London Review of Books

Georgie

Karl Miller, 18 September 1980

The Oxford Chekov. Vol. IV: Stories 1888-1889
edited by Ronald Hingley.
Oxford, 287 pp., £14, July 1980, 0 19 211389 5Show More

“... vexed questions to which it refers, and which had come to the fore in the more liberal Russia of Alexander II. In the manner that we call Chekhovian, it floats. And it may appear that its buoyancy owes a good deal to the handling of the illness which it recounts. With Chekhov, we are in the era where the word ‘nerves’ can mean something, can mean ...”

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8Show More

“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in 1979 ...”

Let’s call it failure

John Lanchester: The Shit We’re In, 3 January 2013

“... day, but the OBR was set up with the explicit ambition of not doing that. In the words of Danny Alexander: ‘We set up an independent Office for Budget Responsibility because we did not want forecasts that could be interfered with by politicians, as they were in the past.’ So why does it look so much as if that’s what’s happening? A cynic would say ...”

Four Funerals and a Wedding

Andrew O’Hagan: If something happens to me…, 5 May 2005

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”

The poet steamed

Iain Sinclair: Tom Raworth, 19 August 2004

Collected Poems
by Tom Raworth.
Carcanet, 576 pp., £16.95, February 2003, 1 85754 624 5Show More

Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth
edited by Nate Dorward.
The Gig, 288 pp., £15, March 2003, 0 9685294 3 7Show More

“... wings to thrum and purr, six inches away.’ Good, yes? But too much of a stand-out cameo, a guest star ‘bit’. The Amis sparrow is significant where Raworth’s generic ‘bird’ behaves in its curious way and flies, immediately and without waiting for applause, out of the story. There is much more to tell. Amis can’t leave the canal fauna alone, the ...”

In the Centre of the Centre

Thomas Meaney: The German Election, 21 September 2017

“... to talk up his biography: a promising football player in his youth, he thought he would become a star, but suffered a knee injury and became an alcoholic; after rehab he ran a bookstore in a small town in the Rhineland, eventually becoming mayor. The real irregularity in his political ascent, though, was that he pursued it not on the national stage, but in ...”

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4Show More

“... First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s remaining brother, Alexander, a vicar in Trinidad, died aged 44, probably from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at ...”

Saintly Outliers

Vadim Nikitin: Browder’s Fraud Story, 5 October 2023

Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath
by Bill Browder.
Simon and Schuster, 328 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 3985 0610 7Show More

“... Riviera. They sent their children to Ivy League universities. They wooed glamorous women at three-star restaurants and grand hotels. They never missed Davos. Much of their time was spent suing one another in Western courts, dodging subpoenas, spreading kompromat on rivals and hiring libel lawyers to threaten unfriendly journalists. In recent years, both the ...”

Ravishing

Colm Tóibín: Sex Lives of the Castrati, 8 October 2015

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds
by Martha Feldman.
California, 454 pp., £40, March 2015, 978 0 520 27949 0Show More

Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani
by Roger Freitas.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £22.99, May 2014, 978 1 107 69610 5Show More

“... vocal plenitude, while psychoanalysis imagines castration as identity’s foundation – star player in the psyche’s interminable opera.’ It began, it seems, because women were not allowed to sing in church, and, in the Papal States, were banned from singing at all. ‘It is important to bear in mind,’ Feldman writes, ‘that castrations for ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... but of the nation itself. They want their country to provide a sensational tableau for them to star in, rather than merely a congenial background to their lives. Neal Ascherson’s bus party (LRB, 21 August) sounds like the Makars on wheels. One hesitates to shut the door on such a charming bunch. All the same, I wouldn’t much fancy them parking in my ...”

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

“... retractable tripod fizzing with static on top, but no sign of insanitary behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world ...”

Like a Thunderbolt

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Solzhenitsyn’s Mission, 11 September 2008

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
by Liudmila Saraskina.
Molodaia gvardiia, 935 pp., €30, April 2008, 978 5 235 03102 9Show More

“... sympathies in 1917-18 are unclear). By the time Solzhenitsyn entered the University of Rostov, a star student and one of eight holders of ‘Stalin’ stipends, he had resolved his childhood ambivalence – Saraskina sees this as a conversion – and with the single-mindedness that was to be characteristic of his adult life, become a thoroughgoing Soviet ...”

Homer Inc

Edward Luttwak, 23 February 2012

The Iliad by Homer
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011, 978 0 297 85973 4Show More

“... II’s regal dates fit, roughly 1295-1272 BCE, and so do the names: Alaksandu cannot be other than Alexander, which happens to be the other name of Paris, he who stole away the wife and treasure of Menelaus, but it is certainly the name of a decidedly Greek ruler. Wilusa is most definitely Troy. The book we know as Iliad is the adjective for the city of Ilios ...”

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5Show More

Philip Roth: A Counterlife
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8Show More

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2Show More

“... stylings could only sedate the rumblings for so long, and then, as if fired from a cannon, came Alexander Portnoy wagging his dingdong and marauding for shiksas.The tremendous, scandalous success of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), that pyrotechnical display of flying ejaculate, stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations ...”

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom

Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5290 4247 4Show More

“... Alexander Cockburn blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars ...”

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