London Review of Books

Going Up

Tobias Gregory: The View from Above, 18 May 2023

Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art
by Philip Hardie.
Princeton, 353 pp., £38, April 2022, 978 0 691 19786 9Show More

“... too busy, too grandiose, too much craning your neck. The best way to view a grand painted ceiling may be from a beanbag such as those now placed on the floor of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, into which visitors can sink while gazing up at the enormous panels Rubens painted for Charles I. Hardie shows how these ceiling paintings reworked classical images ...”

Marching Orders

Ronan Bennett: The new future of Northern Ireland, 30 July 1998

“... credentials; another option, second-best, slightly wishy-washy, is ‘Northern Ireland’. He may also be attracted to ‘United’ to point up the disarray of his enemies or to mask his own difficulties. ‘Official’ is useful for the old guard, ‘Independent’ good for those striking out, who also seem fond of ‘Progressive’, ‘Popular’ and ...”

Is Michael Neve paranoid?

Michael Neve, 2 June 1983

“... Delirium, senility, foolishness, idiosyncratic thinking: Aubrey Lewis has suggested that it may have been used in these ways as well. From the Ancients right through to the Enlightenment, paranoia has an undiscovered history. For reasons that can only be guessed at, it does not seem to have been a commonly used word, and Lewis suggests that its ...”

‘Today the artist is a saint who writes his own life’

Edmund White, 9 March 1995

“... Fichte, gay fiction is considered to be little better than a joke, usually a dirty one; there may or may not be a more pronounced homophobia in Germany than in other European countries, but I suspect the differences are more reasonably attributed to the fortuitous absence of ‘out’ gay novelists of the first ...”

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6Show More

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second ...”

Real Busters

Tom Crewe: Sickert Grows Up, 18 August 2022

Walter Sickert
Tate Britain, until 18 September 2022Show More

Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life
edited by Matthew Travers.
Piano Nobile, 184 pp., £60, October 2021, 978 1 901192 59 9Show More

Sickert: A Life in Art
by Charlotte Keenan McDonald.
National Museums Liverpool, 104 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 902700 63 2Show More

“... decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost ...”

Bebop

Andrew O’Hagan, 5 October 1995

Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-56
edited by Ann Charters.
Viking, 629 pp., £25, August 1995, 0 670 84952 9Show More

“... money off kids in bars, grab at girls, shout ‘I’m Jack Kerouac, the world-famous author!’ He may now be the sort of writer whose life is just as well known as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the ...”

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

“... few, Russian or foreign historians and journalists, some of whom are apt to exaggerate what they may have read. Others again are either closed or not even known to exist (it is clear that, all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, officials carried off bundles of documents to serve as an investment against an uncertain future). And, as Gaddis ...”

Tricked Out as a Virgin

Bee Wilson: Respectable Enough, 4 November 2021

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice
by Julia Laite.
Profile, 410 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78816 442 9Show More

“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...”

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 Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

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

“... AT 8 p.m. on 10 May 1981 François Mitterrand made history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took three seconds for the image to appear clearly, but it felt like an eternity. First, a bald head (which, at this stage, could have been mistaken for that of the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also bald), then the eyes and the mouth and, finally, the full portrait ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... campaign still in the ascendancy as the day of reckoning looms, the pro-independence camp may yet come to regret its rejection of gradualism. Tom Devine The Scottish government states that it is committed ‘to securing the earliest safe withdrawal of Trident from an independent Scotland. This includes the removal of all elements of the current ...”

Rah, Rah, Cheers, Queers

Terry Castle: On Getting Married, 29 August 2013

“... in and tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall during the very brief legal window that opened in May that year (after the California Supreme Court ruled that the existing state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional) and ended – abruptly – in November, when Proposition 8, a rogue right-wing initiative intended to outlaw gay marriage in California ...”

Baffled Traveller

Jonathan Rée: Hegel, 30 November 2000

Hegel: An Intellectual Biography
by Horst Althaus, translated by Michael Tarsh.
Polity, 292 pp., £45, May 2000, 0 7456 1781 6Show More

Hegel: Biographie
by Jacques D'Hondt.
Calmann-Lévy, 424 pp., frs 150, October 1998, 2 7021 2919 6Show More

“... for independent realities. But Hegel realised that Kant’s analogy was not perfect. Cosmologists may be able to discount their earthly existence and envisage the solar system from the point of view of a sun with themselves circling round it on the surface of a spinning planet; but a philosopher could never lay aside the fundamental forms of human experience ...”

Bigness

Hal Foster: Rem Koolhaas, 29 November 2001

Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 800 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6047 6Show More

Great Leap Forward
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 720 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6048 4Show More

“... New York Beauty will be delirious or will not be. Luckily, we have the example of Koolhaas, who may be the most gifted architect-polemicist since Le Corbusier; like Corb he possesses panache in both design and writing, and media charisma, too. Born in Holland in 1944, Koolhaas first worked as a journalist and screenwriter in Amsterdam, and his approach to ...”

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