London Review of Books

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7Show More

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

Patricia Lockwood: Updike Redux, 10 October 2019

Novels, 1959-65: ‘The Poorhouse Fair’; ‘Rabbit, Run’; ‘The Centaur’; ‘Of the Farm’
by John Updike.
Library of America, 850 pp., £36, November 2018, 978 1 59853 581 5Show More

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

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 ...”

Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... seems to be a magnetic subject in what you’ve written. I wondered what sort of war you’d had. FW: I had very much the same sort of war as is described in the books. I was in my teens. I was first at Oxford, then called up, invalided out of the Army, and did a TB cure. So the theme of those first stories in Out of the War, and to a certain extent of The ...”

China’s Crisis

Mark Elvin, 5 November 1992

The Dragon’s Brood: Conversations with Young Chinese
by David Rice.
HarperCollins, 294 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 246 13809 2Show More

Time for telling truth is running out
by Vera Schwarcz.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 300 05009 7Show More

The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis
by W.F.J. Jenner.
Allen Lane, 255 pp., £18.99, March 1992, 0 7139 9060 0Show More

Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology
by Michael Harris Bond.
Oxford, 125 pp., £8.95, February 1992, 0 19 585116 1Show More

Chinese Communism
by Dick Wilson and Matthew Grenier.
Paladin, 190 pp., £5.99, May 1992, 9780586090244Show More

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History
by David Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4Show More

This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022
by Simon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4Show More

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

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 Mask It Wears

Pankaj Mishra: The Wrong Human Rights, 21 June 2018

The People v. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk.
Harvard, 400 pp., £21.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97682 5Show More

Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
by Samuel Moyn.
Harvard, 277 pp., £21.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 73756 3Show More

“... together, with its particular infrastructure, bureaucracy and fundraising programmes, into what David Kennedy in The Rights of Spring (2009), his acidulous memoir of human rights activism in Uruguay in 1984, called the ‘smooth and knowing routines of professional advocacy’. Kennedy, recalling time spent in the offices of Human Rights Watch in the Empire ...”

Cash Today

Andrew McGettigan: Who profits from student loans?, 5 March 2015

“... been made clear, still less where the money will come from to pay for the £7 billion in tax cuts David Cameron airily promised in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference last October. When such pledges are discussed in the media, it is usually in terms of whether they are funded or unfunded – whether the numbers ‘add up’. Osborne’s Autumn ...”

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 ...”

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8Show More

Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5Show More

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

He was the man

Robert Crawford: Ezra Pound, 30 June 2016

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work: Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-72
by A. David Moody.
Oxford, 654 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 0 19 870436 2Show More

“... Early in the first part of his three-volume, 1500-page Portrait of the Man and His Work, A. David Moody, in a section of a chapter also entitled ‘Suburban Prejudice’, cites the same story, but points out that in the summers of 1902 and 1903 Homer Pound and his wife let their house to ‘Mr W.B. Hackenburg, president of the Jewish Hospital ...”

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
by David Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7Show More

The Trader, the Owner, the Slave
by James Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5Show More

The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000
by Colin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6Show More

The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7Show More

“... rise of antislavery in Britain and America coincide with an intensification of racial thinking? David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage throws light on the process by which slavery became exclusively black. There were many European precedents for white slavery, not only in the classical period but in the trading networks of the late medieval ...”

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege
by Joy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3Show More

Ninety-Nine Stories of God
by Joy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5Show More

“... to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s favour: ‘The dog has crammed itself behind the pipes beneath the kitchen sink. David squats before him, blowing gently on his ...”

Don’t wait to be asked

Clare Bucknell: Revolutionary Portraiture, 2 March 2023

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830
by Paris Spies-Gans.
Paul Mellon Centre, 384 pp., £45, June 2022, 978 1 913107 29 1Show More

“... such as de Pujol, who took them on as students in their ateliers.Female pupils of Jacques-Louis David exhibited work at every Salon between 1791 and 1837: in a letter of 1787, defending the morality of his mixed Louvre atelier to the arts administration, David claimed that his women students, all ‘irreproachable’ in ...”

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