Where’s the barbed wire?

John Lahr: August Wilson's Transformation, 9 May 2024

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan.
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8
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“... both a necromancer communicating with the dead and a pilgrim ‘walking down the landscape of the self’, as he described it. ‘It is in many ways a remaking of the self in which all of the parts have been realigned, redistributed and reassembled into a new being of sense and harmony.’Wilson, whose given name was ...”

Great Power Politics

Adam Tooze: What was Bidenomics?, 7 November 2024

“... at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home ...”

Types and Typology

Peter Howarth: Tennyson’s Scientific Imagination, 13 August 2026

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief 
by Richard Holmes.
William Collins, 431 pp., £12.99, September, 978 0 00 869686 3
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“... built into the natural world. The thirteen middle lines of In Memoriam, poem 56, form one long self-interrupting sentence which catches the feeling of mounting outrage rolling into despair:And he, shall he,Man, her last work, who seemed so fair [ … ]Who loved, who suffered countless ills,Who battled for the True, the Just,Be blown about the desert ...”

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

“... again. The West, in its containment of Russia, has guaranteed not only the independence but the self-defined territorial integrity of Russia’s western neighbours. This could well mean supporting their revenge and reconquest in places lost to them thirty years ago – sometimes with good reason. Ilya BudraitskisThousands​  of people have taken to the ...”

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

“... of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement tracts – volumes that were all in the grand, glass-fronted bookcase. Therein lay knowledge. Therein lay my father’s ...”

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

“... years and where her husband died is a luxury she doesn’t deserve. She’s been targeted for self-eviction. Essentially, the government is trying to starve her out. Without the government allowance she receives in the form of housing benefit, she cannot pay her rent, and the government has cut the allowance so it’s no longer enough to cover the rent on ...”

Apartheid’s Last Stand

Jeremy Harding, 17 March 2016

Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War 
by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira.
Hurst, 291 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 84904 284 0
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A Short History of Modern Angola 
by David Birmingham.
Hurst, 256 pp., £17.99, December 2015, 978 1 84904 519 3
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Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa 
by Piero Gleijeses.
North Carolina, 655 pp., £27.95, February 2016, 978 1 4696 0968 3
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A General Theory of Oblivion 
by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Harvill, 245 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 1 84655 847 4
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In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre 
by Lara Pawson.
I.B. Tauris, 271 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 1 78076 905 9
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Cuito Cuanavale: Frontline Accounts by Soviet Soldiers 
by G. Shubin, I. Zhdarkin et al, translated by Tamara Reilly.
Jacana, 222 pp., £12.95, May 2014, 978 1 4314 0963 1
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“... still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while four million people in the capital survive on $2 a day. Poverty is even more pronounced in rural areas. About eight million Angolans, or 37 per cent of the ...”

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

“... but he did so with eloquence: he could bring back Passchendaele in all its horrors without showing self-pity. Much later he made several appearances in a BBC TV series on the Great War.Nevertheless, I wonder about his Army career. He was out there for four years, with people dying like flies, yet the only promotion he ever got was from driver to signaller. He ...”

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

“... the mark of a town on its knees. To lose its high street is a bitter blow to a place’s sense of self-worth, but the collapse of traditional small retailers is hardly a mystery, when a shining, ample Morrisons sucks up shoppers in the heart of town, and retail warehouses and Amazon take most of the rest.Millions of pounds’ worth of regeneration money was ...”

The Killing of Osama bin Laden

Seymour M. Hersh, 21 May 2015

“... were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell ...”

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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“... wife, ‘stuff[ed] away in a shabby apartment’. Said didn’t spare himself, including a mocking self-portrait of a clueless employee called Mufid who idles away his time on things that were ‘utterly lost on everyone else’. Brennan presents the lost manuscript (and a story Said submitted around the same time to the New Yorker) as evidence of the novelist ...”

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

“... moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles’. And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella ...”

Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
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Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
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“... misreading is not uncommon. The novel is seen as the archetypal Puritan adventure story, a self-sufficient fiction which transcends the controversies Defoe addresses in his journalism. This is rather like saying that TV programmes such as Castaway and Big Brother tell us nothing about the social moments that created them. Although some recent scholars ...”

Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd: J.G.A. Pocock, 6 November 2008

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £18.99, September 2005, 9780521616454
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. III: The First Decline and Fall 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 527 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 67233 3
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 521 72101 1
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“... worry that history which did not inform present-day concerns amounts to little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism, but presented his practice as socially useful for its ‘excavation’ of the hidden or misunderstood concepts that underpinned the modern state. Pocock, on the other hand, feels no embarrassment about the sorts of inquiry that ...”

Diary

Keith Gessen: Watching the Rouble Go Down, 20 November 2008

“... line – well that would be a pretty small price to pay if only we could stop listening to those self-righteous fucking Americans. What would it take for this regime to stumble? People have been saying for a long time that Putin will not be tested until oil prices fall. Now oil prices are falling, and Putin-Medvedev are mostly blaming the United States and ...”