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 ...”

Kurt Waldheim’s Past

Gitta Sereny, 21 April 1988

Waldheim
by Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen.
Robson, 192 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 86051 506 0Show More

Waldheim: The Missing Years
by Robert Edwin Herzstein.
Grafton, 303 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 246 13381 3Show More

“... end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such as Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka (about whom I wrote in ...”

Spaces between the Stars

David Bromwich: Kubrick Does It Himself, 26 September 2024

Kubrick: An Odyssey
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams.
Faber, 649 pp., £25, January, 978 0 571 37036 8Show More

“... to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

“... got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s stated in the book that Denis Brogan, fellow of Peterhouse, broadcaster and expert on the USA, used to boast that he had fucked in 46 of the 50 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

A Turk, a Turk, a Turk

Christopher Tayler: Orhan Pamuk, 5 August 2004

Snow
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 436 pp., £12.99, May 2004, 0 571 22065 7Show More

“... bears an uncanny resemblance to the narrator – becomes obsessed with the mysteries of European self-fashioning. Over the course of several years, he and the narrator study one another, gazing into mirrors and writing answers to the question ‘Why am I what I am?’ Hoja decides that the Franks’ successes derive from their greater capacity for ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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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