London Review of Books

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 ...”

The Irresistible Itch

Colin Kidd: Vandals in Bow Ties, 3 December 2009

Personal Responsibility: Why It Matters
by Alexander Brown.
Continuum, 214 pp., £12.99, September 2009, 978 1 84706 399 1Show More

“... instincts and her reputation (not entirely deserved) for outspokenness. However, her successor, John Major, succumbed to the temptations of saloon-bar moralism when he launched his Back to Basics campaign at the 1993 Tory Party Conference. Major remains insistent that Back to Basics did not amount to a moral crusade. It was Peter Lilley and ...”

Calvinisms

Blair Worden, 23 January 1986

International Calvinism 1541-1715
edited by Menna Prestwich.
Oxford, 403 pp., £35, October 1985, 0 19 821933 4Show More

Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in 17th-Century London
by Paul Seaver.
Methuen, 258 pp., £28, September 1985, 0 416 40530 4Show More

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”

Kiss me, Hardy

Humphrey Carpenter, 15 November 1984

Peeping Tom
by Howard Jacobson.
Chatto, 266 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2908 5Show More

Watson’s Apology
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth, 222 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 7156 1935 7Show More

The Foreigner
by David Plante.
Chatto, 237 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 7011 2904 2Show More

“... is a complacent sort of chap, living largely off the earnings of his wife Sharon, who runs a North London bookshop, near a tube station, called Zazie’s dans le Métro. Barney’s views about literature are much the same as Sefton’s. The most gratifying thing he can think of doing with a book is throwing it away, and later in the story he and his ...”

An Attic Full of Sermons

Tessa Hadley: Marilynne Robinson, 21 April 2005

Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 282 pp., £14.99, April 2005, 1 84408 147 8Show More

“... are brought up in an eccentric all-female household at the edge of Fingerbone, a small town in the north-west of the United States, after their mother without any explanation drives her car into the same lake. When their grandmother dies, their aunt Sylvie gives up her life riding the freight trains and comes home to look after the girls, trying her best to ...”

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 ...”

Mrs Straus’s Devotion

Jenny Diski, 5 June 1997

Last Dinner on the ‘Titanic’: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner
by Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £9.99, April 1997, 1 86448 250 8Show More

The ‘Titanic’ Complex
by John Wilson Foster.
Belcouver, 92 pp., £5.99, April 1997, 0 9699464 1 4Show More

Down with the Old Canoe
by Steven Biel.
Norton, 300 pp., £18.95, April 1997, 9780393039658Show More

“... in first class, and the hopes of the dispossessed in steerage. The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and ...”

What Happened to Obama?

August Kleinzahler: The Rise and Fall of Barack Obama, 18 October 2007

Dreams from My Father
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 442 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 1 84767 091 5Show More

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 375 pp., £14.99, May 2007, 978 1 84767 035 9Show More

Obama: From Promise to Power
by David Mendell.
Amistad, 406 pp., $25.95, August 2007, 978 0 06 085820 9Show More

“... in Boston. He was a state senator at the time in Illinois and running for national office. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, a singularly drab and prevaricating man, had been much taken by Obama after appearing on stage with him in Chicago. Many were taken with him. He was the ‘It’ guy, the papers said so. It isn’t much of a ...”

Diary

David Bromwich: President-Speak, 10 April 2008

“... Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the House of Representatives was delivered while he was secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe. A sceptic ...”

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 ...”

Spying doesn’t get any better than this

Murray Sayle, 22 May 1997

Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring
by Robert Whymant.
Tauris, 368 pp., £25, October 1996, 1 86064 044 3Show More

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

More a Voyeur

Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019

Me
by Elton John.
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 5098 5331 1Show More

“... Elton John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

Adored Image

Marina Warner: Celia Paul’s Ghosts, 9 July 2026

Celia Paul: Works 1975-2025
edited by Michael Mack and Liv Constable-Maxwell.
Mack, 543 pp., £150, February 2025, 978 1 915743 65 7Show More

“... about Pamela: that she studied English at King’s College London, that her happy childhood in North Crawley was riven by tragedy when her little cousin was run over. This reticence is a central quality of Paul’s artistry as both writer and painter. In the course of a rare public conversation, held at the London Library in 2023 and transcribed for the ...”

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

Show more articles

More search Options

Browse by Subject