London Review of Books

Cyber-Jihad

Charles Glass: What Osama Said, 9 March 2006

The Secret History of al-Qaida
by Abdel Bari Atwan.
Saqi, 256 pp., £16.99, February 2006, 0 86356 760 6Show More

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
by Michael Scheuer.
Potomac, 307 pp., £11.95, July 2005, 1 57488 862 5Show More

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden
edited by Bruce Lawrence, translated by James Howarth.
Verso, 292 pp., £10.99, November 2005, 1 84467 045 7Show More

Osama: The Making of a Terrorist
by Jonathan Randal.
Tauris, 346 pp., £9.99, October 2005, 1 84511 117 6Show More

“... media professionals for interviews, too. From the newspaper sector, only the British journalist Robert Fisk and I were chosen. ABC News, Channel Four and CNN, whose producer Peter Bergen spotted bin Laden’s importance early on, also accepted. Over the years, so did several Arab and Pakistani networks. The BBC and CBS declined, Atwan writes, out of lack ...”

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

“... that Rochester had no objection to collaboration because he contributed a scene to a play by Sir Robert Howard, a scene which, if the play had ever been finished or played, would almost certainly not have been acknowledged, and he put more effort into a collaboration with the long-dead poet John Fletcher than into anything else he ever did. In ‘Lucina’s ...”

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

“... one day, he said, Mitterrand might get the job. Shortly before Mitterrand’s death, Robert Pesquet, a former member of the OAS – a far right terrorist organisation in Algeria – revealed that the incident was indeed staged and that he had been the fake assassin. The affair cast an unflattering light on Mitterrand’s character: he was ...”

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 ...”

How many speed bumps?

Gavin Francis: Pain, 21 August 2014

The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers
by Joanna Bourke.
Oxford, 396 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 19 968942 2Show More

“... inhaling nitrous oxide – laughing gas. ‘Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide!’ Robert Southey wrote to his brother, ‘I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight.’ Davy considered whether the gas might be useful in surgery, but the power and tenacity of a humoral vision of the body made him think it would be ...”

The World’s Most Important Spectator

David Bromwich: Obama’s World, 3 July 2014

“... Clinton’s. Nuland is married to the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, Robert Kagan, one of the leading promoters of the Iraq war. We may never know what Obama thought Nuland was up to when she flew in to the Maidan to pass out cookies to the protesters in Russia’s backyard. But the message has got around by now that Obama ...”

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

“... by Maclise, for example, who would soon paint Othello and Desdemona, and especially by Charles Robert Leslie (who had supplied the frontispiece for a cheap edition of The Pickwick Papers in 1847). Leslie had on several occasions taken subjects from Cervantes (one example had found its way into the National Gallery). But the subjects of the paintings (like ...”

All Those Arrows

Donald MacKenzie: A Major Cause of the Financial Crisis, 25 June 2009

Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe
by Gillian Tett.
Little, Brown, 338 pp., £18.99, April 2009, 978 1 4087 0164 5Show More

“... Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives ...”

A Kind of Greek

Jeremy Harding: Frank Thompson, 7 March 2013

A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson
by Peter Conradi.
Bloomsbury, 419 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 1 4088 0243 4Show More

“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

Half Snake, Half Panther

James Davidson: Nijinsky, 26 September 2013

Nijinsky
by Lucy Moore.
Profile, 324 pp., £25, May 2013, 978 1 84668 618 4Show More

“... getting dressed next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate ...”

Rah, Rah, Cheers, Queers

Terry Castle: On Getting Married, 29 August 2013

“... the Love Child of Camilla Parker-Bowles and Wayne Rooney. She who every morning plays a gallant Robert Browning to my late-rising, half-paralytic Elizabeth Barrett – get thee up from thy bed, thou fat lazy kitten-slug, and take that nun’s twat off thy head. Here, I’ve bought thee a clip-on pedometer and thou wilt walk ten thousand steps up and down ...”

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5Show More

“... biography may have something to do with that: the sense – Virginia Woolf’s sense, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and Dostoevsky’s – that nobody is simply one thing. Some people write biographies, you suspect, as a way of not writing about themselves. Lennon’s book is good in that way, in the fresh, clarifying, non-Boswellian way of letting ...”

The way out of a room is not through the door

Christian Lorentzen: Charles Manson, 7 November 2013

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon and Schuster, 495 pp., £20, August 2013, 978 0 85720 893 4Show More

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

The Stuntman

David Runciman: Richard Branson, 20 March 2014

Branson: Behind the Mask
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 368 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 571 29710 8Show More

“... of utter ruin. Branson’s line on Bower is that he got lucky a while back exposing the monstrous Robert Maxwell and is now trying the same trick on other prominent figures in the hope that lightning will strike twice. But Bower doesn’t portray Branson as another Maxwell. He never suggests he is a crook and he is almost admiring of the skill with which he ...”

‘A Naughty House’

Charles Nicholl: Shakespeare’s Landlord, 24 June 2010

“... since he is a ‘vintner’, runs a tavern there). So does one of Frances Williams’s sureties, Robert Bowker (who is described in one entry as a carpenter and in another as a glover), while her other, a scrivener called West, lives a block away on Golding Lane. The gardener Richard Meade, co-surety for the three Frenchmen, is not far away either, being of ...”

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