In his new book, Ed Husain takes the temperature of Muslim Britain by visiting mosques in ten cities across the UK at Friday prayers. There are 3.4 million British Muslims, divided by culture, theology and class as well as temperament, and many rarely attend Friday prayers since they are either working or not especially religious. […]
I’m not sure if Cyril Connolly was the first person, with his Theory of Permanent Adolescence, to argue that the English ruling classes suffered from a mass case of arrested development, their attitudes and mind-set formed and frozen by the great public schools they attended. At any rate, this idea is reprised and brought up […]
‘Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man,’ wrote the great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment David Hume. Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide appropriately intersperses exegesis of Hume’s philosophy with biography, character analysis and maxims on how to live that are extracted or derived from his writings. It is also an […]
Through the 1990s and 2000s, I often wondered whether the student-led democratic protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 would prove to be a blip in China’s progress or a turning point. The argument for seeing them as a blip was that China’s direction had already been set – its opening to […]
In 1554 or early 1555, the future Elizabeth I, under house arrest during the reign of her half-sister, Mary I, used her diamond ring to scratch these words on a window pane of Woodstock Manor gatehouse: ‘Much suspected by me,/Nothing proved can be,/Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.’ The inscription, though now lost, was attested to by John […]
In February last year, Victoria Newton assumed the editorship of The Sun, still the UK’s most widely purchased daily. More or less simultaneously, Emma Tucker took the reins at the Sunday Times. At much the same time, Alison Phillips, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mirror, added the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People to her responsibilities. Not […]
Given the wealth of eyewitness accounts, we have a clear idea of what living in the Weimar Republic was like. At one end of the literary spectrum, there are the jaded forensics of Joseph Roth; at the other, the musings of its privileged Pollyanna, Stefan Zweig. But when another witness steps forward, with eyes and […]
Ivor Gurney’s name has endured remarkably well for a man who went mad at an early age and was a war poet overshadowed (in fame, at least) by other war poets and a composer overshadowed by other composers. It is perhaps the bizarreness of Gurney’s life, as much as his unquestionable talent in not one […]
In the course of an extraordinarily productive career spanning six decades, Pat Rogers has written cogently, perceptively and memorably about all kinds of literature, as well as about the character and capacities of literary criticism. His powers of scrutiny and summary are often arresting and always dedicated to resisting imprecision. In his latest book, Rogers imparts
Seventy years on, the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a nondescript couple from Manhattan’s Lower East Side sentenced to death in the electric chair, still holds a horrid fascination. The Rosenberg story has been explored in books, films and on the stage, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991) being one notable example. ‘It […]
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 still provides a compelling and dramatic story that is worth retelling. It is a story with a limited cast and a clear plot line spread over a few days. For most people, it began on Monday 22 October when President John F Kennedy announced the discovery of Soviet nuclear missile bases on Cuba and demanded that they be removed. The tension eased a little on 25 October, when Soviet ships presumed
Today, such is the veneration for all things Darwin, it might seem surprising that at its first offering in 1866 Charles Darwin’s childhood home, The Mount in Shrewsbury, didn’t sell and had to be auctioned the following year. By 1866 On the Origin of Species (1859) was in its fourth edition and further books on […]
That the best anecdotes come from friends of friends is a truism. In Nick Hunt’s case, the task of tale-telling falls to his hiking pal Dougie, who, while they are huddled together in a bothy high in the Cairngorms, recalls an acquaintance who slipped when climbing. Untethered, the poor man hurtled down the mountain, only […]
‘Art, considered as the expression of any people as a whole, is the response they make in various mediums to the impact that the totality of their experience makes upon them, and there is no sort of experience that works so constantly and subtly upon man as his regional environment,’ wrote Mary Austin in The English Journal in 1932. ‘It orders and determines all the direct, practical ways of his getting up and lying down, of staying in and going out, of housing and
‘I was born to bust the balls of half humanity,’ wrote Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1837. For the Italian patriot, surveying the peninsula’s patchwork of duchies and kingdoms in the 1840s, many dominated by foreign powers, there were plenty of balls to bust: ‘Papal balls, French balls, Bourbon balls, above all Austrian balls’, the translator, novelist and […]
Meritocracy has come in for some hard knocks of late. Critical race theorists, egalitarians and others on the left deride meritocracy as ideology, a mechanism for perpetuating and legitimising hierarchy, elite privilege and structural inequities. Populists on the right are no less contemptuous, dismissing elites who claim to owe their positions in society to superior ability and effort as the shills of a system that is ‘rigged’. Prominent critics
In The Republic, Plato famously argued for a communism of the ruling class. An elite of guardians freed from the distractions of private property would govern with philosophical detachment. Aristotle thought the idea was unrealistic. Plato was no mere dreamer, however. More than anything, it was Roman Catholicism that kept civilisation going in Europe’s Dark […]
Spooked is about ‘private spies’: companies and individuals providing upmarket investigation services. The book looks at the tactics they use to gather information, ranging from old-fashioned ‘human-sourced’ reporting to sophisticated surveillance and hacking. Clients tend to be corporations and wealthy individuals looking for ‘strategic intelligence’ (that is, exposés) on rivals and competitors. Sources are mostly […]
The Nobel Prize for Economics has been won three times by psychologists. How long will it be before an anthropologist claims the honour? There have already been a number of books and papers written by anthropologists about the financial world. It appears that they find financial tribes as interesting and complex as they once did […]
The Sackler name adorns the buildings of many elite arts and academic institutions, from the Metropolitan, Guggenheim and Smithsonian museums to Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities, Tate Modern, the V&A and the Louvre. It even appears in a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey. That’s what hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropy buys you. Such money has also earned members of this elusive family access to refined circles, mansions and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘In matters of the heart, cats are at the heart of the matter.’
So says @OSoden on the explosion of cat mania in the early twentieth century.
Oliver Soden - Pussies Galore
Oliver Soden: Pussies Galore - Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
literaryreview.co.uk
A recent inquiry found that British security services had effectively licensed the IRA assassin known as Stakeknife to commit multiple murders.
@malodoherty picks apart the murky world of spying and counterespionage in Northern Ireland.
Malachi O’Doherty - Belfast Confidential
Malachi O’Doherty: Belfast Confidential - Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Espionage, Murder and Justice ...
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Creative non-fiction, I am so sick of this bullshit’, says Michael Anderson, an editor of the New York Times Book Review.
@rosalyster returns to its genesis.
Rosa Lyster - Two Sides to the Story
Rosa Lyster: Two Sides to the Story - The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble Rousers, O...
literaryreview.co.uk