London Review of Books

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... by Ascherson). ‘No’ to independence must also mean ‘Yes’ to serious democratic reform. Ferdinand Mount All classical accounts see England as the original and model nation-state of modern times. One way of looking at the 18 September vote is that it’s a sign of the end of this model. Throughout the past era, the vital questions were posed ...”

Flaubert at Two Hundred

Julian Barnes: Flaubert, the Parrot and Me, 16 December 2021

“... ReaderAt a noisy party many years ago, I was talking to my fellow novelist (and LRB contributor) Ferdinand Mount, who told me that he reread Madame Bovary every year, as both a literary duty and a pleasure. I was mightily impressed – he’d therefore doubtless read it many more times than I had – and carried this detail around for years. I was ...”

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

“... far the most effective critiques of recent British developments; all had a past at the Spectator: Ferdinand Mount, former aide to Thatcher, whose The New Few had appeared in 2012; Peter Oborne, whose Triumph of the Political Class was published five years earlier; and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose Yo, Blair! came out in 2007. The first looked at the ...”

Elitism

Linda Colley, 3 December 1992

The Volcano Lover: A Romance
by Susan Sontag.
Cape, 419 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 224 02912 6Show More

“... was only the fourth son of a Scottish nobleman, and his posting at the Court of the repulsive King Ferdinand of Naples and his clever, fecund Queen, Maria Carolina, placed him very much in the outer circle of British diplomacy. Emma was a blacksmith’s daughter who never lost her Lancashire accent. She went to London, as so many did, and saved herself from ...”

After Rabin

Uri Avnery: Remembering the Ultimate Sabra, 15 November 2007

“... and anxieties bred by the long war. Rabin had routed them, but then allowed them to regroup and mount a counter-attack. For this he paid with his life. His murder changed the history of Israel, much as the murder of Franz Ferdinand changed the history of Europe. Rabin wanted to move forward towards ...”

Varrrroooom!

Aaron Matz: Céline, 25 March 2010

Normance
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Marlon Jones.
Dalkey Archive, 371 pp., £9.99, June 2009, 978 1 56478 525 1Show More

“... In 1954 Louis-Ferdinand Céline was still a pariah in France: a collaborator during the Occupation (it had ended only a decade earlier), a notorious anti-semite (his bloodthirsty ‘pamphlets’ dated from as recently as 1941), and in the view of many Frenchmen, the undeserving beneficiary of a 1951 amnesty that allowed him to return to France from Denmark, where he had taken refuge – and served over a year in prison – after the war ...”

Rambo and Revelation

Malise Ruthven, 9 September 1993

Fire and Blood: The True Story of David Koresh and the Waco Siege
by David Leppard.
Fourth Estate, 182 pp., £5.99, June 1993, 1 85702 166 5Show More

Preacher of Death: The Shocking Inside Story of David Koresh and the Waco Siege
by Martin King and Marc Breault.
Signet, 375 pp., £4.99, May 1993, 0 451 18000 3Show More

“... his followers. Breault began his campaign to alert the authorities immediately after he left the Mount Carmel ranch in 1989. In Texas he got almost nowhere: the Sheriff’s Department in Waco dismissed his warnings as ‘sour grapes’, the local media were indifferent, and it was only after he’d contacted the father of one of the children in the compound ...”

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

“... Though not much enjoying service in the field, the army was in Powell’s genes, as his nephew Ferdinand Mount has written. For him, patriotism was inseparable from the military record of the country, whose defining experience as he grew up was the First World War, in which his father was a decorated officer, at a time when Britain still headed the ...”

Not Altogether Lost

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Tasaday, 19 June 2003

Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday
by Robin Hemley.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., $25, May 2003, 0 374 17716 3Show More

“... aggrandisement (his discovery brought him international celebrity) or else in cahoots with Ferdinand Marcos. By 1971, Marcos’s second term of office (he had been re-elected in 1969) was going badly. There had been destabilising attacks by Maoist guerrillas of the New People’s Army and increasingly violent protests from leftist students; unrest was ...”

The day the golem went berserk

David Katz, 10 January 1983

Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague
by Byron Sherwin.
Associated University Presses, 253 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 8386 3028 6Show More

Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages
by Hyam Maccoby.
Associated University Presses, 245 pp., £15, August 1982, 0 8386 3053 7Show More

“... fewer long-term effects even for Jews than, for example, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand or of Henry IV of France. Jewish historians must always remind themselves that they are specialised workers in the larger historical field which is concerned with what is sometimes referred to as the ‘host community’. The two books before us, recent ...”

The Immortal Coil

Richard Barnett: Faraday’s Letters, 21 March 2013

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday Vol. VI, 1860-67
by Frank James.
IET, 919 pp., £85, December 2011, 978 0 86341 957 7Show More

“... sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount. During the day the poet would sit for the painter beneath an open skylight in the high garret of the house. When the light failed the two men turned to talking and walking in the garden. One evening, just after the sun had set, something flashed across the ...”

One Cygnet Too Many

John Watts: Henry VII, 26 April 2012

Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England
by Thomas Penn.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 0 14 104053 0Show More

“... that accompanied the match made much of the king’s achievements. They stressed the ‘rich mount’ of his prosperity, playing on the name of his father’s earldom (Richmond) and his own new palace by the Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its ...”

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4Show More

“... range equally extraordinary.’ Dwelling on the even play of curiosity that followed from it, Ferdinand Mount, who has written notably well about his uncle, remarks that so far from being snobbish, as often charged, ‘his fiction is extraordinarily democratic in a way few other writers of his time could claim.’The judgment is carefully formulated ...”

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3Show More

“... Wagner was a good conversationalist, he retorted: ‘Do you imagine, sir, that the conversation of Mount Etna is pleasant?’ Was this oracular volcano the same man whom German readers knew for his love of pranks, dogs, soft furnishings and other people’s money? In 1877, the Neue Freie Presse got the scoop of publishing Wagner’s letters to his costumier ...”

Smoke and Lava

Rosemary Hill: Vesuvius Observed, 5 October 2023

Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions
by John Brewer.
Yale, 513 pp., £30, October, 978 0 300 27266 6Show More

“... discussions of geology and theories of the sublime, we get occasional glimpses of the Bourbon king Ferdinand IV fleeing to Sicily hotly pursued by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who takes the throne until he in turn is forced to flee. Brewer’s is a thematic rather than a chronological account, but even broad themes need to be understood ...”

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