London Review of Books

Fighting Men

D.A.N. Jones, 2 February 1984

Ring of Truth
by Vernon Scannell.
Robson, 342 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 86051 244 4Show More

The Tiger and the Rose: An Autobiography
by Vernon Scannell.
Robson, 197 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 86051 221 5Show More

Man of War
by John Masters.
Joseph, 314 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 7181 2360 3Show More

The Notebook of Gismondo Cavalletti
by R.M. Lamming.
Cape, 248 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 224 02141 9Show More

The Rape of Shavi
by Buchi Emecheta.
Ogwugwu Afor, 178 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 9508177 1 6Show More

Thomas Lyster: A Cambridge Novel
by David Wurtzel.
Brilliance, 215 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 946189 30 7Show More

Don’t Swing a Cat
by Eva Bolgar.
Bachman and Turner, 143 pp., £7.50, November 1983, 0 85974 098 6Show More

“... in The Tiger and the Rose; but he is evidently not quite satisfied with them. Turn for a moment to John Masters’s strangely similar novel, Man of War. It is an apologia for another sort of fighting man, a professional soldier. The hero, Dusty Miller, squeezes his way into the British Army during World War One, aged only 16; when World War Two comes ...”

Burying Scott

Marilyn Butler, 7 September 1995

The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography
by John Sutherland.
Blackwell, 386 pp., £19.99, January 1995, 1 55786 231 1Show More

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

Adrenaline Junkie

Jonathan Parry: John Tyndall’s Ascent, 21 March 2019

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual
by Roland Jackson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 878895 9Show More

“... On 21 December 1859 John Tyndall, a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, set out to measure the structure and movements of the Mer de Glace, a glacier above Chamonix. In previous summers he had collected data on several Alpine glaciers, but no one had ever attempted to do so in winter. He got to Folkestone but bad weather meant crossing the Channel was impossible and he returned to London ...”

Diary

Patrick Hughes: What do artists do?, 24 July 1986

“... be printed beautifully and I’ll sign them all. They’ll be put into portfolios and be sold. John Loker and I got drunk in Ireland last summer and he and I and Nicky Watts decided to bicycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer. I had not ridden a bike since I was a schoolboy, but they were pretty fit. So I ...”

Mastering the Art of Understating Your Wealth

Thomas Keymer: The Tonsons, 5 May 2016

The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons
edited by Stephen Bernard.
Oxford, 386 pp., £95, March 2015, 978 0 19 870085 2Show More

“... Adam Smith, who made ‘rhetoric and belles lettres’ a university discipline and exported it to North America. As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656-1736). With his hard-nosed nephew Jacob the younger (1682-1735), Tonson dominated the publishing business of his day and died a landed gentleman worth a reported £40,000 ...”

I ham sorry

Norma Clarke: Poor Lore, 1 August 2019

Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s
by Steven King.
McGill, 480 pp., £27.99, February 2019, 978 0 7735 5649 2Show More

“... were regional differences between what are sometimes described as ‘welfare republics’: the north and west seem to have been less generous than the south and east of England, and Wales was notoriously mean; but with incomplete source materials such judgments are complex. All parishes operated a delicate balance between potentially extraordinary demand ...”

Cameron’s Crank

Jonathan Raban: ‘Red Tory’, 22 April 2010

Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it
by Phillip Blond.
Faber, 309 pp., £12.99, April 2010, 978 0 571 25167 4Show More

“... triumph of a perverted and endlessly corrupting liberalism’. After a drive-by shooting of John Rawls (‘he had no convincing vision of the good society or the good life’), and a wildly constructive misreading of Rawls’s famous ‘veil of ignorance’, Blond ties himself in verbal knots as he tries to assert that the liberal state is destined to ...”

A Bit of Ginger

Theo Tait: Gordon Burn, 5 June 2008

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 214 pp., £15.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 19729 3Show More

“... the while; the car-bomb attacks on the West End of London and Glasgow airport and have-a-go hero John Smeaton’s assault on one of the bombers; the floods that put large parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands under water; the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. The narrator starts the book as an ‘I’. Later, a ‘he’ appears who, it gradually ...”

The Thought of Ruislip

E.S. Turner: The Metropolitan Line, 2 December 2004

Metro-Land: British Empire Exhibition Number
by Oliver Green.
Southbank, 144 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 1 904915 00 0Show More

“... of the public in the 1920s. Metroland was the commuter catchment area for the line running north-west from Baker Street station through a string of ‘unspoiled’ arcadias and ancient pocket boroughs into the Chiltern Hundreds and the Vale of Aylesbury. The originators of successful brand names deserve to be remembered. According to Alan Jackson’s ...”

The Prodigal Century

David Blackbourn: Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century by John McNeill, 7 June 2001

Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century
by John McNeill.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, August 2001, 0 14 029509 7Show More

“... won’t say counted), he garnered 100,000 of them. And in New Hampshire, the only state in the North-East that Gore failed to carry – a state whose three electoral votes would have made him President even without Florida – Nader’s vote comfortably exceeded Bush’s margin of victory. Green Party supporters told pollsters that, in the absence of ...”

Flowers in His Trousers

Christopher Benfey: Central Park’s Architect, 6 October 2016

Frederick Law Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture and Society
edited by Charles E. Beveridge.
Library of America, 802 pp., £30, November 2015, 978 1 59853 452 8Show More

“... with help from his father, his own farm on Staten Island. He visited his younger brother, John, at Yale, making friends with some of his high-minded circle, including Charles Loring Brace, who later founded the Children’s Aid Society. Brace and the Olmsted brothers travelled to Europe in 1850, walking through the English countryside and visiting ...”

At Norwich Castle Museum

Alice Spawls: ‘The Paston Treasure’, 13 September 2018

“... at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also ...”

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 ...”

Irangate

Edward Said, 7 May 1987

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
by Salman Rushdie.
Picador, 171 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 330 29990 5Show More

Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 298 pp., £5.95, September 1986, 0 7453 0184 3Show More

“... it comes to seem probable that the geo-political opening undertaken by William Casey, McFarlane, North and company was nothing less than an attempted coup whose goal was either the fomenting of prolonged instability in Iran or the accession to power of some person or group less hostile to the US and Israel. The man publicly identified with the arms deals in ...”

Brute Nature

Rosemary Dinnage, 6 March 1997

Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade
by Andrew Scull, Charlotte Mackenzie and Nicholas Hervey.
Princeton, 363 pp., £23, February 1997, 0 691 03411 7Show More

“... doctoring the mad – the pauper mad, generally – had a taint of its own. As the alienist Sir John Bucknill acerbically wrote in 1860, ‘the feeling and conduct of the British public towards the insane reminds one of nothing so much as that of the enlightened citizens of the free States of America. Noble and just sentiments towards the negro race are in ...”

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