Colony, Aviary and Zoo

David Denby: New York Intellectuals, 10 July 2025

Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals 
by Ronnie A. Grinberg.
Princeton, 367 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 691 19309 0
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... looked burdened, his eyes heavily pouched, his shoulders sagging, a cigarette (two cigarettes in David Levine’s caricatures) always in his hand, a man wearied by liberalism’s failures, American literature’s failures. Grinberg recounts a fine moment early in his career. In 1936, Trilling was informed by the English Department that as a Marxist, a ...

Clipping Their Whiskers

John Reader: Slavery, 28 October 1999

The Physician and the Slave Trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone Expeditions, and the Crusade against Slavery in East Africa 
by Daniel Liebowitz.
Freeman, 314 pp., £17.95, May 1999, 0 7167 3098 7
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... employees somewhere in the middle and the actual right to use people as chattels – goods that may be bought, sold or exchanged – at the other. And in precolonial Africa, for instance, where rates of natural population growth achieved by marrying and begetting were consistently low, it was customary to augment households by acquiring people ...

Other People’s Rooms

Peter Campbell, 7 April 1994

Inside Culture 
by David Halle.
Chicago, 261 pp., £23.95, January 1993, 0 226 31367 0
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Buildings of the United States: The Buildings of Michigan 
by Kathryn Bishop Eckert.
Oxford, 603 pp., £27.50, June 1993, 0 19 506149 7
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Buildings of the United States: The Buildings of Iowa 
by David Gebhard and Gerald Mansheim.
Oxford, 565 pp., £27.50, June 1993, 0 19 506148 9
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... David Halle’s researches earned him a licence amateur voyeurs would kill for. He got to nose about, more or less at will, in other people’s rooms. His study of the landscapes, portraits, snapshots, saints, masks and so forth which a representative group of Americans, in and near New York, have on their walls and shelves, of how they display them and what they say about them, required that he get to know more than a hundred and sixty different houses ...

‘We hear and we disobey’

Carlos Fraenkel: Anti-Judaism, 21 May 2015

Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking 
by David Nirenberg.
Head of Zeus, 624 pp., £25, July 2013, 978 1 78185 113 5
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Neighbouring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today 
by David Nirenberg.
Chicago, 320 pp., £31.50, October 2014, 978 0 226 16893 7
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... In​ scope and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western civilisation. For Said, the West’s representation of the Orient is an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialism. The Oriental is the Other against whom the West defines itself and whom it tries to dominate ...

Blite and Whack

Paul Seabright, 19 January 1984

A Pocket Popper 
edited by David Miller.
Fontana, 479 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 00 636414 4
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The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery. Vol. I: Realism and the Aim of Science 
by Karl Popper, edited by W.W. Bartely.
Hutchinson, 420 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 09 151450 9
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The Philosophy of Popper 
by T.E. Burke.
Manchester, 222 pp., £16, July 1983, 0 7190 0904 9
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In Pursuit of Truth: Essays in Honour of Karl Popper’s 80th Birthday 
edited by Paul Levinson.
Harvester, 337 pp., £25, May 1983, 0 7108 0424 5
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Science and Moral Priority 
by Roger Sperry.
Blackwell, 135 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 9780631131991
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Art, Science and Human Progress 
edited by R.B. McConnell.
Murray, 196 pp., £12.50, June 1983, 0 7195 4018 6
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... from quacks and the pedlars of false certainty. He has shown that what satisfies our curiosity may not be true. His attacks on Marxism, astrology and psychoanalysis have been widely influential. Many working scientists testify to the effect he has had on the actual practice of their art. And although there is a suspicion of redundancy about the title In ...

