London Review of Books

Political Anatomy

Christopher Lawrence, 3 April 1986

The Black and white Medicine Show: How doctors serve and fail their customers
by Donald Gould.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £10.95, June 1985, 9780241115404Show More

“... poor patients call them ‘sir’. They gave extravagant dinners and patronised the arts: the young Henry Wood owed a good deal to the physician George Cathcart. If they were exceptionally well-connected like ‘Tommy’, Lord Horder, they bought their Rolls-Royces from former prime ministers. Where, historians are now asking, is the historical cunning ...”

Fortunes of War

Graham Hough, 6 November 1980

The Sum of Things
by Olivia Manning.
Weidenfeld, 203 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 297 77816 1Show More

The Viceroy of Ouidah
by Bruce Chatwin.
Cape, 155 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 224 01820 5Show More

The Sooting Party
by Isabel Colegate.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 241 10473 4Show More

An Ancient Castle
by Robert Graves.
Owen, 69 pp., £3.95, October 1980, 0 7206 0567 9Show More

“... never is; and it was decisively exploded in The Battle Lost and Won, where the focus shifts to the young soldier Simon Boulderstone and the superb evocation of his experience of the Alamein offensive – a rare achievement of informed imagination. It is then we realise that the real subject is the war. Not its causes, or its purpose, not primarily its horrors ...”

Poe’s Woes

Julian Symons, 23 April 1992

Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance
by Kenneth Silverman.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £25, March 1992, 9780297812531Show More

“... the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased nature’. In the years of journalistic hackwork that followed he fell out with almost every editor and proprietor who employed him, and ...”

Through the Grinder

Graham Coster, 8 February 1996

The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 523 pp., £17.50, November 1995, 0 241 13504 4Show More

“... Allie Fox is displaced from upstate New York to the Honduran jungle in The Mosquito Coast, or the young Jilly Farina goes on the road in an Airstream caravan in Millroy the Magician, that Theroux writes about travel as an existential test, lands people further away than they want to go, imagines the restless momentum that drives an obsession away from any ...”

On Thatcher

“... no end to her presumption: to the already notorious quotes one can add another culled by Hugo Young, who finds her measuring ‘my performance against that of other countries in the real world’.R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989If you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the ...”

Join the club

Richard Hornsey: A new queer history of London, 7 September 2006

Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-57
by Matt Houlbrook.
Chicago, 384 pp., £20.50, September 2005, 0 226 35460 1Show More

“... www.visitBritain.co.uk, ‘Gay London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian McKellen’. Houlbrook expresses this confidence when he asserts that, contrary to historical and popular orthodoxy, the postwar witch hunt of homosexual men never really happened. For decades, scholars have ...”

The Stamp of One Defect

David Edgar: Jeremy Thorpe, 30 July 2015

Jeremy Thorpe
by Michael Bloch.
Little, Brown, 606 pp., £25, December 2014, 978 0 316 85685 0Show More

Closet Queens: Some 20th-Century British Politicians
by Michael Bloch.
Little, Brown, 320 pp., £25, May 2015, 978 1 4087 0412 7Show More

“... presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining performances on radio (particularly in Any Questions?) and television. By the time of his election to the Liberal Party leadership in 1967, succeeding Jo Grimond, Thorpe had established a platform that ...”

Down the Telescope

Nicholas Penny: The Art of Imitation, 24 January 2019

Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War
by Elizabeth Prettejohn.
Yale, 286 pp., £45, June 2017, 978 0 300 22275 3Show More

“... observes of Holman Hunt’s early painting Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother (1849) that the dead boy stretched across the foreground resembles Christ in Francesco Francia’s Pietà, whose limbs ‘looked too thin and too long to those trained in normative anatomy’, she does so in the knowledge that the acquisition of ...”

Saint Agnes’s Lament

Christian Lorentzen: ‘Shuggie Bain’, 3 December 2020

Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart.
Picador, 448 pp., £14.99, August, 978 1 5290 1927 8Show More

“... is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the ...”

What Is Great about Ourselves

Pankaj Mishra: Closing Time, 21 September 2017

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce.
Little, Brown, 240 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 4087 1041 8Show More

The Fate of the West: Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea
by Bill Emmott.
Economist, 257 pp., £22, May 2017, 978 1 61039 780 3Show More

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart.
Hurst, 256 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 799 9Show More

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 143 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1Show More

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
by Douglas Murray.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 4729 4224 1Show More

“... present at the destruction' of the ‘West’, the ‘world’s most successful political idea’. Edward Luce, for example, a Financial Times columnist based in Washington DC, isn’t sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our liberal democratic systems, can survive’. Donald Trump has also chimed in, asking ‘whether the West has the will to ...”

Mushrooms

Michael Dobson: How to Be a Favourite, 5 October 2006

Literature and Favouritism in Early Modern England
by Curtis Perry.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £50, February 2006, 0 521 85405 9Show More

“... possibilities providing the principal subject of plays as diverse as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603-5), Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). According to Perry, this is in large part because the favourite made conveniently visible a central problem with ...”

Hard Romance

Barbara Everett, 8 February 1996

“... them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its effects embrace even the bewildered Humberstall – they save his life. The battery is wiped out by enemy action. Humberstall staggers shell-shocked away, muttering about ...”

Hoydens

Susannah Clapp, 18 February 1988

A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924
by Julia Briggs.
Hutchinson, 473 pp., £16.95, November 1987, 9780091682101Show More

Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children’s Fiction
by Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin.
Verso, 268 pp., £22.95, November 1987, 9780860911876Show More

“... The young Noel Coward thought E. Nesbit was ‘the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen’. Berta Ruck called her ‘the Duchess’. Nesbit set herself up as the complete Edwardian: a free-thinker, a matriarch and a madcap. She bobbed her hair, carried her tobacco in a corset box, and acquiesced in her Fabian husband’s disdain for the suffragettes: ‘Votes for women ...”

The Mole on Joyce’s Breast

Sean O’Faolain, 20 November 1980

Joyce’s Politics
by Dominic Manganiello.
Routledge, 260 pp., £12.50, October 1980, 0 7100 0537 7Show More

“... to say, a three-quarter inch replica in painted gold, which I at once passed on to the next pretty young woman I met to hang on her charm bracelet. The relevant correlative? A little ethnic gesture to catch another little ethnic vote. In a word, politics. What I now sardonically call my memory flew next to a neighbouring State where another gentleman of Irish ...”

Baleful Smile of the Crocodile

Neal Ascherson: D.S. Mirsky, 8 March 2001

D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life 1890-1939
by G.S. Smith.
Oxford, 398 pp., £65, June 2000, 0 19 816006 2Show More

“... St Petersburg, he was the ringleader of a group of literary boys with close contacts to the best young Russian writers – including M.A. Kuzmin, a predatory but thrillingly rebellious gay who roped the young Mirsky and his friends into a homoerotic salon. Politically, Dmitry had no time for the doomed efforts to turn ...”

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