Why are the Journals of Fanny Kemble not at least as well known as those of Dorothy Wordsworth? Because Dorothy can be viewed as a useful adjunct to Wordsworth and Coleridge, whereas Fanny Kemble makes the men in her life seem like adjuncts to her? Because she left her husband? Because her revelations about life […]
This stupid, vulgar, fatuous, conceited, half-baked and badly written book will give pleasure to the multitude of Trump haters. Many of these coalesce around the Doonesbury cartoons written by Gary Trudeau, the world’s wittiest cartoonist. For those unaquainted with Trudeau’s stuff (and for them a rich pleasure lies ahead), it should be pointed out that […]
‘I hope these disparate pieces add up to something’, writes Martin Amis with uncharacteristic diffidence in his introduction to this collection of occasional journalism ‘offered with all generic humility’. No time spent in Mr Amis’s company is ever wasted. He is a fine novelist who turns an elegant and often hilarious sentence. But even at […]
NIGEL HAMILTON’s ACCOUNT of Bill Clinton’s life and early career – up until the Arkansas governor was elected President in 1992 – must surely rank as the most peculiar political biography ever written by a respectable academic author. The book is hvided into fragments (typically a page and a half long), each suggestive of […]
IT HAS OFTEN been observed that America is full of faith. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1830 he was struck by what he called the ‘religious aspect’ of the Republic. In a democracy built on the separation of church and state, Tocqueville found a happy accommodation between the two – the […]
MORE CLAPTRAP HAS probably been spoken about the US Constitution than any other subject, and the less Americans know about it, the more they use it as an emotive totem. In his predictably entertaining study of the years between the Constitutional Conference at Philadelphia in 1787, when the Founding Fathers drew up the sacred document, […]
ON 5 NOVEMBER 1994 Ronald Reagan announced in a letter to his fellow Americans that he had Alzheimer’s disease, probably triggered by a bad fall from a horse in 1989; and for some years he has ceased to attend those occasions when past presidents muster alongside the current incumbent of the White House. Reagan has […]
When Daniel Boone died in 1820, just a few days short of his eighty-sixth birthday, he was already the most famous American on the frontier and would maintain that position, even when challenged later by the likes of Davy Crockett and Kit Carson. His career was coextensive with the birth of the United States and […]
Skinner v Oklahoma (1942) is an important US Supreme Court decision, because, in annulling an Oklahoma sterilisation law, it supposedly inaugurated the modern era of civil rights. As William O Douglas, perhaps the most activist of the court’s liberal judges, observed in Skinner’s opening sentence: ‘This case touches a sensitive and important area of human […]
Dave Barry, the syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald, once observed that the authors of American history are nowadays compelled occasionally to throw in the sentence, ‘meanwhile, women and minorities were making great strides.’ Multiculturalism is the grand premise of the modern American story, and while this salient fact hardly deserves the excesses of political […]
Although little known in Britain, Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the American public’s favourite popular historians. Her career began in bizarre circumstances: as a young White House intern in the Lyndon Johnson years, she became a kind of muse to the troubled president, who poured out his social and political anxieties in a string […]
‘Some stories never end,’ wrote Don DeLillo in 2005, reflecting upon Libra (1988), his account of the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald. ‘Even in our time, in the sightlines of living history, in the retrieved instancy of film and videotape, there are stories waiting to be finished, open to the thrust of reasoned […]
Reading George Packer’s account of the shredding of America’s social contract, it becomes clear that the author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is no John Dos Passos. That’s not too surprising, since Dos Passos, who died in 1970, was always a one-off, whether as the communist-sympathising novelist whose trilogy U.S.A. remains the great […]
For most of its history American foreign policy has been episodic. In the first century and a half of independence, the governing principle was to stay out of foreign affairs altogether. The United States may have chased down Barbary pirates, huffily engaged in border disputes and intervened in one Caribbean island or another, but even […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm