London Review of Books

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7Show More

Going to Church in Medieval England
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5Show More

“... winnowing of monastic life with the same rationale as Wolsey’s. It concentrated its destructive power on the Anglo-Norman element, since many of the surviving houses from the 11th and 12th centuries were now unfeasibly small by Tudor standards. This meant that the dissolutions up to and including the 1536 act spared at one chronological extreme the ...”

Where could I emote?

Bee Wilson: Looking for Al Pacino, 26 June 2025

Sonny Boy: A Memoir
by Al Pacino.
Century, 369 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 5299 1262 3Show More

“... furious dignity in the face of prejudice. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ takes on an added power when the eyes are Pacino’s giant brown hooded eyes, so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a ...”

Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9Show More

“... To be sure, major killers disappeared periodically but not through the agency of doctors or the power of science. Thus in medicine – unlike physics, chemistry or engineering – an immense accumulation of learning from the scientific revolution to our own century had almost no positive effect. One irony, among many, is that medicine became ...”

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0Show More

The Uncollected Essays
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3Show More

“... troubling when Hardwick is writing about real people. For Plath, ‘suicide is an assertion of power, of the strength – not the weakness – of the personality. She is no poor animal sneaking away, giving up; instead she is strong, threatening, dangerous.’ Nor is Hardwick afraid to pit Plath’s suicide against that of another female writer: ‘When ...”

The South

Colm Tóibín, 4 August 1994

One Art: The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Bishop
Chatto, 668 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 7011 6195 7Show More

“... to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of Bishop’s letters to Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares were destroyed, as were her letters to Marjorie Carr Stevens, with whom she lived in Key West in ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... it might seem attractive to set up a new country where they’re unlikely ever (ever?) to be in power. Who would be then? If a Scottish Labour government were as little socialist and as slavishly Thatcherite as New Labour led by the unspeakable Blair or the harmless Miliband, little would be gained. (Down here in Cumbria, I’ve recently been voting Lib ...”

What makes a waif?

Joanne O’Leary, 13 September 2018

The Long-Winded Lady: Tales from the ‘New Yorker’
by Maeve Brennan.
Stinging Fly, 215 pp., £10.99, January 2017, 978 1 906539 59 7Show More

Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the ‘New Yorker’
by Angela Bourke.
Counterpoint, 360 pp., $16.95, February 2016, 978 1 61902 715 2Show More

The Springs of Affection: Stories
by Maeve Brennan.
Stinging Fly, 368 pp., £8.99, May 2016, 978 1 906539 54 2Show More

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

The Coburg Connection

Richard Shannon, 5 April 1984

Albert, Prince Consort
by Robert Rhodes James.
Hamish Hamilton, 311 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 241 11000 9Show More

“... Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s consort, the dim Prince George of Denmark, confined himself largely to trying (and failing) to provide a successor to the Stuart crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince Albert’s consortship from his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840 to his ...”

Sister-Sister

Terry Castle, 3 August 1995

Jane Austen’s Letters
edited by Deirde Le Faye.
Oxford, 621 pp., £30, March 1995, 0 19 811764 7Show More

“... early 19th-century Britain (the recently rediscovered diaries of Austen’s lesbian contemporary, Anne Lister, are an example) – one is struck not so much by the letters’ hastiness or triviality as by the passionate nature of the sibling bond they commemorate. Sororal or pseudo-sororal attachments are arguably the most immediately gratifying human ...”

Devoted to Terror

Thomas Laqueur: How the Camps Were Run, 24 September 2015

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
by Nikolaus Wachsmann.
Little Brown, 865 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 0 316 72967 3Show More

“... for Wachsmann’s magisterial history of the concentration camps. Soon after Hitler came to power in January 1933, tens of thousands of people, mainly communists and socialists, were taken into ‘protective custody’ as enemies of the state by a variety of party and state organisations. By the end of the year 200,000 had been held. This was made ...”

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4Show More

“... a negative check. The positive claims of Ginzburg’s micro-history, however, rest on the power of the anomaly. For what micro-history could reveal, as illustrated dramatically in The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, was the existence of worlds undreamed of in standard versions of the past, challenging their easy acceptance. Still, the ...”

There isn’t any inside!

Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6Show More

JR
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0Show More

“... of exposition. The lawyer Coen needs legal and financial documentation from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called ...”

‘The Meeting of the Waters’

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

“... rivers or the great collisions of rivers and oceans, that have clung to my memory with tenacious power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash ...”

I am only interested in women who struggle

Jeremy Harding: On Sarah Maldoror, 23 May 2024

“... in Z (1969), his thriller about the turmoil in Greece, where a military junta had recently seized power. The FLN agreed a co-production deal. It had also put up money for Klein’s documentary and for Monangambeee, which was approved for release a few months after the festival. ‘Having screened the film,’ the official report went, ‘the Department of ...”

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5Show More

The Buildings of England: Surrey
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7Show More

“... inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of him. He couldn’t see it for its ubiquity. Here was the distinctive architecture of its time, derived from countless precedents, with ...”

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