London Review of Books

Diary

Adam Shatz: Elections in Egypt, 19 July 2012

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

When were you thinking of shooting yourself?

Sophie Pinkham: Mayakovsky, 16 February 2017

Mayakovsky: A Biography
by Bengt Jangfeldt, translated by Harry Watson.
Chicago, 616 pp., £26.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 05697 5Show More

Volodya: Selected Works
by Vladimir Mayakovsky, edited by Rosy Carrick.
Enitharmon, 312 pp., £14.99, November 2015, 978 1 910392 16 4Show More

“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8Show More

“... coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the ...”

Smarter, Happier, More Productive

Jim Holt: ‘The Shallows’, 3 March 2011

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember
by Nicholas Carr.
Atlantic, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2010, 978 1 84887 225 7Show More

“... things at once than non-players, and are better at ignoring irrelevant features of a problem. Very young children trained with video games have been shown to develop superior attention-management skills, scoring substantially higher than their untrained peers on some IQ tests. You can actually see the improvement on an EEG: four-year-olds trained on video ...”

Top Brands Today

Nicholas Penny: The Art World, 14 December 2017

The Auctioneer: A Memoir of Great Art, Legendary Collectors and Record-Breaking Auctions
by Simon de Pury and William Stadiem.
Allen and Unwin, 312 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 1 76011 350 6Show More

Rogues’ Gallery: A History of Art and Its Dealers
by Philip Hook.
Profile, 282 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78125 570 4Show More

Donald Judd: Writings
edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray.
David Zwirner, 1054 pp., £28, November 2016, 978 1 941701 35 5Show More

“... point, of an artist’s work and then describing the impression that art makes on an open mind. (David Sylvester was especially good at this.) It has seldom generated a productive debate because it tends to be defensive, but also because there is such a fear of encouraging philistinism or of being mistaken for a philistine. Artists themselves have not always ...”

Wobbly, I am

John Kerrigan: Famous Seamus, 25 April 2024

The Letters of Seamus Heaney
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 820 pp., £40, October 2023, 978 0 571 34108 5Show More

“... him a visibility at odds with the solitude and simplicity he craved. One reason he moved with his young family from Belfast to Glanmore in County Wicklow in 1972 was to protect himself from what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical ...”

I’d smash you in the face

Thomas Meaney: MAGA’s Debt to Buckley, 22 January 2026

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 1040 pp., £33, June 2025, 978 0 375 50234 7Show More

“... politics; a promising Harvard dropout, John Leonard, who became a leading literary critic; and a young caption writer at Vogue called Joan Didion. All three ended their careers writing for the New York Review of Books.One of the problems National Review faced in the 1950s was that America possessed only the rudiments of an anti-liberal conservative ...”

Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... antiquities at Sotheby’s and head of modern painting. When Magnus Linklater took over as editor, David Sylvester, my neighbour and great friend, who had been art adviser, offered his resignation. So suddenly there wasn’t an art adviser. Bruce was at a terribly low ebb. He’d been working for ages on the book which eventually came out as The Songlines. He ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Down with DWEMs

John Sutherland, 15 August 1991

ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education
by Charles Sykes.
St Martin’s, 304 pp., $9.95, December 1989, 0 312 03916 6Show More

Tenured Redicals: How politics has corrupted our Higher Education
by Roger Kimball.
HarperCollins, 222 pp., $9.95, April 1991, 0 06 092049 1Show More

“... stock of American humanity (the latest census reveals that ethnic minorities, particularly in young age groups, are growing explosively). The recent attack on universities was triggered by freshman requirements at an élite West Coast university. Allegations that the Western Culture course at Stanford was ‘racist’ began to surface in 1986. Like other ...”

Walking like Swinburne

P.N. Furbank, 12 July 1990

Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant
by Philip Hoare.
Hamish Hamilton, 463 pp., £20, June 1990, 0 241 12416 6Show More

“... appearance, his jewels and magenta lipstick and gold-dusted hair. In the year of the Bright Young Things and their parties, those parties dear to our imagination from Vile Bodies, Stephen Tennant, arriving in his Edwardian electric brougham, dressed perhaps in a football jersey and earrings, became a star attraction, rivalled only by Brian Howard. There ...”

The Chop

John Bayley, 27 January 1994

A History of Warfare
by John Keegan.
Hutchinson, 432 pp., £20, September 1993, 0 09 174527 6Show More

How Great Generals Win
by Bevin Alexander.
Norton, 320 pp., £22, November 1993, 9780393035315Show More

The Backbone: Diaries of a Military Family in the Napoleonic Wars
edited by Alethea Hayter.
Pentland, 343 pp., £18.50, September 1993, 1 85821 069 0Show More

“... at a crucial moment, demanding if his legionaries intended to let these rebel ‘boys’, like the young Cato, overthrow him. Hitler’s record in the First World War was that of a junior NCO who really enjoyed it; and even in the Second he loved discussing with young officers such things as the best way to site an 88mm ...”

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell
by Roger Hutchinson.
Mainstream, 238 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 1 85158 702 0Show More

James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’
edited by Marshall Waingrow.
Edinburgh, 518 pp., £75, March 1995, 0 7486 0471 5Show More

Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia
by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 245 pp., £30, April 1995, 0 19 818259 7Show More

“... Born in 1740, the heir of a cool, clever Lowland laird and lawyer, he became very rapidly a young literary lion, an acquaintance of Rousseau and Voltaire, the close friend, not just of Samuel Johnson, but of a broad sample of London’s cultural and fashionable élite, the celebrated biographer of the Corsican nationalist, Pasquale Paoli, a man, or so ...”

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