George Walden
A Dog’s Life
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
By John Gray
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 221pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Humanity has always had an indifferent press, particularly outside Britain. The only people who believe in progress, Baudelaire wrote, are fools and Belgians. For the Romanian Emil Cioran, ‘existence is our exile and nothingness our home’, while generations of Russians have displayed a degree of misanthropy understandable to anyone who has lived in their country.
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
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings