London Review of Books

Atone and Move Forward

Michael Stewart, 11 December 1997

Balkan Justice: The Story behind the First International War Crimes Trial since Nuremberg
by Michael Scharf.
Carolina, 340 pp., $28, October 1997, 0 89089 919 3Show More

The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia
by Rezak Hukanovic.
Little, Brown, 164 pp., £14.99, May 1997, 0 316 63955 9Show More

Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia
edited by Jasminka Udovicki and James Ridgeway.
Duke, 326 pp., $49.95, November 1997, 0 8223 1997 7Show More

A Safe Area: Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since the Second World War
by David Rohde.
Simon and Schuster, 440 pp., £8.99, June 1997, 0 671 00499 9Show More

Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War
by James Gow.
Hurst, 343 pp., £14.95, May 1997, 1 85065 208 2Show More

“... look spineless in the face of Serb and Croat terror, has produced a subsidiary institution which may be the most important legacy of the war. In one way this is history repeating itself, for in 1945 it was US pressure that led to the creation of the International Military Tribunal which sat at Nuremberg. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin proposed a toast ...”

Hand and Foot

John Kerrigan: Seamus Heaney, 27 May 1999

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 478 pp., £20, September 1998, 0 571 19492 3Show More

The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study
by Neil Corcoran.
Faber, 276 pp., £9.99, September 1998, 0 571 17747 6Show More

Seamus Heaney
by Helen Vendler.
HarperCollins, 188 pp., £15.99, November 1998, 0 00 255856 4Show More

“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened ...”

The Push for War

Anatol Lieven: The Threat from America, 3 October 2002

“... I had to put money on it, I’d say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the unreliability of Baghdad’s missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

‘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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Belt, Boots and Spurs

Jonathan Raban: Dunkirk, 1940, 5 October 2017

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4Show More

“... which also features an eloquent Black pastor, on account of its condemnation of lynching. Sturges may have got lucky. When White left the country to take up a post as a foreign correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that ...”

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 ...”

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