London Review of Books

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8Show More

“... biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over ...”

The Vile and the Louche

David Todd: France’s First Fascist, 25 June 2026

The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès
by Sergio Luzzatto.
Allen Lane, 488 pp., £30, February, 978 0 241 71581 9Show More

“... Revolution, France was admired – or feared – as a source of liberal and progressive ideas. John Stuart Mill hailed the revolution as evidence that ‘democracy’ could become ‘the creed of the nation’. As late as 1914, France was Europe’s most advanced liberal democracy. Unlike in Britain, all men in France could vote, and had been able to do so ...”

‘I would never release him’

Muhammad Shehada: Marwan Barghouti and Palestine’s future, 9 July 2026

“... Gaza, as the editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, put it. Hamas fighters policed other armed factions and took action against anyone who tried to attack Israel while a ceasefire held. Israel responded by assassinating Hamas’s military second-in-command, Ahmad al-Jabari, in 2012. According to the Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, al-Jabari was looking over a ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth

Owen Bennett-Jones: Trouble at the BBC, 20 December 2018

“... made a series of ten podcasts on the murder of Benazir Bhutto called The Assassination. It took more than a year to get it commissioned, during which time many promises were made and broken, and my emails were routinely left unanswered. By the time the series was finally commissioned, my producer and I had just ten weeks before the first episode was ...”

In the Waiting-Room of History

Amit Chaudhuri: ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’, 24 June 2004

Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Princeton, 320 pp., £42.95, October 2000, 0 691 04908 4Show More

“... tile’. Benjamin is not alone in using these metaphors; both Ruskin and Lawrence (who probably took it from Ruskin) use Rome as a metaphor for the imperial, the finished, the perfected, as against the multifariousness of, say, the Gothic, the ‘barbaric’, the non-Western. Benjamin doesn’t quite romanticise the primitive as Lawrence at least appears ...”

Betting big, winning small

David Runciman: Blair’s Gambles, 20 May 2004

“... sometimes looks ghastly; Eden was a seriously ill man who did his best to appear well. Blair also took a Caribbean holiday when the war was over (staying at Cliff Richard’s luxury holiday home on Barbados), but unlike Eden, he showed no sign of having lost either his appetite or his nerve on his return. Indeed, Blair and his colleagues – with their ...”

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