London Review of Books

In such a Labyrinth

Jonathan Rée: Hume, 17 December 2015

Hume: An Intellectual Biography
by James Harris.
Cambridge, 621 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 521 83725 5Show More

“... Back in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

Don’t imagine you’re smarter

Neal Ascherson: The Informers, 19 July 2018

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File
by Katherine Verdery.
Duke, 344 pp., £20.99, May 2018, 978 0 8223 7081 9Show More

“... been a secret file on ‘Burns, Robt (cover code Mossgiel). Exciseman. Adverse trace: sympathy for French Revolution. Subject is sensitive and promiscuous. See verses passim.’ Politics were one thing, but did he ever long to read what government spies thought of him as a person? ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see ...”

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6Show More

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

Terrorists? Us?

Owen Bennett-Jones, 7 June 2012

Terror Tagging of an Iranian Dissident Organisation
by Raymond Tanter.
Iran Policy Committee, 217 pp., £10, December 2011, 978 0 9797051 2 0Show More

“... But MEK members outside Iraq also displayed remarkable devotion to the cause. When in 2003 the French authorities detained Maryam Rajavi on terrorism charges (she was later released) ten MEK members around the world set themselves on fire in protest; two of them died. The MEK of course denies being a cult, though many outsiders – senior US military ...”

Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5Show More

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

Staying in power

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 January 1988

Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era
by Peter Jenkins.
Cape, 411 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 224 02516 3Show More

De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade
by R.E. Rowthorn and J.R. Wells.
Cambridge, 422 pp., £40, November 1988, 0 521 26360 3Show More

“... both to deter and to negotiate, and to a delighted designer of posters gave the impression on a David Frost programme that if he were running the country, only Dad’s Army would stand between us and the Warsaw forces. Had it not been for defence, one old hand in the Party thought, the Tories might even have lost. But once more, helped by the continuing ...”

Belgravia Cockney

Christopher Tayler: On being a le Carré bore, 25 January 2007

The Mission Song
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 339 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 9780340921968Show More

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

Kaboom!

Lorraine Daston: Slow-Motion Extinction, 23 October 2025

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction
by Sadiah Qureshi.
Allen Lane, 470 pp., £30, June 2025, 978 0 241 35210 6Show More

“... century, battle lines had hardened between two broad camps. The catastrophists, led by the French zoologist Georges Cuvier, thought that the Earth underwent periodic convulsions – titanic volcanic eruptions, huge floods – that wiped out many species at once. The uniformitarians, led by the British lawyer and geologist Charles Lyell, insisted that ...”

Follow-the-Leader

Colm Tóibín: Bishop v. Lowell, 14 May 2009

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 875 pp., £40, November 2008, 978 0 571 24308 2Show More

“... and the final natural but charged image that gives the poem its conclusion and title.’ As David Kalstone pointed out in Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, however, the poem was not simply a homage to Bishop and her work, but a way of using her tone and then moving away from it, a way of separating himself from her ...”

Brussels Pout

Ian Penman: Baudelaire’s Bad End, 16 March 2023

Late Fragments: ‘Flares’, ‘My Heart Laid Bare’, Prose Poems, ‘Belgium Disrobed’
by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Sieburth.
Yale, 427 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 27049 5Show More

“... strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight years: grouchy, standoffish, a dissipated cleric. Ghosting everyone, ghosting poetry itself, Rimbaud stops writing aged nineteen and disappears like a magician’s ...”

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 0Show More

A Short History of Modern Angola
by David Birmingham.
Hurst, 256 pp., £17.99, December 2015, 978 1 84904 519 3Show More

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 3Show More

A General Theory of Oblivion
by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Harvill, 245 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 1 84655 847 4Show More

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 9Show More

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 1Show More

“... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...”

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

“... in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual protection by crossfire, and interconnected by underground galleries safe from bombardment. All the key positions, normally vulnerable ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... south of the border, and this raises two big questions at least. What would have happened had David Cameron not foolishly refused to include a third, ‘devo-max’ option on the ballot? And, whatever the result, will political self-interest and the need to survive finally begin to push the UK’s two so-called main parties in the direction of localism ...”

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

“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior editors, wanted Cyril Connolly to write something, and I immediately looked myself up and it said: ‘Francis Wyndham, un des rédacteurs les plus ...”

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