London Review of Books

The Enforcer

Stephen Sackur, 20 August 1992

Deterring Democracy
by Noam Chomsky.
Vintage, 453 pp., £7.99, April 1992, 0 09 913501 9Show More

Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War
by Mohamed Heikal.
HarperCollins, 350 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 00 255014 8Show More

The Imperial Temptation
by Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson.
Council on Foreign Relations Press, 240 pp., $22.50, June 1992, 0 87609 118 4Show More

“... by superpower competition, was all well and good – but only so long as there was no clash with vital US strategic interests. From the Arab point of view, the Gulf War merely confirmed an all-pervasive moral and political bankruptcy. The region continues to be dominated by anti-democratic regimes, whether it be the family oil-kingdoms of the Gulf, or the ...”

Foreigners

Denis Donoghue, 21 June 1984

Selected Essays
by John Bayley.
Cambridge, 217 pp., £19.50, March 1984, 0 521 25828 6Show More

Collected Poems: 1941-1983
by Michael Hamburger.
Carcanet, 383 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 9780856354977Show More

Poems: 1953-1983
by Anthony Thwaite.
Secker, 201 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 436 52151 2Show More

“... in which that question does not arise.’ Stevens is the typical American poet, ‘because the “vital” was for him the inside of the mind, the place where the visions and inventions of poetry used to be born, but which for that purpose is now “The empty spirit/In vacant space” ’. Stevens’s true ephebe is Ashbery, whose poems exhibit ‘an elegance ...”

To the End of the Line

Ferdinand Mount: The Red Dean, 26 April 2012

The Red Dean of Canterbury: The Public and Private Faces of Hewlett Johnson
by John Butler.
Scala, 292 pp., £16.95, September 2011, 978 1 85759 736 3Show More

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

But what did they say?

Stephen Walsh: Music in 1853, 25 October 2012

Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year
by Hugh Macdonald.
Boydell, 208 pp., £25, June 2012, 978 1 84383 718 3Show More

“... was no detectable poetic idea in Brendel’s sense; and the violinist-composer Joseph Joachim, a vital catalyst in Macdonald’s story because of his friendship with all the others and his great stature as a musician, even if he was creatively a very minor figure. The case of Brahms is more interesting than that of a mere juvenile misfit, however. The New ...”

Things Left Unsaid

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Achebe on Biafra, 11 October 2012

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
by Chinua Achebe.
Allen Lane, 333 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84614 576 6Show More

“... ambition of the Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an overambitious man who had engineered the secession and manipulated his people into supporting him. Many others have repeated this view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe that following the ...”

Stand and Die

Richard Overy: Rückzug, 10 October 2013

Rückzug: The German Retreat from France, 1944
by Joachim Ludewig, edited by David Zabecki.
Kentucky, 435 pp., £33.95, September 2012, 978 0 8131 4079 7Show More

“... the Allied attack would come in the Pas de Calais, making a powerful counter-offensive absolutely vital to protect the Ruhr. In the event, it had to be improvised far to the west, where holding the line and counter-attacking were always going to be more difficult. When the Allies eventually broke out of the invasion bridgehead in late July 1944, the ...”

Hooray Hen-Wees

John Christensen: Pinochet’s Millions, 6 October 2005

Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System
by Raymond Baker.
Wiley, 438 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 471 64488 9Show More

“... use of tax havens by virtually every major global bank and multinational business has nullified David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage. Fundamentalist advocates of a no-holds-barred approach to free trade have persistently turned a blind eye to this problem. For those like Baker – and myself – who believe that free and fair trade can ...”

Irrational Expectations

Barry Supple, 18 November 1982

The 1982 Budget
edited by John Kay.
Blackwell, 147 pp., £10, July 1982, 0 631 13153 1Show More

Money and Inflation
by Frank Hahn.
Blackwell, 116 pp., £7.95, June 1982, 0 631 12917 0Show More

Public Enterprise in Crisis: The Future of the Nationalised Industries
by John Redwood.
Blackwell, 211 pp., £5.25, May 1982, 0 631 13053 5Show More

Controlling Public Industries
by John Redwood and John Hatch.
Blackwell, 169 pp., £12, July 1982, 0 631 13078 0Show More

“... borrowing requirement are transformed by measurements which allow for price changes, so Morris and David Savage, in the same book, make the even more telling observation that public expenditure and income are not dependent solely on government policy. They vary with fluctuations in the economy, since these fluctuations will change the expenditure needs (for ...”

Tissue Wars

Roy Porter: HIV and Aids, 2 March 2000

The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and Aids
by Edward Hooper.
Allen Lane, 1070 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 7139 9335 9Show More

“... then: one in Montreal in 1945, one in Toronto in 1958 etc. In particular, he tells the story of David Carr, a Manchester sailor who died in 1959, and was widely reported some years ago as having been the ‘first’ Aids victim. Over the course of some fifty pages, threaded in and out of the book, Hooper elucidates Carr’s tours of duty with the ...”

Heart and Hoof

Marjorie Garber: Seabiscuit, 4 October 2001

Seabiscuit: The Making of a Legend
by Laura Hillenbrand.
Fourth Estate, 399 pp., £16.99, May 2001, 1 84115 091 6Show More

“... book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles ...”

I’m a Surfer

Steven Shapin: What’s the Genome Worth?, 20 March 2008

A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life
by Craig Venter.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, October 2007, 978 0 7139 9724 8Show More

“... Sasser and Paul Sarbanes; and, as an apparent afterthought, one of Bourke’s summer neighbours, David Rockefeller. Getting wind of the commercial initiative, the NIH offered Venter more power, more autonomy and even more money, and in the UK the Wellcome responded similarly in support of the Medical Research Council’s sequencing work. By this time, Venter ...”

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

“... It is entirely symptomatic that she should devote disproportionate space to the work of David Irving, which has little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is ...”

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8Show More

Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5Show More

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... south of the border, and this raises two big questions at least. What would have happened had David Cameron not foolishly refused to include a third, ‘devo-max’ option on the ballot? And, whatever the result, will political self-interest and the need to survive finally begin to push the UK’s two so-called main parties in the direction of localism ...”

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

“... Early in the first part of his three-volume, 1500-page Portrait of the Man and His Work, A. David Moody, in a section of a chapter also entitled ‘Suburban Prejudice’, cites the same story, but points out that in the summers of 1902 and 1903 Homer Pound and his wife let their house to ‘Mr W.B. Hackenburg, president of the Jewish Hospital ...”

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