Rising northwest of Moscow and flowing 2,200 miles southeast to the Caspian Sea, the Volga is Europe’s longest river. Passing through pine forests, black-earth steppe and semi-desert, it is simultaneously part of Russia’s heartland and a marker of the border between Europe and Asia. For Russians, the river is ‘Mother Volga’, subject of song and […]
The Battle of Verdun raged for three hundred days – the longest battle the world has ever seen. Forty million shells were dropped, more than six for every square metre of the battlefield. The conflict left behind a desert in which the soil had undergone the equivalent of ten thousand years of natural erosion. After the war, an arc of land around Verdun was deemed too broken and dangerous to
There were times while reading Count Down that I felt I was going to skip to the final part. Not because I wasn’t gripped – I was – but because I needed a dose of the optimism Shanna Swan wisely promises her readers will be coming at the end. For this is a story of potential apocalypse: the demise of human fertility at worst, the emergence of an unsustainable society of oldies at best. We assume procreation is a choice. We rest easy, believing we can utilise this natural
Commenting on an argument in the Labour Party some years ago as to who should write the manifesto Frank Johnson once asked: ‘who should read it?’ It was a good question, since nothing written by human hand is quite as dull as a British Party political manifesto. Many months ago, as a duty to the […]
For a year of my life, as editor of the Daily Mirror, I suffered the mercurial, maverick and sometimes monstrous behaviour of its owner, Robert Maxwell. Soon after I departed from the newspaper, he departed from life altogether. More on the manner of his death in a moment. In his wake, an awful truth emerged […]
Life after Gravity is structured around the idea that although Isaac Newton is famous as a scientist and mathematician, ‘biographers often glide over’ his later life in London, where he was a prominent member of fashionable society. That is true up to a point, but even some of the biographies cited in this book give […]
Jeremy Heywood, who died in November 2018 at the cruelly young age of fifty-six, was one of the most outstanding British civil servants of recent times. At his memorial service in Westminster Abbey, four prime ministers delivered flowing and affectionate tributes to him. Tony Blair said he was a ‘negotiator of genius’. Gordon Brown said […]
Gay bars are, as anyone who tries to go out in a homosexual fashion knows, disappearing for all sorts of reasons, most of which predate the pandemic: apps, rising rents, gender fluidity. For those who go out in search of them, the fact of their closing can be quite sad. They are a theatre of […]
After Maria Czaplicka had eased herself into a sledge in the furthest, frozen wastes of Siberia in 1914, one question popped into her mind as her party got under way without even attending to supper: ‘What about the reindeer?’ ‘All my thoughts were absorbed by one regret; now I should not get my draught of […]
When I first boarded a container ship to spend five weeks at sea, I made sure to wear trousers for the first week. I thought that I was entering a world of men, a tight-knit, unknown environment where it was easy to throw someone overboard or sexually assault them and there were no police or […]
The genesis of this book was an incident witnessed by the author in El Salvador in 1984. There was civil war between leftist rebels and the US-backed government, whose death squads murdered thousands. The government claimed ignorance of the squads, a position the United States was happy to go along with. What Scott Anderson witnessed […]
An accepted principle in enlightened circles holds that it is morally wrong, or at least ill-mannered, to judge people according to crude or roughly drawn stereotypes. Luckily, this principle is not often extended to millennials, or the young generally, about whom some rich and largely helpful generalisations
The science of consciousness is having a bit of a moment. Long confined to the margins because of concerns about how experimental methods could possibly get a grip on the vagaries of subjective experience, consciousness has become neuroscience’s glittery new thing, the subject of colourful theories, packed-out conventions and the wildest of claims. Understanding how […]
While Mary Wollstonecraft earned her place at the table for pioneering women in Judy Chicago’s art installation The Dinner Party (1974–9), she would not be everyone’s ideal guest. She has a reputation as an acerbic killjoy. She deemed novels to be the ‘spawn of idleness’. She did not embrace women in sisterhood but censured them for their propensity to ‘despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain’. Wollstonecraft has proved both an inspiration and a challenge to those who have come after her. Her life and works, as Sylvana Tomaselli demonstrates in this wide-ranging new book, contain startling contradictions. On the one hand, she championed women’s capacity for reason in an age that
Robert Twigger is always worth reading. His gonzo Angry White Pyjamas, an account of joining a hardcore martial arts school in Japan and being put through his paces, is one of my favourite travel books. Just as fearless have been his journeys into the Canadian northwest, which he crossed by birchbark canoe, and across the […]
The term ‘New Romantic’ was coined by the pioneering electronic musician Richard Burgess to describe the showy pop subculture that exploded in the British club scene in the late 1970s. As those present will attest, the New Romantics were never anything as unified as a movement. Some called themselves ‘Futurists’ and ‘gender benders’. The press […]
There is no lack of published biographical material on Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart (1756–91), the singular musical genius who put the piano concerto on the map, birthed some of the greatest operas in the repertoire and left behind him a stream of glorious melodies. He was also, from the evidence of his letters, uncouth […]
As the senior curator of fashion at the V&A, Claire Wilcox knows more than most about the feel of fabric and buttons, the hang, cut, history and context of clothing. She understands that what we wear is more than just what we wear: it’s an expression of something deep about what we are, our personal […]
Here are two huge subjects, and one of them, class, is tricky, to say the least. This book attempts to mesh them together. What is British food? Some countries don’t have a cuisine. Well, they do, but it isn’t often mentioned. You never hear of anybody rushing to a German restaurant – outside of Germany, […]
Ben Hutchinson, a mere forty-three, considers that he has reached middle age. In this I suggest he is being a little doomy, but no more so, perhaps, than one of the authors to whom he turns for wisdom and philosophical support, Michel de Montaigne, who retired from political and social life at the ripe old age of thirty-eight to his ‘citadel’ in the Dordogne to compose his meditative essays.
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A review of my biography of Wittgenstein, and of his newly published last love letters, in the Literary Review: via @Lit_Review
Jane O'Grady - It’s a Wonderful Life
Jane O'Grady: It’s a Wonderful Life - Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb;...
literaryreview.co.uk
It was my pleasure to review Stephanie Wambugu’s enjoyably Ferrante-esque debut Lonely Crowds for @Lit_Review’s April issue, out now
Joseph Williams - Friends Disunited
Joseph Williams: Friends Disunited - Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
literaryreview.co.uk