During his eighteen-year tenure as chairman of the USA’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was arguably the world’s most powerful public servant, and probably the most revered. This soft-spoken New Yorker – blue-suited and bespectacled like an older Clark Kent – came to be credited with an almost superhuman ability to calm or […]
Beware of beauty. The cover portrait of Elizabeth Jane Howard transfixes you, but beauty failed to bring her happiness – quite the opposite, in fact. It plays a starring role in Artemis Cooper’s perceptive biography and led Jane (as everyone called her) into a breathtaking number of doomed affairs and three marriages which ended in […]
Winners of the Somerset Maugham Award for young authors are required to spend their prize money on foreign travel. Angela Carter, the 1969 winner, lit out for the Orient. She abandoned Paul Carter, her husband of nine years standing
‘What contrasting planes of existence he moved in – vibrating at a swing between the artificial gaieties of a London season and the quaintnesses of a primitive rustic life.’ So, late in his long life, Thomas Hardy described the self-division
Jan Morris likes to be known as a ‘writer about places’ (a much classier designation than mere ‘travel writer’). But she herself is best understood in the context of journeys. A loafer who quietly observes as she moves among peoples and places, she has undergone a series of remarkable personal odysseys. These include her well-publicised […]
Anthony Powell said that John Betjeman had ‘a whim of iron’. To judge by these compulsive letters, Patrick Leigh Fermor had a pleasure-loving streak of purest titanium. From the first letter,
The imminent publication of Tony Gould’s biography of Colin MacInnes, Inside Outsider, is well timed. For MacInnes is an unfairly neglected figure, and it’s only in the 1980’s that we can see how ahead of his time he really was. His three London novels – City of Spades, Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice […]
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Booker McConnell Prize for 1981, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the English Speaking Union Literary Award. A fecund, dynamic, baroque, transformative fable of memory and politics – ‘a commingling of the improbable and the mundane’ – the book has been equally acclaimed on both sides of the […]
A court case story in the Daily Mirror seemed to say it all. ‘Jilted guns freak killed party guest’ (July 15th). A twenty-year-old Brummie was refused sex by a girl at a party and said he was going to ‘blow someone’s head off’. It was alleged that he then fetched a sawn-off shotgun from his […]
Hypocrisy doesn’t have the cachet of other vices. It is typically petit bourgeois, lacking the aristocratic glamour of jealousy or ambition, the subject matter of the great tragic writers. Vanity is better regarded. Avarice does more damage. Cruelty is in an altogether different league. Hypocrites will be sent, if they are unlucky enough to meet […]
A visitor to the presbytery of St Peter’s Morningside in Edinburgh during the 1920s would have realised at once that the occupant was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill Roman Catholic priest. There were fitted carpets (a most unusual luxury at this period) of a soft velvety quality. The leaded casements in the windows shut out the Edinburgh […]
Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be believed, it seems unlikely that Michael Cox’s ‘informal portrait’ of M R James can have captured the essence of the […]
Do American politicians and academics take office for the office itself or for the memoirs? The question often seems to me moot. Every four years, during the dreary and debilitating inter regnum, outgoing officials scurry around publishers or, if they are lucky, have publishers scurry around them. At the same time incoming officials equip themselves […]
In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the mass slaughter of the Jews was beginning. Our hearts bled for the Jewish men, women and children, and […]
Nineteenth-century Bretons had their own distinctive obsession with death. When the novelist Prosper Mérimée visited Brittany in the 1830s, he was appalled to discover that it was usual to dig up the dead after a few years and rebury them in a lean-to next to the church. By the time they were unearthed the bones […]
The opening of the Russian archives following the collapse of the Soviet regime has wrought the summary demise of much scholarly work on the history of the twentieth century. It is not in Soviet studies alone that the effect has been felt, however, as restored intellectual freedom begins to realise the vast range of treasures […]
Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) is on every list of great mathematicians. However, he had a day job as a judge in Richelieu’s France and his great theorems were scribbled, with little or no proof, in the margins of a book. About his Last Theorem he tantalisingly noted: ‘I have discovered a truly marvellous demonstration which […]
The frontispiece to this remarkable book reproduces an 1882 advertisement in a weekly evangelical magazine – a strip cartoon representing, consecutively, children in a doss-house, huddled together under a bridge, being led and carried away by a rescue worker presumably to a waifs-and-strays home, on a railway platform setting out for Canada, and meeting their […]
A story is told of G. E. Moore, seated in his study, being asked, ‘What is philosophy?’ He replied, after a pause, with a wave of his hand at the bulging shelves, ‘What all these books are about’. Professor Rorty implicitly asks ‘What is philosophy?’ but explicitly, with a wave of his pen at many […]
The White Hotel tells the fictional story of Lisa Erdman, the daughter of a Jewish Ukrainian grain merchant and a German Catholic mother. In her very early childhood Lisa witnesses two scenes of adulterous love-making between her mother and her uncle, the first of which also involves her mother’s twin sister. When she is five […]
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