London Review of Books

Not Just the Money

Mattathias Schwartz: Cybermafia, 5 July 2012

DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia
by Misha Glenny.
Vintage, 432 pp., £8.95, July 2012, 978 0 09 954655 9Show More

“... three ambitious histories of the region. His fourth book, McMafia, examined how the underworld took advantage of globalisation in the 1990s, establishing partnerships and franchises in the manner of their corporate counterparts. In DarkMarket, Glenny traces a virtual landscape that maps onto familiar political geography, explaining, for instance, how the ...”

Destroy the Miracle!

Lorna Scott Fox: Manuel Rivas, 19 May 2011

Books Burn Badly
by Manuel Rivas, translated by Jonathan Dunne.
Vintage, 592 pp., £8.99, February 2011, 978 0 09 952033 7Show More

“... the docks by leaping over the flames (as one jumps over the bonfire to fend off evil spirits on St John’s night), and he and his best friend, Luís Terranova, an extrovert tango singer and his temperamental opposite, go into hiding for the rest of the war. Some time later Luís is taken as a sexual pet by the local censor, Commander Dez, who, like many of ...”

Diary

Jeremy Harding: Hitchens, 31 March 2011

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”

On Thatcher

“... what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of error only magnified her disgust. As John Ranelagh, who once worked for her at the Conservative Research Department, says, she was no intellectual. His book purports to be about the people who did her intellectual work for her, and what they undoubtedly had in common was the conviction that the ...”

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5Show More

“... Davenport ended up teaching at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for two years and then took a job at the University of Kentucky, ‘the remotest offer with the most pay’. He taught there for 27 years; in 1973 Kenner moved on to Johns Hopkins for 17 years, and finally, in 1990, to the University of Georgia for a decade. By 1977, the exchange of ...”

Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon

Frank Kermode, 23 May 2002

The Invasion Handbook
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 201 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 20915 7Show More

“... the Duke of Windsor will resume his throne and Henry Williamson replace the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. If these instructions and predictions derive from a genuine document, then that document is Audenesque. But Auden’s voice can be heard in less fantastic moments: the lights of a car sweeping across a bedroom, as in that fine early poem later ...”

Room for the Lambs

Elizabeth Spelman: Sexual equality, 26 January 2006

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws
by Catharine MacKinnon.
Harvard, 558 pp., £25.95, March 2005, 0 674 01540 1Show More

“... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John Stuart Mill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from such equiphobia as well – or rather, that ...”

Prince Arthur

Paul Addison, 21 August 1980

Balfour
by Max Egremont.
Collins, 391 pp., £12.95, June 1980, 0 00 216043 9Show More

“... of most country house society. The emotional ties proved enduring but also unequal. Balfour always took more than he gave, inspiring love but granting only friendship in return. The pattern was set early on, and for the rest of their lives brother and sister danced to his tune. George was eventually promoted to the Cabinet, but when the time came to sack him ...”

Labour in Wales

Richard King, 7 May 2026

“... inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh ...”

Post-Bourgeois Man

Peter Jenkins, 1 October 1981

Arguments for Democracy
by Tony Benn, edited by Chris Mullin.
Cape, 257 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 224 01878 7Show More

Manifesto
by Francis Cripps, John Griffith, Frances Morrell, Jimmy Reid and Peter Townsend.
Pan, 224 pp., £1.95, September 1981, 0 330 26402 8Show More

“... a rival élite, a new interest, a putative power structure. It was these people, by and large, who took over the moribund Labour Parties in the constituencies and who are now advancing their power within the corrupt and rotten Trade Union movement. And most of what Benn has said in the years of his power bid has been directed, not at the general public who ...”

Helluva Book

Mark Lawson, 3 September 1987

Love is colder than death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
by Robert Katz and Peter Berling.
Cape, 256 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 224 02174 5Show More

“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”

Michael Howard writes about the Korean War, and about leaders that could not be abandoned

Michael Howard, 26 November 1987

The Korean War
by Max Hastings.
Joseph, 476 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 9780718120689Show More

The Origins of the Korean War
by Peter Lowe.
Longman, 256 pp., £6.95, July 1986, 0 582 49278 5Show More

Korea: The War before Vietnam
by Callum MacDonald.
Macmillan, 330 pp., £25, November 1986, 0 333 33011 0Show More

“... troops, Synghman Rhee’s openly-proclaimed ambitions and the coincidental presence of the hawkish John Foster Dulles in Seoul have been cited in evidence, but none of the works under review provides any substantiation for this interpretation. The scale and weight of the North Korean attack speaks for itself. And as Max Hastings properly reminds us, the United ...”

Recognising Mozart

Peter Gay, 7 July 1988

Mozart the Dramatist: The Value of his Operas to Him, to his Age and to Us
by Brigid Brophy.
Libris, 322 pp., £17.50, June 1988, 1 870352 35 1Show More

1791: Mozart’s Last Year
by H.C. Robbins Landon.
Thames and Hudson, 240 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 500 01411 6Show More

Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores
by Alan Tyson.
Harvard, 381 pp., £27.95, January 1988, 0 674 58830 4Show More

“... unmitigated heroism, perhaps most memorably embodied in that antique Glyndebourne recording with John Brownlee as the Don, remains a moving and impressive protest against the authority of the old over the young. Surely a Catholic opera would have shown Don Giovanni less courageous, more cringing and repentant. I offer such reservations, not as a severe ...”

Rachel and Heather

Stephen Wall, 1 October 1987

A Friend from England
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 205 pp., £9.95, August 1987, 0 224 02443 4Show More

The New Confessions
by William Boyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 462 pp., £11.95, September 1987, 0 241 12383 6Show More

The Colour of Blood
by Brian Moore.
Cape, 182 pp., £10.95, September 1987, 0 224 02513 9Show More

“... of a Notting Hill bookshop and a reader of Stendhal; her first novel A Start in Life (1981) took its title from Balzac and had a heroine whose life was ‘ruined by literature’. Nor is Rachel unusual in feeling a strong attraction towards people for whom comfort is more important than culture. In her case, the soothing solidity of the bourgeois is ...”

Glooms

E.S. Turner, 23 February 1995

Edward Lear: A Biography
by Peter Levi.
Macmillan, 362 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 333 58804 5Show More

“... stiff competition. Levi in his bibliography does not bother to mention studies by Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, Joanna Richardson and Susan Chitty, among others. He does, however, pay his warm respects to Vivien Noakes’s definitive Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, reissued 1985). Noakes has reviewed Levi’s book – ‘a joyous ...”

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