Reputation

Colin McGinn, 23 November 1989

The Secret Connection: Causation, Realism and David Hume 
by Galen Strawson.
Oxford, 291 pp., £32.50, August 1989, 0 19 824853 9
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J.L. Austin 
by G.J. Warnock.
Routledge, 165 pp., £30, August 1989, 0 415 02962 7
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... and fleeting, an imposition from without, no sooner bestowed than withdrawn. Take the case of David Hume. In the dark days of logical (sic) positivism Hume’s reputation ran high as the philosopher who first did away with causal necessity; he was thought to have shown that causation consists in nothing, objectively, but constant conjunction: things ...

Balfour’s Ghost

Peter Clarke, 20 March 1997

Why Vote Conservative? 
by David Willetts.
Penguin, 108 pp., £3.99, February 1997, 0 14 026304 7
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Why Vote Liberal Democrat? 
by William Wallace.
Penguin, 120 pp., £3.99, February 1997, 0 14 026303 9
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Why Vote Labour? 
by Tony Wright.
Penguin, 111 pp., £3.99, February 1997, 0 14 026397 7
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... worth reading for a justification of his party that rises above ritual partisan point-scoring. If David Willetts was not already the best-known of the three when the books were commissioned, he certainly is now. Allegedly known as ‘Two Brains’ to his friends (or alleged friends, perhaps), Mr Willetts last year found himself in difficulties before a ...

The Retreat from Monetarism

J.R. Shackleton, 6 February 1986

... of a very old idea: the Quantity Theory of Money. This theory, clearly present in the work of David Hume and David Ricardo, was formalised in the work of Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and Irving Fisher at the beginning of this century. With the rise of Keynesianism, however, the primary lesson of the old-time religion ...

Blame Robert Maxwell

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: How Public Inquiries Go Wrong, 17 March 2016

... into a wide range of matters of public interest, from the Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made ...

Destiny v. Democracy

David Runciman: The New Deal, 25 April 2013

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time 
by Ira Katznelson.
Norton, 706 pp., £22, April 2013, 978 0 87140 450 3
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... of this kind is the other reason it was a big mistake to think the South was Fascist. It may have been a one-party state, but the Democrats were not a one-state party. Southern Democrats didn’t have a single leader; theirs, as Katznelson says, was a ‘chaotic and anarchic’ organisation, riddled with local variations. More important, it was an ...

Heathcliff Redounding

David Trotter: Emily Brontë’s Scenes, 9 May 2024

Emily Brontë: Selected Writings 
edited by Francis O’Gorman.
Oxford, 496 pp., £95, December 2023, 978 0 19 886816 3
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... channel, a thoroughfare, an axis of change.The basis of Phillips’s oblique affinity with Brontë may lie in their shared conviction that the storyteller, real or imaginary, must already be in place – however uneasily – before the story can be told. The introduction to Phillips’s A New World Order: Selected Essays (2001) sets each of four separate ...

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... he listed. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special ...

After the Referendum

LRB Contributors, 9 October 2014

... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...

Re-Readings

Chris Baldick, 10 November 1988

Poetry, Language and Politics 
by John Barrell.
Manchester, 174 pp., £21.50, May 1988, 0 7190 2441 2
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Garden – Nature – Language 
by Simon Pugh.
Manchester, 148 pp., £25, May 1988, 0 7190 2824 8
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Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture 
by David Cairns and Shaun Richards.
Manchester, 178 pp., £21.50, May 1988, 0 7190 2371 8
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The Shakespeare Myth 
edited by Graham Holderness.
Manchester, 215 pp., £25, May 1988, 0 7190 1488 3
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... comma in Shakespeare’s 29th Sonnet. To point out that in fact it is a semicolon that is at stake may not entirely dispel the suspicions of lemon-squeezing pedantry which thus arise, but a reading of Barrell’s chapter on Shakespeare certainly does: he is one of those rare scholar-critics who can make matters of punctuation genuinely interesting. The ...

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
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... electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus presented by the SNP. Surely, David Cameron reckoned, the same formula would work again a mere two years later in the UK-wide Brexit referendum. After all, there was also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone ...