London Review of Books

Desire Was Everywhere

Adam Shatz, 16 December 2010

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives
by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman.
Columbia, 651 pp., £26, August 2010, 978 0 231 14560 2Show More

“... activists, Marxist professors and anti-psychiatrists – turned out en masse for the symposium; John Cage and William Burroughs came along; and Foucault flew in from Paris. It quickly became a circus.Deleuze and Guattari had long envied American writers like Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, with their ‘gift for ...”

That Disturbing Devil

Ferdinand Mount: Land Ownership, 8 May 2014

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater.
Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £20, January 2014, 978 1 4088 1574 8Show More

“... all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before Gilbert set sail and now in the British Library, shows a rich mixture of strip-fields, commons and orchards, as well as the large number of fields already enclosed by the landowner and ...”

However I Smell

Jenny Diski: Old, Unwanted and Invisible, 8 May 2014

Out of Time
by Lynne Segal.
Verso, 331 pp., £16.99, November 2013, 978 1 78468 139 5Show More

“... of the situation of the old and the attitude of society to them is more stringent. She quotes John Berger writing in his eighties: ‘One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests … in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds.’ Berger’s social optimism is always ...”

Flub-Dub

Thomas Powers: Stephen Crane, 17 July 2014

Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire
by Paul Sorrentino.
Harvard, 476 pp., £25, June 2014, 978 0 674 04953 6Show More

“... account as long as a novella. In it, along with much else, Crane describes the fate of Dr John Gibbs, a naval surgeon shot in the night when guerrillas attacked Crane’s detachment at Guantánamo: I heard somebody dying near me. He was dying hard … The darkness was impenetrable. The man was dying in some depression within seven feet of me. Every ...”

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8Show More

Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5Show More

“... somewhat brittle voice, occasionally grated’. She was the first-born child of the Boston mayor, John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a ‘paunchy welterweight’ as Nasaw calls him, who belted out ‘Sweet Adeline’ at every campaign gathering and kept his daughter on a short leash. Rose returned home from convent school in 1910 to become her ...”

‘We ain’t found shit’

Scott Ritter, 2 July 2015

“... nuclear scientists. ‘It’s critical for us to know going forward,’ the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in June, that ‘those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.’ France has said that any agreement that doesn’t include inspections of military sites would be ‘useless’. Iran has been adamant ...”

Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?

Andrew O’Hagan, 22 October 2015

“... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... people decide – and then, if it doesn’t get the result it wants, overrule us from Holyrood. John Burnside New states are usually the product of catastrophe. Violence is the air they breathe. I can’t decide if it is Scotland’s good or bad fortune that its vote for statehood should take place against the background of an entirely normal birth of a ...”

New Man from Nowhere

James Davidson: Cicero, 4 February 2016

Dictator
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 299 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 09 175210 1Show More

“... phylactery shouted out by Verres’ victims pleading for a stay of crucifixion), recycled by John F. Kennedy with unavoidable bathos as ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ This great and by no means guaranteed victory against the establishment, as well as the addition of an entire province to his list of clients, helped ease Cicero’s way. But as consul he was ...”

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8Show More

“... held in their hands Pieces of the gravestone grey granite Proof of their innocence?The parable in John of the woman sentenced to be stoned to death after being taken in adultery receives a new twist in Hughes’s figuration of the stones being of granite as grey as the first wife’s gravestone. It was, or so Hughes firmly believed, the news of this second ...”

Murder in Mayfair

Peter Pomerantsev, 31 March 2016

A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West
by Luke Harding.
Faber, 424 pp., £12.99, March 2016, 978 1 78335 093 3Show More

“... Society that – see the Register of Members’ Interests – paid for the culture minister, John Whittingdale, to visit Ukraine and Austria and provided the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ukraine; Firtash has been rewarded with an honour by the Duke of Edinburgh. The tour proceeded past the Russian Embassy off Kensington Park ...”

Between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines

Tim Parks: Guelfs v. Ghibellines, 14 July 2016

Dante: The Story of His Life
by Marco Santagata, translated by Richard Dixon.
Harvard, 485 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 674 50486 8Show More

“... Equality, however, wasn’t enough for Dante: in the Vita nova, he suggests that Cavalcanti is his John the Baptist, which of course makes Dante ‘the Messiah’. By his mid-twenties he already had a reputation as a poet. There are indications that he had been to Bologna to use its libraries and to read philosophy; he knew Latin and had most likely studied ...”

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

He was the man

Robert Crawford: Ezra Pound, 30 June 2016

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work: Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-72
by A. David Moody.
Oxford, 654 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 0 19 870436 2Show More

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to ...”

Snap among the Witherlings

Michael Hofmann: Wallace Stevens, 22 September 2016

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens
by Paul Mariani.
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., £23, May 2016, 978 1 4516 2437 3Show More

“... has never been a travel poster like Harmonium,’ Randall Jarrell said; ‘He mutter spiffy,’ John Berryman (or Henry) wrote approvingly in The Dream Songs. But Stevens lived in the North even as he wrote raptly and rapturously about the South; while writing colourful poems he made his living writing colourless, transactional letters. He too once wanted ...”

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