London Review of Books

Khrushchev’s Secret

Neal Ascherson, 16 October 1997

We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Oxford, 425 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 19 878070 2Show More

“... new sort of assessment was growing fashionable in the West. Comparing missile and warhead totals, Robert McNamara warned, was no longer useful; the point was that overwhelming slaughter and destruction would be caused if only a tiny fraction of an enemy’s missiles got through. How do you use a weapon which can neither be fired against an enemy nor ...”

Après Brexit

Ferdinand Mount, 20 February 2020

“... for the founders of American neoconservatism, the Yale classicist Donald Kagan and his sons Robert and Frederick, both of whom were influential in promoting the second Iraq War. And yet for the Founding Fathers of the United States, Hamilton and Madison in particular, Pericles was a warmongering imperialist who instigated and persisted in the fatal war ...”

A Strange Blight

Meehan Crist: Rachel Carson’s Forebodings, 6 June 2019

‘Silent Spring’ and Other Writings on the Environment
by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber.
Library of America, 546 pp., £29.99, March 2018, 978 1 59853 560 0Show More

“... species – carried from here to there by humans – eat the local food and kill the local young and homogenise formerly diverse landscapes as effectively as any bulldozer; whole animal populations already poisoned by pesticides and pollution are hunted or fished to a ghostly semblance of their former density, and their absence in turn damages the ...”

Operation Barbarella

Rick Perlstein: Hanoi Jane, 17 November 2005

Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon
by Mary Hershberger.
New Press, 228 pp., £13.99, September 2005, 1 56584 988 4Show More

“... a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she accepted the ceremonial title of ‘Miss Army Recruiter’. A budding Method-trained actress, the daughter of an American icon, she fell in love with Roger Vadim, the Nouvelle ...”

Doomed to Sincerity

Germaine Greer: Rochester as New Man, 16 September 1999

The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
edited by Harold Love.
Oxford, 712 pp., £95, April 1999, 0 19 818367 4Show More

“... guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of ...”

Republican King

Philippe Marlière: François Mitterrand, 17 April 2014

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity
by Philip Short.
Bodley Head, 692 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84792 006 5Show More

“... staunch traditionalists, but not followers of the extremist, anti-Semitic Action Française. The young Mitterrand devoured Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, as well as French translations of Faulkner, Joyce and Hemingway; later, as an adult, taken with the notion of ancestral soil, he sometimes seemed closer, aesthetically and intellectually, to the nationalist ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... predominates. Unionists are quietly fretful, concerned about pensions, job opportunities for the young and North Sea oil running out. I think they are right to be worried. Alex Salmond is what is known in Scotland as a ‘chancer’. He is taking major risks – against the advice of experts – on EU membership, cross-border pension schemes, the ...”

All Those Arrows

Donald MacKenzie: A Major Cause of the Financial Crisis, 25 June 2009

Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe
by Gillian Tett.
Little, Brown, 338 pp., £18.99, April 2009, 978 1 4087 0164 5Show More

“... Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives ...”

The Stuntman

David Runciman: Richard Branson, 20 March 2014

Branson: Behind the Mask
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 368 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 571 29710 8Show More

“... He likes to brag about his drug use and his sexual appetites. He treats the personal space of the young women around him – constant props in his endless publicity stunts – with the sort of disregard you’d expect from a 1970s disc jockey rather than a successful 21st-century businessman. No one would mistake Richard Branson for Roman Abramovich, any more ...”

The Other Thomas

Charles Nicholl, 8 November 2012

“... to the ‘lineage history’ (vamshvāli) which is a strong tradition among Keralan Christians. In Robert Eric Frykenberg’s Christianity in India, vamshvālis are described as orally transmitted pedigrees which ‘claim hereditary authority within certain elite families, through which kattanars [pastors] and metrans [bishops] descended from one generation to ...”

Laptop Jihadi

Adam Shatz: Theoretician of al-Qaida, 20 March 2008

Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri
by Brynjar Lia.
Hurst, 510 pp., £27.50, November 2007, 978 1 85065 856 6Show More

“... sources, more likely to cite Mao than Muhammad: in Afghanistan he was known for giving lectures on Robert Taber’s 1965 study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea, once a favourite of the IRA. Al-Suri, Lia writes, was ‘a dissident, a critic and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than ...”

Entrepreneurship

Tom Paulin: Ted Hughes and the Hare, 29 November 2007

Letters of Ted Hughes
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 756 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 571 22138 7Show More

“... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a ...”

Diary

Sean Wilsey: Going Slow, 17 July 2008

“... but he’s still bulletproof in Texas). The Gunter – another cattle king hotel – is where Robert Johnson made his first recordings, in 1936, and rock and roll was born. Eisenhower had an office in town, and he was in it on the morning he heard about Pearl Harbor. I don’t even think he was a general then. The San Antonio gangster Freddie ...”

The natives did a bunk

Malcolm Gaskill: The Little Ice Age, 19 July 2018

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America
by Sam White.
Harvard, 361 pp., £23.95, October 2017, 978 0 674 97192 9Show More

“... from Essex, desperate to find food, sailed a shallop down the New England coast accompanied by his young daughter and two others. A storm drove them to Cape Cod, where feet had to be chipped away from the ice in the boat. They tried to make a fire, but had no hatchet to cut wood. The party lay exposed to the cold all night. Everyone except the girl and one ...”

His Own Dark Mind

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron, 30 November 2023

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £19.99, December 2022, 978 1 009 23295 1Show More

Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics
by Bernard Beatty.
Liverpool, 266 pp., £90, January 2023, 978 1 80085 462 8Show More

Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century
by Richard Cronin.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £85, June 2023, 978 1 009 36623 6Show More

“... When, at the beginning of the canto, ‘self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,’ the young hero finds himself, not coincidentally, ‘upon this place of skulls,/The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo’. Why not glimpse personal calamity in a generation’s burial place? (‘He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward ...”

Show more articles

More search Options

Browse by Subject