December 2020, Issue 492 H Kumarasingham on British slavery * Karina Urbach on Nazis & nobles * William Boyd on meeting Billy Wilder * Elizabeth Lowry on Vivien Eliot * Lawrence Freedman on Barack Obama * Joanna Kavenna on writers & the weather * Henry Gee on fungi * Andrew Adonis on merit * David Anderson on GCHQ * Richard Vinen on wine in Algeria * David Wheatley on John Berryman's letters * Tom Stern on the Vienna Circle * Susan Owens on Ruskin's art * Salley Vickers on midlife * Andrew Hussey on Jacques Derrida * Anthony Cummins on Richard Owain Roberts * Patricia T O'Conner on Angela Thirkell * James Purdon on Don DeLillo * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
Tim Stanley
Too Nice to Be President?
This is the definitive Jimmy Carter anecdote. Once, when he was president, a bemused journalist asked if it was true that the leader of the free world was in charge of the schedule for the White House tennis court. Of course not, said Carter; don’t be silly. What he had done was tell staff they must speak to his secretary if they wanted to book a tennis session. That way, he elaborated, people cannot use the court simultaneously ‘unless they [are] either on opposite sides of the net or engaged in a doubles contest’. Honest, wonky and utterly without humour, Carter was probably one of the smartest American presidents and, consequently, one of the worst. Two new accounts of his time in office bring clarity and depth to the record, albeit with varying degrees of sympathy. As Jonathan Alter argues... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Karina Urbach
Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance
By Stephan Malinowski (Translated from German by Jon Andrews)
In the closing scene of the film Valkyrie, Hitler’s would-be assassin Count Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise, is about to be shot by a firing squad when his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, suddenly throws himself in front of him. The adjutant takes the bullets and Stauffenberg utters... read more
Xan Smiley
A Brutal State of Affairs: The Rise and Fall of Rhodesia
By Henrik Ellert & Dennis Anderson
The authors of this book paint a detailed and dispassionate yet wrenching picture of the painful and bloody transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in the period following the white leader Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. Their main gift to historians is... read more
Patricia T O'Conner
On Barsetshire
I’m always reminded of Angela Thirkell as Christmas casts its thick gloom (her word, not mine) upon a weary world. ‘No one has ever yet described with sufficient hatred and venom this Joyous and Festive Season,’ she once wrote. A rector in her Barsetshire novels privately regards the Second World War as ‘little but an intensification of Christmas’. And a mother of four grown sons... read more
Salley Vickers
The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Ageing
By Ben Hutchinson
Ben Hutchinson, a mere forty-three, considers that he has reached middle age. In this I suggest he is being a little doomy, but no more so, perhaps, than one of the authors to whom he turns for wisdom and philosophical support, Michel de Montaigne, who retired from political and social life at the ripe old age of thirty-eight to his ‘citadel’ in the Dordogne to compose his meditative essays... read more
H Kumarasingham
The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery
By Michael Taylor
Do you think a human life is worth £5,800? That was the upper end of the value placed on an individual African’s life (in today’s money) when compensation for slave ‘property’ was being negotiated in 1833. When emancipation came the year after in the British West Indies, it did not mean freedom. Instead, existing slaves became ‘apprentices’ and in many cases... read more
William Boyd
My Evening with Marilyn
Reading Jonathan Coe’s fascinating new novel, Mr Wilder and Me, I was reminded of my one and only meeting with Billy Wilder. It was in London in 1993, at the house of a friend. Wilder and his wife, Audrey, were among the guests at the small dinner party. Wilder was eighty-six by then and was on genial good form. We were encouraged to get him to anecdotalise about his years in Hollywood. Thus prompted, I asked him a no doubt familiar question: what was Marilyn Monroe... read more
Most Read
moreXan Smiley
A Brutal State of Affairs: The Rise and Fall of Rhodesia
By Henrik Ellert & Dennis Anderson
Karina Urbach
Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance
By Stephan Malinowski (Translated from German by Jon Andrews)
Tim Stanley
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life
By Jonathan Alter
Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980
By Rick Perlstein
Michael Ignatieff
What’s Wrong with Rights?
By Nigel Biggar
Andrew Adonis
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
By Michael J Sandel
From the Archives
moreFrom the July 2020 issue
John Banville
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
By John Kaag

From the September 2020 issue
Patricia T O'Conner
You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English
By E J White

From the October 2019 issue
Francis Wheen
Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982
By Dominic Sandbrook

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'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad