London Review of Books

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Drugs, anyone?

Seamus Perry: George Meredith, 18 June 2015

Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads
by George Meredith, edited by Criscillia Benford and Rebecca Mitchell.
Yale, 390 pp., £40, April 2015, 978 0 300 17317 8Show More

“... too.’ Even his admirers could find it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but ...”

‘We ain’t found shit’

Scott Ritter, 2 July 2015

“... the site again. Iran has refused on the grounds that the basis for such an inspection is flawed. Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspector, agreed: ‘The allegations that Iran carried out hydrodynamic experiments related to nuclear explosives in a large steel containment vessel [at Parchin] have questionable technical credibility.’ Parchin is a sensitive ...”

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 ...”

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