London Review of Books

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3Show More

The Commanding Heights
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4Show More

“... attract capital and keep it, and for a significant number of the citizens of every country. Even Robert Rubin, Secretary to the United States Treasury, is anxious about the tendency of the dispersed intelligences to move as a herd and amplify the oscillations. This is not to say that the financial interests of what the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, no enemy of ...”

Robespierre’s Chamber Pot

Julian Barnes: Loathed by Huysmans, 2 April 2020

Modern Art
by J.K. Huysmans, translated by Brendan King.
Dedalus, 313 pp., £10.99, February 2019, 978 1 910213 99 5Show More

“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

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 ...”

Light through the Fog

Colin Burrow: The End of the Epithet, 26 April 2018

The Odyssey
translated by Peter Green.
California, 538 pp., £24, April 2018, 978 0 520 29363 2Show More

The Odyssey
translated by Emily Wilson.
Norton, 592 pp., £30, December 2017, 978 0 393 08905 9Show More

The Odyssey
translated by Anthony Verity.
Oxford, 384 pp., £7.99, February 2018, 978 0 19 873647 9Show More

“... against so many.This simile was much reviled by neoclassical critics. In his translation of 1726 Alexander Pope couldn’t bring himself to mention the sausage, and produced instead one of his prissiest euphemisms: ‘As one who long with pale-ey’d famine pin’d,/The sav’ry cates on glowing embers cast.’ Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and is still ...”

Doomed to Sincerity

Germaine Greer: Rochester as New Man, 16 September 1999

The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
edited by Harold Love.
Oxford, 712 pp., £95, April 1999, 0 19 818367 4Show More

“... encounters the first sub-heading, ‘Poems probably by Rochester’, which is followed by ‘Alexander Bendo’s brochure’, and ‘Writings for the theatre’ before branching off into ‘Lost works’, ‘Disputed works’ and ‘Appendix Roffensis’. The resulting format is chaotic; unnecessary rubrics such as ‘Love dialogues’, ‘Love ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... he threatens to destroy more Scottish jobs than Margaret Thatcher, to ruin more pension plans than Robert Maxwell. Colin Kidd In an ideal world a fully independent Scotland might be a better place than the quasi-independent state it is now, but why is almost impossible to see given the evasions and silences of the ‘Yes’ campaign. The SNP’s argument is ...”

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

“... years from private into public hands and back again. The telephone was invented in March 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Queen Victoria witnessed a demonstration of the new device on 14 January 1878. On 7 April 1882, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that the establishment of a rudimentary telephone system in London had ‘justified the most sanguine ...”

Poetry and Christianity

Barbara Everett, 4 February 1982

Three for Water-Music
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 69 pp., £2.95, July 1981, 0 85635 363 9Show More

The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse
edited by Donald Davie.
Oxford, 319 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 19 213426 4Show More

“... level of translation is high). There are also whole poets new to me, like the 16th-century Scot Alexander Hume, who can achieve a small intense uncanny radiance: The ample heaven of fabrik sure In cleannes dois surpas The crystal and the silver pure Or clearest poleist glas. The same so tranquill is and still That na where sail ye find Saif on ane high ...”

How Utterly Depraved!

Deborah Friedell: What did Ethel know?, 1 July 2021

Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy
by Anne Sebba.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 0 297 87100 2Show More

“... was a junior engineer for the Army Signal Corps and married to Ethel.In 1999, Julius’s handler, Alexander Feklisov, published his memoirs over the objections of the Russian intelligence service. He was a decorated Hero of the Russian Federation, credited in Moscow with having helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis: he figured they’d let him get away with ...”

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom

Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5290 4247 4Show More

“... Alexander Cockburn blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”

Oven-Ready Children

Clare Bucknell: Jonathan Swift, 19 January 2017

Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel
by John Stubbs.
Viking, 752 pp., £19.99, November 2016, 978 0 670 92205 5Show More

“... about turnips, potatoes and the intricacies of cheesemaking. The centrepiece of the second book of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad is a mock-epic games, featuring mud-slinging contests and competitions to see who can piss the highest. Satire could be profoundly unlikeable (as contemporary detractors and an army of hostile Victorian critics made clear), and ...”

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0Show More

Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8Show More

“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring ...”

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

“... names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a legitimate ...”

Cardenio’s Ghost

Charles Nicholl: The Bits Shakespeare Wrote, 2 December 2010

The Arden Shakespeare: Double Falsehood
edited by Brean Hammond.
Arden Shakespeare, 443 pp., £16.99, March 2010, 978 1 903436 77 6Show More

“... impressive book, Shakespeare Restored, challenging what he saw as the errors and complacencies of Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of the works, and offering many examples of his own editorial skills, particularly in the elucidation of difficult or corrupt passages. So his exalted claims for the provenance of Double Falsehood seemed to carry some weight. But ...”

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