Vol. 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020

Browse other issues from this year

Cover Artist

Gaby Wood

Alan Bennett

An Ordinary Woman

Letters

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Frazer Hembrow, Judith Kumin, Robyn Marsack, Alan Windsor, Tim Booth, Jacob Ecclestone, Robin Kinross, Paul Bilic, Simon O’Hagan, Martin Shipway, Editor, 'London Review', John Glenday

Pankaj Mishra

Flailing States

Mattathias Schwartz

Short Cuts: John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness

Keith Thomas

Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford. Polity, 216 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 5095 3677 1
The Clean Body: A Modern History by Peter Ward. McGill-Queen’s, 313 pp., £27.99, December 2019, 978 0 7735 5938 7

Tom Crewe

On the Shelf

Philip Clark

Michael Tippett: The Biography by Oliver Soden. Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8

Colin Grant

At Tate Modern: Steve McQueen

Nicole Flattery

Pew by Catherine Lacey. Granta, 207 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 78378 517 9

Rosemary Hill

Victory in the Kitchen: The Life of Churchill’s Cook by Annie Gray. Profile, 390 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 78816 044 5

Ange Mlinko

‘The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice’: A Tiny Homeric Epic by A.E. Stallings. Paul Dry, 109 pp., £19.99, October 2019, 978 1 58988 142 6
Like by A.E. Stallings. Farrar, Straus, 160 pp., £9.99, October 2019, 978 0 374 53868 2

Joanna Biggs

On Dorothea Lange

Jon Day

To Hell and Back: An Autobiography by Niki Lauda. Ebury, 314 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 5291 0679 4
A Race with Love and Death: The Story of Britain’s First Great Grand Prix Driver, Richard Seaman by Richard Williams. Simon and Schuster, 388 pp., £20, March, 978 1 4711 7935 8

August Kleinzahler

Poem: ‘Traveller’s Tales: Chapter 90’

Andrew O’Hagan

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia by Darren Coffield. Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5

Stephen Sedley

Old Tunes

Tariq Ali

Notebooks: 1936-47 by Victor Serge, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman. NYRB, 651 pp., £17.99, April 2019, 978 1 68137 270 9

Erin Maglaque

Machiavelli: His Life and Times by Alexander Lee. Picador, 762 pp., £30, March 2020, 978 1 4472 7499 5

Patricia Lockwood

Diary: Insane after coronavirus?

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