London Review of Books

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 Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3Show More

Machiavelli in the Making
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7Show More

Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6Show More

“... Treatise of Government is ‘slavery’, a fate to which Locke thought the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer condemned everyone except monarchs. Still, Machiavelli’s influence on the American revolutionaries is plain. His description in the Discourses, memorable in the way of oxymorons, of the way the tribunate made the Roman republic ‘more ...”

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3Show More

“... her onto The Tonight Show along with Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick; he had been going to ask Robert Kennedy but didn’t because she hadn’t liked his brother – she was a supporter of Eisenhower and Nixon but also of LBJ, calling herself ‘one of his most fervent admirers’, Vietnam and all. She was an old lady now, New York State’s Senior Citizen ...”

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8Show More

“... Burnt Diaries (1999), and by Elaine Feinstein in her biography of Hughes from 2001. Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of Shakespeare, both in his imagination and in the forms that she assumed in the women whom he met and slept with. Few, it seems, took much ...”

In the Body Bag

Adam Mars-Jones: Ian McEwan’s ‘Nutshell’, 6 October 2016

Nutshell
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 198 pp., £16.99, September 2016, 978 1 911214 33 5Show More

“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”

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 ...”

On the Sixth Day

Charles Nicholl: Petrarch on the Move, 7 February 2019

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer
by Christopher Celenza.
Reaktion, 224 pp., £15.95, October 2017, 978 1 78023 838 8Show More

“... Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594) and Robert Tofte’s Laura (1597). Tofte is included for his title, but also as a representative of the many inferior warblers troubling the presses at this time. The glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of anti-Petrarchan satire and parody. Among the ...”

The natives did a bunk

Malcolm Gaskill: The Little Ice Age, 19 July 2018

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America
by Sam White.
Harvard, 361 pp., £23.95, October 2017, 978 0 674 97192 9Show More

“... Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of ...”

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3Show More

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7Show More

“... path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...”

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 ...”

Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8Show More

“... party had failed him; his grandmother died; the Cross-Bronx Expressway, built by the city planner Robert Moses, ripped through East Tremont, displacing five thousand people. In 1950, Bookchin joined a literary collective led by Josef Weber, a Holocaust survivor, who had brought together a group of former Communists to publish Contemporary Issues, a journal ...”

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7Show More

“... LSD to twenty inmates of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary nearly every day for 15 months. Robert Hyde at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital paid hundreds of students from Emerson, Harvard and MIT $15 each to drink a vial of liquid that might induce an ‘altered state’; in the aftermath, one of the subjects hanged herself in a clinic bathroom. As well ...”

What is rude?

Thomas Nagel: Midgley, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, 10 February 2022

The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics
by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb.
Oxford, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 19 754107 4Show More

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
Chatto, 398 pp., £25, February, 978 1 78474 328 4Show More

“... was the justice of political and social institutions, but others, including Judith Jarvis Thomson, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Walzer and T.M. Scanlon took up a range of topics, including the structure and content of individual rights, the problem of means and ends, and the moral content of law, as well as more specific issues like abortion and just ...”

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

“... some amenable sponsors if she is to sustain her bid for freedom. Fortunately, the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), a lugubrious sausage magnate, is on hand to clear the improvident couple of debt; and the journey from New York to Palm Beach yields a multi-purpose Florida meal ticket in the shape of the unimaginably rich John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy ...”

Beloved Country

R.W. Johnson, 8 July 1993

“... This is a country where convicted murderers, even multiple murderers like Barend Strydom and Robert McBride, are released within a year or two to walk the streets and give TV interviews justifying their savagery. Strydom, who gunned down 11 hapless black passers-by because he didn’t like blacks, advises us that he dislikes English-speakers just as much ...”

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