London Review of Books

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

‘Everyone is terribly kind’

Deborah Friedell: Dorothy Thompson at War, 19 January 2023

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
by Kathryn Olmsted.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 0 300 25642 0Show More

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War
by Deborah Cohen.
William Collins, 427 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 00 830590 1Show More

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s own writing. The broken ...”

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 ...”

The Pleasures of Poverty

Barbara Everett, 6 September 1984

A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries
by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £12.95, July 1984, 0 333 34995 4Show More

“... an appropriate shaping in the materials, which merely follow a loose chronological sequence. The major events of Barbara Pym’s life were probably the acceptance of her first novel in 1950, the rejection of her seventh in 1963, and her ‘rediscovery’ in 1977. Appropriately, the latter or post-1950 part of the book is in the nature of excerpts from a ...”

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 ...”

Kept Alive for Thirty Days

Stefan Collini: Metrics, 8 November 2018

The Tyranny of Metrics
by Jerry Z. Muller.
Princeton, 220 pp., £19.95, February 2018, 978 0 691 17495 2Show More

The Metric Tide
by James Wilsdon et al.
Sage, 168 pp., £19.99, February 2016, 978 1 4739 7306 0Show More

“... of purpose are replaced by quantifiable results. ‘Goal displacement’ is also a major problem: where a metric is used to judge performance, energy will be diverted to trying to improve the scores at the expense of the activities for which the metric is supposed to be a proxy. As well as the likelihood of diminishing utility in terms of real ...”

Lynched for Drinking from a White Man’s Well

Thomas Laqueur, 11 October 2018

“... innocent. A private marker placed in the Colfax cemetery in 1921 – at the tail end of the first major phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in ...”

Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth

Owen Bennett-Jones: Trouble at the BBC, 20 December 2018

“... revenue are likely to get worse quickly. Yet anyone witnessing a BBC news operation during a major story would think it had money to spare. It takes more than thirty BBC staff to cover an event such as the World Economic Forum in Davos. For Nelson Mandela’s state memorial service, there were more than a hundred. The only effective check on this is the ...”

Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap

Alex de Waal: The Road to Darfur, 5 August 2004

“... Islam after leaving Khartoum University and joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, led by John Garang. Nothing could be further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed – and nothing more inimical to them – than the ideology of the SPLA. Although Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state for southern ...”

In the Waiting-Room of History

Amit Chaudhuri: ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’, 24 June 2004

Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Princeton, 320 pp., £42.95, October 2000, 0 691 04908 4Show More

“... way of saying "not yet” to somebody else.’ To illustrate what he means, he turns to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and On Representative Government – ‘both of which,’ Chakrabarty says, ‘proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.’ According to Mill, Indians or ...”

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