Diary

James Hamilton-Paterson: What’s happened to the sea, 23 September 2004

... the cod fishery on the Grand Banks has been devastating to these townships. Some cling on in the hope that cod will make a comeback as a result of the fishing moratorium which has been in force since 1990. But they still haven’t, unlike the North Sea cod, which returned in 1919 after four years’ disruption to fishing caused by submarine warfare. Nature ...

I had to refrain

Andrew Saint: Pre-Raphaelite Houses, 1 December 2005

Philip Webb: Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture 
by Sheila Kirk.
Wiley-Academy, 336 pp., £29.99, February 2005, 0 470 86808 2
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... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...

Garret’s Crusade

Roy Foster, 21 January 1982

... was categorically told ‘by an authority on Irish politics’ that as a foreigner he ‘could not hope to understand the dynamic of Irish nationalism ... there was no sociological, sectarian or class problem or angle in it from beginning to end.’ However, Lenin and Connolly chose to believe that Ireland had to be independent before the workers could rightly ...

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell 
by Roger Hutchinson.
Mainstream, 238 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 1 85158 702 0
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James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ 
edited by Marshall Waingrow.
Edinburgh, 518 pp., £75, March 1995, 0 7486 0471 5
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Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia 
by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 245 pp., £30, April 1995, 0 19 818259 7
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... hundred years ago in 1795, leaving behind a massive cache of highly personal manuscripts in the hope that their publication would pay his debts, finance his children and perpetuate his name. Instead, the frankness of some of their content caused them to be hidden away for more than a century, Boswell’s Victorian descendants even allowing it to be thought ...

Stone’s Socrates

Alan Ryan, 27 October 1988

The Trial of Socrates 
by I.F. Stone.
Cape, 282 pp., £12.95, September 1988, 0 224 02591 0
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... Jefferson, and espoused a leftish liberalism intended to recall America to her mission as the best hope of the common man rather than the conservative super-power she has too often become. At the same time, he has preached the need to marry Marx and Jefferson to anyone who would listen in Eastern Europe, in an effort to drag Communist regimes back into the ...

Monasteries into Motorways

Isabel Hilton: The Destruction of Lhasa, 7 September 2006

Lhasa: Streets with Memories 
by Robert Barnett.
Columbia, 219 pp., £16, March 2006, 0 231 13680 3
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... Jesuit Desideri, who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War ...

Bite It above the Eyes

Susan Eilenberg: ‘Mister Pip’, 4 October 2007

Mister Pip 
by Lloyd Jones.
Murray, 223 pp., £12.99, June 2007, 978 0 7195 6456 7
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... Wife of the Above’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations A book about the delights and healing effects of reading, recalling the novels about precocious readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and ...

Un Dret Egal

David A. Bell: Political Sentiment, 15 November 2007

Inventing Human Rights: A History 
by Lynn Hunt.
Norton, 272 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 0 393 06095 9
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... threshold of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of ‘sympathy’. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that ‘an almost complete ...

Scattering Gaggle

Jessie Childs: Armada on the Rocks, 4 May 2023

Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588 
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.
Yale, 718 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 0 300 25986 5
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... more than 150 illustrations.‘I do warrant you,’ the lord admiral of the English fleet, Charles Howard of Effingham, reported from his flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The ...

It’s for dorks

Christian Lorentzen: Michael Clune’s ‘Pan’, 6 November 2025

Pan 
by Michael Clune.
Fern, 320 pp., £16.99, July, 978 1 911717 61 4
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... times per day, five days per week.’ He’s moved on from Wilde to the works of his great-uncle Charles Maturin (specifically the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer), developed a taste for classical music and Italian Renaissance art, and begun to think of the management of his panic attacks in religious terms: grace (the mouse in the tunnel) and works (the ...

Grasshoppermindedness

Tess Little: On Malachi Whitaker, 9 July 2026

And So Did I 
by Malachi Whitaker.
Boiler House, 181 pp., £14.99, September 2025, 978 1 915812 74 2
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... detachment that almost eliminates the first person. She seems to achieve the split we all dread or hope for; she seems to stand in the dark looking in through a lighted window at her own figure by the lamp.’ Hugh Walpole compared the experience of reading the memoir to discovering the first volume of Proust or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. ‘I shall push and ...

Slavdom

Greg Afinogenov: What Russians Want, 4 June 2026

Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime 
by Marlène Laruelle.
Stanford, 402 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 1 5036 4159 4
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Russia’s World Order: How Civilisationism Explains the Conflict with the West 
by Paul Robinson.
Cornell, 160 pp., £22.99, April 2025, 978 1 5017 8001 1
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Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance 
by Jeremy Morris.
Bloomsbury, 243 pp., £21.99, March 2025, 978 1 350 50931 3
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... enjoy the security of their rights, their commerce and their civilisation’. The line belongs to Charles-Louis Lesur, writing just before the Grande Armée’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812, but it could be used to describe today’s European military strategy. Each side still sees the other as expansionist and tyrannical. As the political scientist ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... around Dover being turned into lorry parks. And I admire those in all parts of what I still hope will remain the United Kingdom who have at least tried to speak from a different and more constructive script.But my hope for the next few years is simple. I suspect that not much can be done about the Billy Bunter ...

How can we live with it?

Thomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change, 23 May 2013

The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – and How to Fix It 
by Dieter Helm.
Yale, 273 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 300 18659 8
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Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering 
by Clive Hamilton.
Yale, 247 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 0 300 18667 3
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The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live 
by Brian Stone.
Cambridge, 187 pp., £19.99, July 2012, 978 1 107 60258 8
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... Reactor: a joint venture by China, the EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US. The hope, when it eventually goes online (in 2020, supposedly), is that it will be able to generate ten times as much power as goes into it: 500 megawatts from 50. In order to do this it will have to reach temperatures of 150,000,000°C, ten times hotter than the ...

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

... 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.’ He is referring to the FBI.*Pornography star Stormy Daniels provides a detailed description of Donald Trump’s ...