London Review of Books

Separation Anxiety

David Hollinger: God and Politics, 24 January 2008

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West
by Mark Lilla.
Knopf, 334 pp., $26, September 2007, 978 1 4000 4367 5Show More

“... Friedrich Strauss and countless others were just then demonstrating. Romantic conceptions of the self and wissenschaftliche approaches to the Bible combined to produce a liberal theology according to which the Bible was a cultural document rather than a series of commands, and the individual soul less an object of judgment than a site for religious ...”

Eat your own misery

Tessa Hadley: Bette Howland’s Stories, 4 March 2021

‘Blue in Chicago’ and Other Stories
by Bette Howland.
Picador, 329 pp., £12.99, July 2020, 978 1 5290 3582 7Show More

“... 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in ...”

So South Kensington

Julian Bell: Walter Sickert, 20 September 2001

The Complete Writings on Art
by Walter Sickert, edited by Anna Gruetzner Robins.
Oxford, 699 pp., £90, September 2000, 0 19 817225 7Show More

“... its maximum gestural impact.When he slipped away from England and his first wife in 1898, for a self-appointed exile in Dieppe, Paris and Venice, Sickert left behind a reputation as foremost apostle to the ‘genius’, he whose ‘lightest utterance is inspired’, the ‘immortal’, London’s ‘living Old Master’. Whistler was his first point of ...”

Diary

Gaby Wood: How to Draw an Albatross, 18 June 2020

“... to circumnavigating the Earth 120 times.It isn’t known whether the albatross already belonged to Robert Edmond Grant when he started to put together his collection in 1827. Grant arrived in London that year from Edinburgh, where he had taught Charles Darwin and studied marine invertebrates with him in the Firth of Forth. All 12 of Grant’s brothers joined ...”

After I am hanged my portrait will be interesting

Colm Tóibín, 31 March 2016

“... he made Clarke his assistant and the paper’s general manager. Clarke was effective and self-effacing. He was in a good position to assess the new generation of Irish revolutionaries who came to New York. In 1907, he concluded that it was time for him to return to Ireland. The police noted the arrival of the ‘ex-convict and dynamiter’ while ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... machine in Scotland. No longer. When large numbers stop believing that they can exercise political self-determination within the existing social order they begin to look beyond traditional governing parties. On the Continent (and in England) this has led to the growth of the right. In Scotland what is being demanded is national, social and political ...”

Too Many Alibis

James Wood: Geoffrey Hill, 1 July 1999

Canaan
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 76 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 14 058786 1Show More

The Truth of Love: A Poem
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 82 pp., £8.99, January 1997, 0 14 058910 4Show More

“... may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and suffering may go together: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) There are difficulties nonetheless with Hill’s enactment of ...”

Secret Purposes

P.N. Furbank, 19 September 1985

Defoe and the Idea of Fiction: 1713-1719
by Geoffrey Sill.
Associated University Presses, 190 pp., £16.95, April 1984, 0 87413 227 4Show More

The Elusive Daniel Defoe
by Laura Curtis.
Vision, 216 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 85478 435 7Show More

Dofoe’s Fiction
by Ian Bell.
Croom Helm, 201 pp., £17.95, March 1985, 0 7099 3294 4Show More

Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction
by Maximillian Novak.
Nebraska, 181 pp., £21.55, July 1983, 0 8032 3307 8Show More

“... rather briefly. He interprets Robinson Crusoe as being about the need to learn ‘moderation and self-restraint’ and the art of pursuing ‘ease and safety’. The ‘real crux of Crusoe’s moral sensibility’, Sill says, is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s ...”

Joan Didion’s Style

Martin Amis, 7 February 1980

The White Album
by Joan Didion.
Weidenfeld, 223 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 297 77702 5Show More

“... the neurologist concluded: ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In her relatively self-effacing preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem Miss Didion admitted: ‘whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’ Ten years on, the emphasis has changed; you might even say, after 200 pages of these high-profile musings, that ...”

My god wears a durag

Ian Penman: Better than Beyoncé, 6 January 2022

Why Solange Matters
by Stephanie Phillips.
Faber, 256 pp., £9.99, May 2021, 978 0 571 36898 3Show More

“... space to learn to love what I describe in various ways throughout the book as my Black girl weirdo self,’ Phillips writes. Another way in which Solange matters: her excursions into art and literacy and fashion have her speaking in a different way, in different places, to new audiences. Her now frequent art-world projects make her a kind of Bowie figure for ...”

Creamy Polished Globes

Blake Morrison: A.E. Coppard’s Stories, 7 July 2022

The Hurly Burly and Other Stories
by A.E. Coppard, edited by Russell Banks.
Ecco, 320 pp., £16.99, March 2021, 978 0 06 305416 5Show More

“... But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty Realist era of ...”

Gravity’s Smoothest Dream

Matthew Bevis: A.R. Ammons, 7 March 2019

The Complete Poems
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, two vols, 2133 pp., £74, December 2017, 978 0 393 25489 1Show More

“... threatens to live a shadow life as a gerund. Ammons’s early work is sometimes enervated by a self-watchfulness that borders on mannerism; his desire for a life ‘chilled in the attitude of song’ can lead to a sort of pinched imperviousness. When starting out, he proudly explained to an editor that ‘this slight indifference, unwillingness to be ...”

Thee, Thou, Twixt

Mark Ford: Walter de la Mare, 24 March 2022

Reading Walter de la Mare
edited by William Wootten.
Faber, 320 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 0 571 34713 1Show More

“... plastic individual truth immerged in beauty: whereas the scrap of science is for the time being a self-contained announcement of what is an ascertained fact – universally provable by those intelligent enough to comprehend it. You can’t prove a poem; it proves you.Although an early sonnet called ‘The Happy Encounter’ depicts Science as a ...”

Puffed Wheat

James Wood: How serious is John Bayley?, 20 October 2005

The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002
by John Bayley, selected by Leo Carey.
Duckworth, 677 pp., £25, March 2005, 0 7156 3312 0Show More

“... about solipsism in Tolstoy’s world, ‘the simpleness and naturalness of the great open world of self-conceit which Tolstoy knew so well, the world of War and Peace in which solipsism is in reasonable accord with mutuality’. It is War and Peace, with its epic naturalness and its indebtedness to Pushkinian ‘lightness’ that clearly absorbs Bayley, much ...”

What’s left of Henrietta Lacks?

Anne Enright: HeLa, 13 April 2000

“... but the question of intention must be a false one. Under the microscope, the question of ‘self’ is so diffuse and so complicated that it might as well not arise. This is all unlucky talk. I am pregnant for the first time, the bump just beginning to show. I don’t know what my pregnant self is, either. The ...”

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