Joan Smith
Caught in the Web
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
By James Lasdun
Jonathan Cape 218pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
In old-fashioned crime novels, the residents of a sleepy English village are occasionally scandalised by a spate of anonymous letters. It’s usually small stuff, about supposed affairs or minor financial transgressions, but the effect is devastating. In the modern world, it’s all much easier: no need to go to the bother of disguising handwriting or cutting letters out of newspapers. There’s something about the Internet that seems to give people permission to send malicious emails or post poisonous words online. They adopt self-aggrandising pseudonyms or don’t even bother to hide their identities; the chances of being punished are not that high, and the impact – to a deranged mind at least – is intensely satisfying.
Thus Twitter is full of people spewing bile, often directed at complete strangers who’ve annoyed them with a single sentence or a phrase. The lack of proportion and the absence of concern about the impact on blameless individuals are quite startling, and a reminder of a simple fact: being furious
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
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete