London Review of Books

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 ...”

Orificial Events

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The Promise’, 4 November 2021

The Promise
by Damon Galgut.
Chatto, 293 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 78474 406 9Show More

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8Show More

“... editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, who came out that year as a Holocaust revisionist; John Zerzan, a hermit who thought language was the root of the world’s problems; and L. Susan Brown, who held that anarchists should support Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ ‘When I normally encounter my so-called ...”

Diary

Julian Barnes: People Will Hate Us Again, 20 April 2017

“... Europe’s ‘plan’ for us was like Hitler’s (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with John Redwood – he of the velveteen disdain (‘That’s a very BBC question,’ he tells Kirsty Wark patronisingly) – Johnson has been a big proponent of the ‘prosecco and cheese’ argument: that the Italians and the French will be so scared of losing the ...”

Vorsprung durch Techno

Ian Penman, 10 September 2020

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany
by Uwe Schütte.
Penguin, 316 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 14 198675 3Show More

“... or Iggy Pop’s The Idiot? Kraftwerk have a track called ‘Numbers’, but I prefer Soft Cell’s John Rechy-inspired single of the same name, one of the great lost 45s of the 1980s, which involves an entirely other (and far less hygienic) form of accounting. And I haven’t even mentioned that other great pre-techno German dance classic, ‘I Feel Love’ by ...”

Eat butterflies with me?

Patricia Lockwood, 5 November 2020

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.
Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, November, 978 0 14 139838 9Show More

“... shoes’, only pausing occasionally to see the white fountain of remixed and continuous life that John Shade saw when his heart stopped. Nabokov sets up problems to which it seems there should be answers, but he does not give answers, he gives rewards. That is why he is beloved, why people dedicate whole academic lives to him. White fountains at the end of ...”

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6Show More

George Michael: Freedom Uncut
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
Show More

“... early 1980s were fronted by gay men, Steve Strange, Jimmy Somerville, Pete Burns, Boy George, Leee John, Morrissey, Billy Mackenzie, Holly Johnson and Marc Almond among them.Not since the Supremes and Diana Ross had a pop group produced a lead singer so clearly destined for solo success. ‘Careless Whisper’, though co-written with Ridgeley, had shown that ...”

‘Everyone is terribly kind’

Deborah Friedell: Dorothy Thompson at War, 19 January 2023

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
by Kathryn Olmsted.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 0 300 25642 0Show More

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War
by Deborah Cohen.
William Collins, 427 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 00 830590 1Show More

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s own writing. The broken ...”

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