London Review of Books

Kill the tuna can

Christopher Tayler: George Saunders, 8 June 2006

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2006, 0 7475 8221 1Show More

“... George Saunders – whose semi-official website carries a reminder that the man who played Addison DeWitt in All about Eve was called George SANDERS – was born in Chicago in 1958. A schoolteacher got him interested in literature, but having been exposed at an impressionable age to the novels of Ayn Rand he ended up studying geophysical engineering: ‘I didn’t want to be one of those life-sucking parasitic artists,’ he recalled last year ...”

The Dark Horse Intimacy

Daniel Soar: Helen Simpson, 16 November 2000

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life
by Helen Simpson.
Cape, 179 pp., £14.99, October 2000, 0 224 06082 1Show More

“... round the grape hyacinths as though they were on fire and squeezed his way along behind the lilac bush, past cobwebs and worms, until he burst out fiercely into the space behind the hedge. She was being forced to walk the plank. He leaped into the ocean and cantered sternly across the waves. This is a prelapsarian garden full of mantraps, with the smallest ...”

Sucking up to P

Greg Grandin: Henry Kissinger’s Vanity, 29 November 2007

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, August 2007, 978 0 7139 9796 5Show More

Henry Kissinger and the American Century
by Jeremi Suri.
Harvard, 368 pp., £18.95, July 2007, 978 0 674 02579 0Show More

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the right-wing vote – could balloon ...”

It’s only a paper moon

Patrick Parrinder, 13 June 1991

Wise Children
by Angela Carter.
Chatto, 234 pp., £13.99, June 1991, 0 7011 3354 6Show More

“... nor so devoted to Shakespeare as a legitimate prince, to judge by the current heir to the throne.) We have heard all too many earnest pronouncements, including a correspondence in the London Review, in recent months, as if these alone could determine the future place of Shakespeare in the educational and cultural life of the nation. What a relief then, to come ...”

A Sequence from ‘Camera Obscura’

Robin Robertson, 22 August 1996

“... own. *Dead Centre, 1858Exactly halfway through his life, panning easton Princes Street, George Washington Wilson stoppedthe moving world into focus. After long exposure,ghosts returned to their bodies. Calton Hill roseat the top of the frame, the grave-slots of the cemeterya perfect memento. The first snapshot. Steady traffic. *Atget Comes ...”

You bet your life

Margaret Walters, 21 April 1988

Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 512 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 571 14812 3Show More

The Fifth Child
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 131 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02553 8Show More

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 299 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 670 82117 9Show More

“... by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one. It begins in Devon, with a ...”

Radical Aliens

David Cole: The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, 22 October 2009

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial
by Moshik Temkin.
Yale, 316 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 300 12484 2Show More

“... reviewed the deportation orders resulting from the raids and reversed most of them; and Judge George Anderson, who declared the raids illegal in 1920, writing in his decision that ‘a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.’ In ...”

Why Bull was killed

Victor Mallet, 15 August 1991

Arms and the Man: Dr Gerlad Bull, Iraq and the Supergun
by William Lowther.
Macmillan, 298 pp., £15.99, July 1991, 0 333 56069 8Show More

“... Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 The ninth child of George L. Toussaint Bull (‘a bibulous solicitor’), Gerald was three years old when his mother died. At school he built model aeroplanes and felt lonely. He was to become a temperamental mathematical and scientific genius and a sentimental lover of poetry, a ...”

Taxphobia

Edward Luttwak, 19 November 1992

The Culture of Contentment
by J.K. Galbraith.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 195 pp., £14.95, April 1992, 1 85619 147 8Show More

“... reflect very justifiable future fears), the American electorate rejected the zero-change candidate Bush only to vote for the minimum-change candidate Clinton. True, the radical-change candidate Perot was simply too bizarre to be widely acceptable. But during the earlier Democratic primaries the American public did have serious alternatives, who variously ...”

Cuba or the Base?

Piero Gleijeses: Guantánamo, 26 March 2009

Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution
by Jana Lipman.
California, 325 pp., £17.95, December 2008, 978 0 520 25540 1Show More

“... the intervention: it was ‘the most honourable single war in all history’, in the words of George Hoar, Republican senator from Massachusetts, ‘a war in which there does not enter the slightest thought or desire of foreign conquest, or of national gain, or advantage’. European diplomats and journalists were less impressed. ‘These high-minded ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... Scotland has long been a nation. We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares but dare not admit to, fearing that his intervention might tip the balance in the opposite direction ...”

Wanting to Be Something Else

Adam Shatz: Orhan Pamuk, 7 January 2010

The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 720 pp., £18.99, December 2009, 978 0 571 23700 5Show More

“... in a mirror together and the Italian realises: ‘The two of us were one person!’ By the end, we’re not sure the sailor ever existed, or whether he is an invention of the Turkish savant, who claims in the final chapter to have written the story. The dialectic of East and West appears as a constantly shifting dreamscape inhabited, and endlessly ...”

Who removed Aristide?

Paul Farmer, 15 April 2004

“... there was plenty they could do to undermine him. The most effective method, adopted by the first Bush administration, was to fund both the opposition – their poor showing at the polls was no reason, it appears, to cut off aid to them – and the military. Declassified records now make it clear that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and fund a ...”

Overtaken by Events

Avi Shlaim, 30 November 1995

Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land
by Meron Benvenisti.
California, 260 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 520 08567 1Show More

“... disputes and escape the intercommunal conceptual conundrum.’ The peace process initiated by George Bush and James Baker in the aftermath of the Gulf War was different, in Benvenisti’s view, from previous American initiatives in that this time it was the Americans who badly needed progress. Shamir, however, failed to discern the fundamental ...”

Doctor Feelgood

R.W. Johnson, 3 March 1988

Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home
by Garry Wills.
Heinemann, 488 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 434 86623 7Show More

“... backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts. But we haven’t answered the question: would you believe it? Well no, actually – the real figure was 5.1 per cent. Unfazed, Ronnie’s backers simply redoubled their efforts and their campaign contributions. The expert handler put in to manage him discovered that ...”

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