London Review of Books

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3Show More

Political Advice: Past, Present and Future
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1Show More

“... and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.’ But it wasn’t until May 2005, a month after Oborne’s new book came out, that a report dated 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in Washington. It contained the killer ...”

Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5Show More

None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7Show More

No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2Show More

“... corps of like-minded Vietnamese, one a history teacher fascinated by Napoleon, Vo Nguyen Giap. In May 1941 at Chingshi in South China they founded the League for the Independence of Vietnam, Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or for short, Vietminh. (Vietcong, ‘Vietnamese Communist’, was a dismissive label invented in Saigon that the VC themselves never ...”

Such amateurishness …

Neal Ascherson: The Sufferings of a Young Nazi, 30 April 2009

The Kindly Ones
by Jonathan Littell, translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Chatto, 984 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 7011 8165 9Show More

“... it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame? A conscientious reader may want to go to a number of other books to check out Littell’s account of events, personalities and organisations. The best is the old classic Anatomy of the SS State (1968), written by four members of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich after they had ...”

End-of-the-World Trade

Donald MacKenzie: The credit crisis, 8 May 2008

“... long-term bet, but traders don’t do it because of the fear that in the short run its price may increase even further, causing a mark-to-market loss. Although it would be a paper loss, it would have real consequences, damaging your bank’s balance sheet and profits, threatening your bonus, and typically forcing you to transfer valuable collateral to ...”

Republican King

Philippe Marlière: François Mitterrand, 17 April 2014

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity
by Philip Short.
Bodley Head, 692 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84792 006 5Show More

“... AT 8 p.m. on 10 May 1981 François Mitterrand made history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took three seconds for the image to appear clearly, but it felt like an eternity. First, a bald head (which, at this stage, could have been mistaken for that of the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also bald), then the eyes and the mouth and, finally, the full portrait ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... campaign still in the ascendancy as the day of reckoning looms, the pro-independence camp may yet come to regret its rejection of gradualism. Tom Devine The Scottish government states that it is committed ‘to securing the earliest safe withdrawal of Trident from an independent Scotland. This includes the removal of all elements of the current ...”

Learning My Lesson

Marina Warner, 19 March 2015

“... students was told by management to take down the questions she raised on Facebook). Gagging orders may not even be necessary. Silence issues from different causes: from fear, insecurity, precarious social conditions and shame. It is the shame of the battered wife that allows her husband to count on her silence. I recognise, for example, the compunction in the ...”

She shall be nameless

Nicholas Spice: Marlen Haushofer, 18 December 2014

The Wall
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Quartet, 211 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7311 2Show More

Nowhere Ending Sky
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 178 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7207 8Show More

The Loft
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 173 pp., £12, May 2011, 978 0 7043 7313 6Show More

“... the ‘always already’ of death, the ineluctable truth that, as Larkin puts it, ‘most things may never happen: this one will.’ The woman ends her account with a valiant gesture towards an implausible future, but the hour is indisputably late – she has only so many matches left. The Wall is a study in dread; The Loft is lighter in mood and tone, more ...”

The Big Mystique

William Davies: Central Banks and Banking, 2 February 2017

The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath
by Ben Bernanke.
Norton, 624 pp., £27.99, October 2015, 978 0 393 24721 3Show More

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King.
Little Brown, 448 pp., £25, March 2017, 978 0 349 14067 4Show More

“... out of monetary policy. The thinking was that while politicians, policy fads and whole governments may come and go, investors and currency traders can rest assured that over the long term interest rates will be set according to unbending institutional rules. Bernanke argued the case for inflation-targeting by the Federal Reserve for many years, and eventually ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More

“... the Declaration was plainly contradictory, with its promise that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ This had been carefully worded. ‘Civil and religious rights’ weren’t the same as ...”

Tricked Out as a Virgin

Bee Wilson: Respectable Enough, 4 November 2021

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice
by Julia Laite.
Profile, 410 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78816 442 9Show More

“... were convicted of solicitation offences, with 2500 of them receiving prison sentences. The law may have struggled to find pimps guilty, but it had no difficulty in condemning female prostitutes.The journalist Guy Scholefield, who reported Harvey’s case for the New Zealand Evening Post, described her as an ‘unfortunate girl’ entrapped by dreams of ...”

We must burn them

Hazel V. Carby: Against the Origin Story, 26 May 2022

The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story
edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones.
W.H. Allen, 624 pp., £25, November 2021, 978 0 7535 5953 6Show More

Exterminate All the Brutes
directed by Raoul Peck.
HBO, April 2021Show More

“... itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.’ University administrations boast of diversity, equity and inclusion, while behind the scenes they hold tightly to power, continuing to privilege the Eurocentric, settler colonial ...”

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4Show More

“... which also features an eloquent Black pastor, on account of its condemnation of lynching. Sturges may have got lucky. When White left the country to take up a post as a foreign correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that ...”

An Epiphany of Footnotes

Claude Rawson, 16 March 1989

Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work
by Jerome McGann.
Harvard, 279 pp., £21.95, April 1988, 0 674 81495 9Show More

“... routines derive partly from traditions of learned wit that are as old as learning, and may also be seen as self-conscious adaptations, in a narrowed context, of the ancient ideal of the learned poet: an ideal shrunk to classroom dimensions but not yet appropriated by the classroom itself, attracting residual celebration in lowered terms, insistent ...”

Kermode’s Changing Times

P.N. Furbank, 7 March 1991

The Uses of Error
by Frank Kermode.
Collins, 432 pp., £18, February 1991, 9780002154659Show More

“... for his cunning polemic Forms of Attention (1985) was already all about canons: nevertheless we may regard this as the fourth, which is to say the current, stage in his development. His project in History and Value was at first sight a very promising one. He would have another look at the writers, those of the Thirties, who were producing during his own ...”

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