London Review of Books

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4Show More

“... is an aimless walk in the rain; yet the book is full of surprising affections, it is a major sprawl of words with uncanny energy and plenty to say about ‘difference’, and about equality of a kind: the sort of book in short that people usually call a novel, because there is nothing else to call it. Admittedly, it is not a novel that could have ...”

Orificial Events

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The Promise’, 4 November 2021

The Promise
by Damon Galgut.
Chatto, 293 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 78474 406 9Show More

“... smoothly flowing alternatives could have been used.Galgut doesn’t observe the convention whereby major characters have privileged access to the narrative locus. Anyone can chip in. A homeless man with visions of supernatural beings (unconnected to the other characters) steers the narrative for several pages. It comes to seem as if the significant departure ...”

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

“... Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted from, different ...”

‘We ain’t found shit’

Scott Ritter, 2 July 2015

“... nuclear scientists. ‘It’s critical for us to know going forward,’ the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in June, that ‘those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.’ France has said that any agreement that doesn’t include inspections of military sites would be ‘useless’. Iran has been adamant ...”

Snap among the Witherlings

Michael Hofmann: Wallace Stevens, 22 September 2016

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens
by Paul Mariani.
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., £23, May 2016, 978 1 4516 2437 3Show More

“... the world without leaving home (the index to Stevens’s letters seems to include every major European country). An account of Stevens must be sensual, or it is nothing.I love a quatrain from Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... people decide – and then, if it doesn’t get the result it wants, overrule us from Holyrood. John Burnside New states are usually the product of catastrophe. Violence is the air they breathe. I can’t decide if it is Scotland’s good or bad fortune that its vote for statehood should take place against the background of an entirely normal birth of a ...”

Flub-Dub

Thomas Powers: Stephen Crane, 17 July 2014

Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire
by Paul Sorrentino.
Harvard, 476 pp., £25, June 2014, 978 0 674 04953 6Show More

“... The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous prose, which made for a readable book. The substantial demerit, slow to emerge, was that Beer had made parts of it up, sending later biographers down wrong roads for decades. Sorrentino concluded, but in many cases ...”

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

“... ideal of beauty and the decorous sentiment to which Dickens was attached. Art reviews weren’t a major feature of Household Words, but on 13 September 1856 the leading contribution was an anonymous article written by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins and entitled ‘To think, or be thought for’. The pretext for the piece was a controversy in 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

“... work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was tolerated. At one gathering in Florida, one of the team’s managers broke his nose when drunken colleagues were pushing him into a hotel swimming-pool. The team’s pivotal innovation, introduced in December 1997, was a deal they called ...”

A View of a View

Marina Warner: Melchior Lorck, 27 May 2010

Melchior Lorck
edited by Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen.
Royal Library Vandkunsten, 808 pp., €300, August 2009, 978 87 91393 61 7Show More

“... There are very few surviving paintings and they are widely scattered; there has never been a major exhibition of or monograph about his work until now, and his own efforts to bring his graphic work into print failed and failed again. Few original drawings survive; instead they are reproduced in woodcuts for which Lorck did not do all the cutting or ...”

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

“... necessary basis for the proper organisation of middle-class social, economic and cultural life in major cities around the world. Using the device was one way to be modern, in public and in private. ‘In Berlin, Zurich and Hamburg, telephonic kiosks have been established, so that anyone walking along and desirous of sending a communication by telephone, or ...”

Murder in Mayfair

Peter Pomerantsev, 31 March 2016

A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West
by Luke Harding.
Faber, 424 pp., £12.99, March 2016, 978 1 78335 093 3Show More

“... million). Firtash, we were told, is the Ukrainian oligarch who was at the centre of a series of major gas deals between Russia and Ukraine. Moscow allowed him to buy gas at below market rates and he sold it on high. The profits from this and other deals helped him finance the government of Viktor Yanukovych, whose kleptocratic rule was only stopped by way ...”

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

“... Association’. Clearly Pound’s parents ‘would take Jews as tenants’. All three of Pound’s major biographers begin with an evident and inevitable awareness that Pound’s is a stingingly complicated life. Moody’s is the fullest account likely to be written; his third volume, ominously subtitled The Tragic Years: 1939-72, goes beyond any predecessor ...”

Between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines

Tim Parks: Guelfs v. Ghibellines, 14 July 2016

Dante: The Story of His Life
by Marco Santagata, translated by Richard Dixon.
Harvard, 485 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 674 50486 8Show More

“... on constructing a myth of himself as both nobly born and destined to greatness. All three of his major works, the Vita nova (1295), the Convivio (1307) and the Commedia (1321), were, for their time, remarkably autobiographical. ‘Dante seems incapable of imagining a book in which his person, or at least a person bearing his name, doesn’t play a ...”

Rinse it in dead champagne

Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004

War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry
by Lindy Woodhead.
Virago, 498 pp., £20, April 2003, 1 86049 974 0Show More

Diana Vreeland
by Eleanor Dwight.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £30, December 2002, 0 688 16738 1Show More

“... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...”

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