London Review of Books

Rainy Days

Gabriele Annan, 18 September 1997

The File on H
by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos.
Harvill, 169 pp., £8.99, June 1997, 9781860462573Show More

“... provenance and political correctness. Which also explains why Ismail Kadare is big in Italy and France (where he has lived in semi-self-imposed exile since 1990. The blurb says that he now divides his time between Paris and Tirana). Besides, it is unfair to judge his work in double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from ...”

Tied to the Mast

Adam Mars-Jones: Alan Hollinghurst, 19 October 2017

The Sparsholt Affair
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Picador, 454 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 1 4472 0821 1Show More

“... may say, of the obsession that one of his friends, Evert Dax, conceives for the splendidly built David Sparsholt, ‘I struggled slightly to understand it,’ but there’s no element of disapproval. Dax even asks why he’s so sympathetic, and he replies: ‘So much of that sort of thing went on at school it would seem very odd to me if it suddenly stopped ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... whether successful or not – will undoubtedly further nurture autonomy movements in Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere, and this will have implications not just for the economy and governance, but also for Nato. In the UK itself the referendum is also about much more than Scotland. On an extended visit to Edinburgh last month, I was struck by how many ...”

A General Logic of Crisis

Adam Tooze, 5 January 2017

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck.
Verso, 262 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78478 401 0Show More

“... we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from ...”

Love of His Life

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Dickens, 8 July 2010

Charles Dickens
by Michael Slater.
Yale, 696 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 300 11207 8Show More

“... how the birth of one of his children may have helped to shape the birth scenes in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, how his revulsion at Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents fuelled an article attacking the Pre-Raphaelites in general, or just why that Megalosaurus ‘would have been fresh in Dickens’s memory’ as he wrote the remarkable opening ...”

In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0Show More

Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0Show More

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3Show More

Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2Show More

“... its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was ...”

Three feet on the ground

Marilyn Butler, 7 July 1983

William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision
by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Oxford, 496 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 19 812097 4Show More

William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness
by David Pirie.
Methuen, 301 pp., £14.95, March 1982, 0 416 31300 0Show More

Benjamin the Waggoner
by William Wordsworth, edited by Paul Betz.
Cornell/Harvester, 356 pp., £40, September 1981, 0 85527 513 8Show More

“... and a commentator on Wordsworth’s oeuvre in its best years, 1797-1805. Another British critic, David Pirie, writes in The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness from a point of view which often resembles Jonathan Wordsworth’s. Pirie’s book is less obviously biographical in its orientation, yet in the end its goal is a portrait of Wordsworth’s mind and ...”

Go for it, losers

David Trotter: Werner Herzog’s Visions, 30 November 2023

Every Man for Himself and God against All
by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Bodley Head, 355 pp., £25, October, 978 1 84792 724 8Show More

“... the patriarch of the family, but not to her husband, Dietrich, who was serving in the army in France (and probably, since he ‘knew how to make himself scarce’, well to its rear). Both men were academics: Rudolf a classics professor turned archaeologist who made significant discoveries on the island of Kos; Dietrich, more ‘pirate’ than professor, a ...”

Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3Show More

“... and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical theory – the avant-garde of this period. To his surprise Roland Barthes accepts him into his seminar on ...”

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6Show More

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

War on Heisenberg

M.F. Perutz, 18 November 1993

Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb
by Thomas Powers.
Cape, 610 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 224 03641 6Show More

Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts
introduced by Charles Frank.
Institute of Physics, 515 pp., £14.95, May 1993, 0 7503 0274 7Show More

“... evidence to refute Goudsmit’s accusation, confirming the conclusion already reached in David Irving’s The German Atomic Bomb, that the German physicists wanted to build a reactor, but not a bomb. Their secretly recorded comments on Hiroshima have now provided further evidence of their reluctance; Heisenberg apparently regarded it as ...”

How did they get away with it?

Bernard Porter: Britain’s Atrocities in Kenya, 3 March 2005

Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
by David Anderson.
Weidenfeld, 406 pp., £20, January 2005, 0 297 84719 8Show More

Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins.
Cape, 475 pp., £20, January 2005, 9780224073639Show More

“... and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. We ...”

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

“... The quirkiest of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet ...”

Managing the Nation

Jonathan Parry, 18 March 2021

Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition
by Edmund Fawcett.
Princeton, 525 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 691 17410 5Show More

“... a historical phenomenon. He surveys political practice and political thought in Britain, the US, France and Germany since 1800, with authority and perspective. For him, conservatism is about defending core values against the encroach of liberal modernity. He shows that many conservatives have taken ideas more seriously than is generally supposed, and ...”

Russia Vanishes

Tony Wood, 6 December 2012

“... a reproductive regime with high levels of fertility and mortality to one with low levels of both. France led the way in fertility decline, with the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR, dropping to three children per woman by 1900; the ‘replacement rate’ notionally required for the population to remain stable is 2.1. Between 1880 and 1930, the TFR dropped below ...”

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