London Review of Books

I haven’t been I

Colm Tóibín: The Real Fernando Pessoa, 12 August 2021

Pessoa: An Experimental Life
by Richard Zenith.
Allen Lane, 1088 pp., £40, July, 978 0 241 53413 7Show More

“... yet truly by making a brothel of that marriage bed.’Lisbon was not a city in which young writers found an audience or settled down to a comfortable domestic life. Some members of Pessoa’s all-male literary club ended badly. His closest friend, the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro, committed suicide in a Paris hotel in 1916. Others spent time in ...”

Liquored-Up

Stefan Collini: Edmund Wilson, 17 November 2005

Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature
by Lewis Dabney.
Farrar, Straus, 642 pp., £35, August 2005, 0 374 11312 2Show More

“... advantages of private schooling and Princeton when the latter was still partly a drinking club for young Southern gentlemen. He attributed his own widened social sympathies to his service as a private in the US medical corps in France in 1917-18, though in later life the manners and attachments of his class were what struck younger observers. It had been clear ...”

Made in Algiers

Jeremy Harding: De Gaulle, 4 November 2010

Le mythe gaullien
by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Gallimard, 280 pp., €21, May 2010, 978 2 07 012851 8Show More

The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved
by Jonathan Fenby.
Simon and Schuster, 707 pp., £30, June 2010, 978 1 84737 392 2Show More

“... notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s urging. Almost certainly, after the Spanish Civil War, he seemed to ...”

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1Show More

Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0Show More

Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7Show More

“... trust.One of the many politicians who sought validation through caricature was George Canning, a young gun of the Foxite Whigs who turned in 1792 to side with the Pitt ministry. Canning went out of his way to solicit recognition by Gillray in particular, advising a mutual friend, James Sneyd, to offer Gillray the use of his franking privilege for a heavy ...”

Larkin and Us

Barbara Everett, 4 November 1982

Larkin at Sixty
edited by Anthony Thwaite.
Faber, 148 pp., £7.95, May 1982, 9780571118786Show More

The Art of Philip Larkin
by Simon Petch.
Sydney University Press, 108 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 424 00090 3Show More

“... poems makes a reader feel that he can only approve the poet’s judgment in not collecting them; Robert Conquest plunges the reader into an obscure background involving reciprocal limericks which were no doubt funny at the time but which are not (unlike those Monteith quotes) funny enough now. In the absence of any more exact sense of subject and form, these ...”

New Ways of Killing Your Father

Colm Tóibín, 18 November 1993

Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 305 pp., £22.50, October 1993, 0 7139 9095 3Show More

“... was made up of O’Connell and Parnell, and there was much emphasis on their time at Westminster. Young Ireland, the Fenians, even the poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done ...”

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 ...”

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