., £24.99, January, 978 1 3995 4480 1Show More

“... of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in every single election. In May it won just 17 out of 129, tied with Reform in a distant second place after the SNP, which has 58 seats and is about to enter its third decade in government. A chunk of Harris’s old Glasgow constituency is now represented in Edinburgh by Holly Bruce of the ...”

Looking Away

Stephen Holmes: Questions of Intervention, 14 November 2002

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power.
Basic Books, 640 pp., £21.99, January 2002, 0 465 06150 8Show More

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals
by David Halberstam.
Bloomsbury, 540 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 7475 5946 5Show More

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

Sticky Wicket

Charles Nicholl: Colonel Fawcett’s Signet Ring, 28 May 2009

The Lost City of Z
by David Grann.
Simon and Schuster, 339 pp., £16.99, February 2009, 978 1 84737 436 3Show More

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

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