Les Murray vies with John Ashbery and Geoffrey Hill for the title of most prominent living poet passed over for a Nobel Prize. Readers who come to Murray hoping for an Antipodean Seamus Heaney will find a more ornery figure, endlessly bountiful but lacking the Irishman’s diplomatic gene. A vein of outspoken anger runs through […]
Modern German poetry can plausibly be divided into two main lines of descent. At the head of one tradition stands Friedrich Hölderlin, initiating, at the turn of the 19th century, a poetry of subjective inwardness, metaphysical intensity and syntactical compression that finds its most important 20th-century expression in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and […]
A rich body of legend has gathered around the figure of J H Prynne. In Iain Sinclair’s novel Radon Daughters (1994) he becomes Simon Undark, ‘hermit and scribe, the conscience of England’, ‘famous for his goldfish tie’, ‘the most intelligent entity on the island’: ‘At England’s darkest hour, initiates muttered Undark’s name like a password.’ In […]
The day after W G Grace’s funeral, a writer placed an advertisement in The Sportsman announcing that he had been commissioned to produce a biography of the great man, asking all those who had known him to come forward. And they did, in droves. Since then, there has been a steady stream of books on […]
For years, David Hume was seen as a traitor to philosophy. When his masterpiece of 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, merely boggled or terrified its readers, he is said to have retreated into mercenary journalism and history writing. The brief autobiography Hume wrote a few months before his death in 1776, My Own Life, […]
Lee Miller is best remembered nowadays as a war photographer, a chronicler of the misery of defeat and destruction that was Europe in 1944 and 1945, its inhabitants wretched, its roads clogged with refugees searching for their homes. ‘Germany is a beautiful landscape’, Miller wrote in one of her reportages for Vogue, ‘dotted with jewel-like […]
In 1929, Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl competed for the role of Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s film The Blue Angel. According to Riefenstahl, von Sternberg was in love with her
Augustus’s victory over Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC left him in control of the Roman world after a period of civil war that stretched back to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49. Augustus’s unrivalled military power base and personal prestige gave him a supremacy that he was unwilling […]
In July 1799, the 29-year-old Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt finally reached South America. When he docked in New Andalusia (present-day Venezuela), he plunged his thermometer into the sand, logging a temperature of 37.7ºC. It would be the first of the many thousands of recordings he would make during his journey across the Americas, from testing the charge of electric eels on his own arm to measuring earthquake tremors in Caracas and taking periodic altitude readings on his precious barometers that smashed one by one as the voyage progressed
In view of the treasure trove of original sources at Charles Moore’s disposal, he and his publishers have sensibly decided to stretch the authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher from two volumes
Any book with this title must detail how Germany fought the Second World War and the effect that fighting had on its people. Nicholas Stargardt does that rigorously and with wide-ranging scholarship that embraces numerous primary and secondary sources. But such a book also has to consider the moral character of a nation and people […]
‘What if?’ is the great question of history, all the more so for being unanswerable. What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver had not taken a wrong turn and stalled the engine in June 1914 in Sarajevo, thus denying Gavrilo Princip the opportunity to open fire and kill the Habsburg heir? What if Hitler had been […]
Ronald Reagan was a canny old thing. In the 1966 primary to select the Republican candidate for governor of California, his opponent complained that he always stole the show at photo calls: ‘They would put us in line for a photograph … as soon as the photographer was about to snap the picture, Reagan would […]
The Dark Ages did not become dark, or the Middle Ages medieval, until the 19th century, when it turned out that the Nuova Scienza, the ‘New Learning’ of the Italians, had really been the Renaissance, a rebirth of old learning. But the Enlightenment named itself as it was happening: l’Illuminisme, Aufklärung, Haskalah. As Vincenzo Ferrone […]
Mary Beard keeps coming back to the same name: Catiline. Who was he and what did he want? When he conspired to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC, was he acting as a ‘far-sighted radical or an unprincipled terrorist’? Was he a glory-hunting idealist or the victim of senators’ paranoia? And when today’s protesters […]
‘It’s not so easy writing about nothing’, states Patti Smith at the beginning of M Train. She just makes it look easy. M Train is essentially a companion piece to her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, which was a record of her life in New York in the early 1970s with her friend the photographer Robert […]
‘Must we document everything?’ exclaims Greta Gerwig, heroine of Noah Baumbach’s recent film Mistress America, when someone takes a casual snap of her on a mobile phone. Tweets, emails and instant photography allow us to keep constant track of our lives and to bombard the outside world with the details. But one wonders what effect […]
Here are three chilling but revealing books about North Korea and the perils of escaping from it. Lucia Jang surprised me by making plain that even after decades of brainwashing by the ruling Kim dynasty, ordinary Koreans remain traditional and superstitious in their habits and beliefs. But the cruelty of the North Korean regime is […]
In the 1997 movie Wag the Dog – cowritten by David Mamet and released just a month before the eruption of the Monica Lewinsky scandal – a Washington spin doctor played by Robert De Niro seeks to distract the public’s attention from a sexual scandal involving the president by inventing a war in Albania. The […]
If you are looking for a celebration of the failure of the South African dream following the end of apartheid, this is the book for you. ‘What is now clear, just 20-odd years later and beyond any reasonable doubt,’ R W Johnson triumphantly asserts towards the book’s end, ‘is that “liberation” has failed, that the […]
India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
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Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
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India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
literaryreview.co.uk
Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
literaryreview.co.uk