London Review of Books

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

“... What to make of him? The man is a shock, like the toy buzzer in a prank handshake, and the effect is to baffle and immobilise thought. Consider a typical reaction from the morning after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night ...”

Shockingly Worldly

David Runciman: The Abbé Sieyès, 23 October 2003

Emmanuel Sieyès: Political Writings
edited by Michael Sonenscher.
Hackett, 256 pp., $34.95, September 2003, 0 87220 430 8Show More

“... This makes the rest of the world uncomfortable, and Madison’s ideas can often seem too American to be true (in contrast to Rousseau, whose ideas can often seem too true to be Swiss). The other, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès from Provence, is not mistrusted outside his native France so much as ...”

Over the top

Graham Coster, 22 October 1992

Hell’s Foundations: A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli
by Geoffrey Moorhouse.
Hodder, 256 pp., £19.99, April 1992, 0 340 43044 3Show More

“... Gallipoli has not lent itself to literature. The First World War on the Western Front has furnished a body of poetry, prose fiction and memoir so substantial, and so distinguished, as to equip any O-Level English student with at least an adequate historical knowledge of the campaign ...”

Faculty at War

Tom Paulin, 17 June 1982

Re-Reading English
edited by Peter Widdowson.
Methuen, 246 pp., £7.95, March 1982, 0 416 31150 4Show More

Against Criticism
by Iain McGilchrist.
Faber, 271 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 571 11922 0Show More

“... subject is in a state of acute crisis. Some nourish the suspicion that English literature isn’t properly an academic subject, while others believe that its study can be revitalised by adopting structuralist procedures and developing a ‘materialist criticism’. Partly, the crisis which now afflicts English studies is a reflection of a more general ...”

On Thatcher

“... Shakespeare and Freud. These are some of the things that were said.Servicemen are starting to wonder more and more precisely what the reason was for which Britain spent so much treasure, and for which they and their friends were asked to risk their lives. It is now dawning on many of them that if Mrs Thatcher really ...”

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5Show More

“... were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing. He soon gave up on the ...”

Ambitions

Robert Blake, 18 December 1980

Harold Nicolson: A Biography: Vol. 1, 1886-1929
by James Lees-Milne.
Chatto, 429 pp., £15, November 1980, 0 7011 2520 9Show More

Harold Nicolson Diaries 1930-1964
by Stanley Olson.
Collins, 436 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 0 00 216304 7Show More

“... Harold Nicolson was a diarist of genius who would have loved to make a success of public life or literature. He was an able but not outstanding diplomat who retired at 43, a journalist and broadcaster of talent, an MP for ten years and a junior minister in 1940-41. His literary achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase ...”

Blessed, Beastly Place

Douglas Dunn, 5 March 1981

Precipitous City
by Trevor Royle.
Mainstream, 210 pp., £6.95, May 1980, 0 906391 09 1Show More

RLS: A Life Study
by Jenni Calder.
Hamish Hamilton, 362 pp., £9.95, June 1980, 0 241 10374 6Show More

Gillespie
by J. MacDougall Hay.
Canongate, 450 pp., £4.95, November 1979, 0 903937 79 4Show More

Scottish Satirical Verse
edited by Edwin Morgan.
Carcanet, 236 pp., £6.95, June 1980, 0 85635 183 0Show More

Collected Poems
by Robert Garioch.
Carcanet, 208 pp., £3.95, July 1980, 0 85635 316 7Show More

“... and atmosphere are still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors ...”

Funny Water

Frank Kermode: Raban at Sea, 20 January 2000

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 435 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 0 330 34628 8Show More

“... it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed ...”

Tropical Storms

Blake Morrison, 6 September 1984

Poems of Science
edited by John Heath-Stubbs and Phillips Salman.
Penguin, 328 pp., £4.95, June 1984, 0 14 042317 6Show More

The Kingfisher
by Amy Clampitt.
Faber, 92 pp., £4, April 1984, 0 571 13269 3Show More

The Ice Factory
by Philip Gross.
Faber, 62 pp., £3.95, June 1984, 0 571 13217 0Show More

Venus and the Rain
by Medbh McGuckian.
Oxford, 57 pp., £4.50, June 1984, 0 19 211962 1Show More

Saying hello at the station
by Selima Hill.
Chatto, 48 pp., £2.95, June 1984, 0 7011 2788 0Show More

Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems
by Liz Lochhead.
Polygon, 159 pp., £2.95, May 1984, 0 904919 80 3Show More

News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of West Indian-British Poetry
edited by James Berry.
Chatto, 212 pp., £4.95, June 1984, 9780701127978Show More

Human Rites: Selected Poems 1970-1982
by E.A. Markham.
Anvil, 127 pp., £7.95, May 1984, 0 85646 112 1Show More

Midsummer
by Derek Walcott.
Faber, 79 pp., £3.95, July 1984, 0 571 13180 8Show More

“... for a poem’ s authenticity. But Imlac also argues, apparently contradicting himself, that ‘to a poet nothing can be useless,’ that he ‘must know many languages and many sciences’ and through his command of botany, zoology, astronomy, politics, ethics and so on become a ‘legislator of mankind’. This is familiar enough for us ...”

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

“... The abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

Diary

Jonathan Lethem: Theatre of Injury, 15 December 2016

“... feel like he is making everyone sick, and bipolar./i feel like I am so incredibly ill-equipped to deal with any of this./i’m taking blind advice from all comers without feeling like anything is remotely adequate./ i feel nostalgic for all of life before Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter ...”

One’s Thousand One Nightinesses

Steven Connor: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 22 March 2012

Stranger Magic
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 540 pp., £28, November 2011, 978 0 7011 7331 9Show More

“... Not because they have been exhausted by retelling and explication, but because we always seem to have encountered them, or some of them, already, somewhere else, at some other time in our lives we are not able quite to pin down. They are, in the phrase George Grote applied to Greek ...”

At the Foundling Museum

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, 2 April 2020

“... Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media (until 26 April; temporarily closed) opens with images of the Visitation, the encounter in St Luke’s Gospel between the expectant Virgin Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist ...”

In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0Show More

Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0Show More

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3Show More

Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2Show More

“... A historian ought to know better, I suppose. But for the last decade – ever since I passed a long queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007 – the idea that we might be living through our own version of the 1930s has proved irresistible. The run on Northern Rock augured a financial collapse on the scale of 1929, and has been followed by the re-emergence in the West of protectionist posturing, authoritarian politics, demagoguery and nativism, as well as the bullying land-grabs in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine ...”

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