Odd Arne Westad
Cold Hands, Warm Heart
Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
By Frank Costigliola
Princeton University Press 533pp £24.95 order from our bookshop
What role does emotion play in modern diplomacy? Would the US reaction to 9/11 have been different if George W Bush had not needed to act as a Texas cowboy in order to hide his privileged East Coast upbringing? Would the Serbs have got a better deal in the post-Yugoslavia settlement if Slobodan Miloševic had had less of the dark about him? And would the Cold War have ended peacefully if not for Ronald Reagan’s immense personal charm and ability to fuddle the issues?
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
They 'disliked Georgian architecture because it was identified with the enclosure movement ... their preferred style was Elizabethan: half-timbered and gabled'.
Jane Ridley on the houses Edwardian Liberals built.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/liberal-habitats
An author bought a diary on eBay. By a stroke of luck, it formerly belonged to Dora Maar, Picasso's Weeping Woman. Her address book was still tucked inside. What a starting point for a biography, but oh! did I despair of the exclamation marks! https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-art-of-deduction @Lit_Review
Whitman 'licensed poets to place themselves centre stage in their prose, from Adrienne Rich in "What is Found There" to Susan Howe in her prose-poetry hybrids.'
In his memoir, Mark Doty replicates Walt Whitman's 'aesthetic of intimacy', says @nemoloris.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/turning-the-leaves