Christopher Coker
Alibis of Aggression
The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred
By Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 745pp £25 order from our bookshop
In Steven Spielberg’s film War of the Worlds there is a scene which is often missed by audiences, but it captures the fragmentation of the Western world (and with it the decline of Western influence) which is a major theme of Niall Ferguson’s book. Rushing back to his home in Brooklyn, Tom Cruise bundles his children into his car. The Martian tripods can be seen zapping everything in their wake. In Wells’s novel, the frightened priest asks: ‘Why are these things permitted? … What are these Martians?’ Cruise’s son asks his father the same question. ‘What are they, dad? Terrorists?’ ‘No son, far worse.’ ‘You mean they are from Europe?’
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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'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