London Review of Books

Loose Canons

Edward Mendelson, 23 June 1988

History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures 1987
by Frank Kermode.
Oxford, 160 pp., £15, June 1988, 0 19 812381 7Show More

Nya
by Stephen Haggard and Frank Kermode.
Oxford, 475 pp., £5.95, June 1988, 0 19 282135 0Show More

British Writers of the Thirties
by Valentine Cunningham.
Oxford, 530 pp., £30, February 1988, 0 19 212267 3Show More

“... their class. In the received version of the ‘Thirties myth’, the middle-class writers who took up left-wing views succeeded only in deceiving themselves and betraying their gifts. In Kermode’s counter-myth, these writers braved a dangerous passage across a social and psychological frontier in the hope of offering their work and their lives to a ...”

The Pleasures of Poverty

Barbara Everett, 6 September 1984

A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries
by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £12.95, July 1984, 0 333 34995 4Show More

“... The background to this part of her life is London, where she set up house with her sister and took up her first full-time professional employment, helping to edit an anthropological magazine: ill-health, however, forcing her to retire early, at 60, to a small house – again shared with her sister – in an Oxfordshire village, where she died six or seven ...”

Francis and Vanessa

Peter Campbell, 15 March 1984

Francis Bacon
by Michel Leiris, translated by John Weightman.
Phaidon, 271 pp., £50, September 1983, 0 7148 2218 3Show More

Vanessa Bell
by Frances Spalding.
Weidenfeld, 399 pp., £12.95, August 1983, 0 297 78162 6Show More

The Omega Workshops
by Judith Collins.
Secker, 310 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 436 10562 4Show More

The Omega Workshops 1913-1919: Decorative Arts of Bloomsbury
Crafts Council, 96 pp., £6.95, March 1984, 0 903798 72 7Show More

The Omega Workshops: Alliance and Enmity in English Art 1911-1920
Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 80 pp., £4.95, February 1984, 0 947564 00 4Show More

“... They breed speculation. Moreover they carry a freight of pictorial references. Early images took more or less famous images – Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X, Van Gogh on his way to work, Muybridge’s sequences of people and animals in motion – and made them carriers of charges of irrational energy. The Pope’s scream suggests demonic ...”

Orificial Events

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The Promise’, 4 November 2021

The Promise
by Damon Galgut.
Chatto, 293 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 78474 406 9Show More

“... power nevertheless excites Anton, to the point that ‘his most memorable thunderclap of an orgasm took place in a chair where the buttocks of the minister of justice had only recently rested.’Galgut claims the writerly privilege of entering his characters’ minds, though he tends not to stick around for long. The family members gathered for Rachel’s ...”

Billionaires in the Dock

Rachel Nolan: Operation Car Wash, 23 June 2022

Operation Car Wash: Brazil’s Institutionalised Crime and the Inside Story of the Biggest Corruption Scandal in History
by Jorge Pontes and Márcio Anselmo, translated by Anthony Doyle.
Bloomsbury, 191 pp., £20, April, 978 1 350 26561 5Show More

“... learned that the company had a Department of Structured Operations, which the Brazilian press took to calling the Bribery Department. It had a ‘cash flow, director, organisational chart with lines of report, an in-house coded communication system, list of telephone extensions, and its very own database. A director would request a sum, another would sign ...”

Bobbery

James Wood: Pushkin’s Leave-Taking, 20 February 2003

Pushkin: A Biography
by T.J. Binyon.
HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002, 0 00 215084 0Show More

“... die an honourable warrior, on your shield, your war-cry on your lips!’ It was Uncle Vasily who took the little Pushkin, in 1811, to his admission interview at the new lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles south of Petersburg, where the boy would make several enduring friendships, and where he wrote 29 poems, five of them published in the newspaper the ...”

One word says to its mate

Claire Harman: W.S. Graham, 4 October 2001

The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham
edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow.
Carcanet, 401 pp., £12.95, November 1999, 1 85754 445 5Show More

“... Graham’s asceticism and what Donald Davie called ‘the hieratic solemnity’ with which he took his own poetic vocation could be both romantic and manipulative. The editors of these letters tell us that when Graham moved from Gurnard’s Head in 1962, he simply walked out of the house, leaving his belongings behind and the door open. This sounds ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... people decide – and then, if it doesn’t get the result it wants, overrule us from Holyrood. John Burnside New states are usually the product of catastrophe. Violence is the air they breathe. I can’t decide if it is Scotland’s good or bad fortune that its vote for statehood should take place against the background of an entirely normal birth of a ...”

An Example of the Good Life

Steven Shapin: Michael Polanyi, 15 December 2011

Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science
by Mary Jo Nye.
Chicago, 405 pp., £29, October 2011, 978 0 226 61063 4Show More

“... seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside. When one of the Martians, the mathematician John von Neumann, was appointed to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the age of 29, a story went around that he was ‘a demigod but had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly’. In Britain and America, the ...”

Escaped from the Lab

Robert Crawford: Peter Redgrove, 21 June 2012

A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove
by Neil Roberts.
Cape, 341 pp., £30, January 2012, 978 0 224 09029 2Show More

Collected Poems
by Peter Redgrove, edited by Neil Roberts.
Cape, 496 pp., £25, January 2012, 978 0 224 09027 8Show More

“... Wine-Witch’, annotating it with a manuscript that makes clear it was about Dilly. Redgrove took up a teaching post at the School of Art in Falmouth in 1966; he and Barbara were still together and he continued his affairs with Dilly and with booze. When Barbara went into labour in 1968, ‘Peter was too drunk to drive her to the hospital and she had to ...”

A View of a View

Marina Warner: Melchior Lorck, 27 May 2010

Melchior Lorck
edited by Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen.
Royal Library Vandkunsten, 808 pp., €300, August 2009, 978 87 91393 61 7Show More

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

Murder in Mayfair

Peter Pomerantsev, 31 March 2016

A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West
by Luke Harding.
Faber, 424 pp., £12.99, March 2016, 978 1 78335 093 3Show More

“... the consequences of being the financial capital of the world. A week after the final verdict I took part in a ‘kleptocracy tour’: a bus ride around some of London’s most glitzy addresses. We drove past the £60 million pad near the V&A belonging to Dmytro Firtash (he has also bought a former tube stop next door for £50 million). Firtash, we were ...”

Frocks and Shocks

Hilary Mantel: Jane Boleyn, 24 April 2008

Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford
by Julia Fox.
Phoenix, 398 pp., £9.99, March 2008, 978 0 7538 2386 6Show More

“... 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

Rinse it in dead champagne

Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004

War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry
by Lindy Woodhead.
Virago, 498 pp., £20, April 2003, 1 86049 974 0Show More

Diana Vreeland
by Eleanor Dwight.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £30, December 2002, 0 688 16738 1Show More

“... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...”

Mixed Feelings

James Wood: Italo Svevo’s Last Cigarette, 3 January 2002

Zeno's Conscience
by Italo Svevo, edited by William Weaver.
Everyman, 437 pp., £12.99, November 2001, 1 85715 249 2Show More

Memoir of Italo Svevo
by Livia Veneziani Svevo, translated by Isabel Quigly.
Northwestern, 178 pp., $15.95, June 2001, 0 8101 6084 6Show More

Emilio's Carnival
by Italo Svevo, translated by Beth Archer Brombert.
Yale, 233 pp., £22.50, October 2001, 0 300 09049 8Show More

“... damnable thing called literature has now been quite definitely cut out of my life.’ He took up the violin (never playing very well, though possibly better than Zeno), and said that it ‘saved him from literature’. Over these years, he assumed greater responsibility at the Veneziani firm, overseeing the building of a factory in South-East ...”

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