There is a long history of FBI meddling in the affairs of public intellectuals in America, and it’s not a happy one. State surveillance of writers and political activists (such as Martin Luther King Jr) became an obsession under the bizarre and dictatorial leadership of J Edgar Hoover, who served as director from its inception […]
In the latter part of 1894, A E Housman drafted a poem in which he complained about the state’s interference in the private lives of men such as himself. ‘Let God and man decree/Laws for themselves and not
Shortly before Christmas 1996, six people working for the International Committee of the Red Cross were shot dead in their beds in Chechnya. The turnout at their funeral in Geneva’s St-Pierre Cathedral was vast; and so was the sense of shock. For almost the first time in the history of the Red Cross its delegates, […]
Thousands and thousands of years ago, when I was an innocent and idealistic undergraduate, I spent a summer travelling alone in Greece. One evening, as I was making my way to a restaurant on the Ionian island of Zakynthos, I was accosted by a group of youths who wanted me to go dancing with them. […]
Master Danny bounces in with his plucky Sony – the tenth muse – and asks us to jaw on about Eton. And we did, all forty of us, a brace of bishops, a pair of earls including a former Prime Minister and his brother the playwright, a trumpeter and a couple of chaps in films. […]
In the mid-1970s a mighty crisis shook the Conservative Party and all the people with property which it represents. The problem was not just that a Labour Government won two elections in 1974. The victories were narrow, and the Labour politicians were as soft as ever. The cause of the crisis was the strength and […]
Short and lively reflections about doctoring by Dr Donald Gould. Qualified in 1942, he saw the days before the NHS and the therapeutic revolution: even if you could afford a doctor, he could prescribe little more than sympathy and hot drinks. Dr Gould is now a writer and broadcaster and has had periods as an […]
Hitler’s Children began as a series of interviews conducted with the children of eight prominent National Socialists, plus two others. ‘I knew that several books had studied the children of concentration camp survivors,’ Posner explains, ‘but . . . I was not aware of any attempt to study the children of the perpetrators.’ And so […]
This book’s unprepossessing title and cover lend it an unfortunate resemblance to the interminable books sometimes written by Labour MPs but more often ‘ghosted’ by their researchers, which have all the charismatic appeal and thrilling unpredictability of an English weather forecast. If they’re not wet, they’re bound to be windy. The prospect of a book […]
Always be suspicious when politicians use a quotation from a source you are certain they have not read personally. Thatcher told us earlier this year how affectionately she remembered that postwar chart-topper, ‘How much is that doggie in the window? The one with the wagg-ely tail.’ I dare say that, if pressed, she could repeat […]
I have always feared that Michael Foot and I have at least one weakness in common. Both of us find it almost impossible to accept Oliver Cromwell’s advice and at least consider the possibility that we might be wrong. So it is not surprising that, having been on opposite sides of what Foot calls the […]
Count Alexandre de Marenches, and the French secret service which he headed for eleven years, are both great fun. The Count is 67, 6’1”, 15 stone, half American, trilingual and of ancient Burgundian lineage. This delightful and revealing book was written with Christine Ockrent, loved by every Frenchman as France’s most intelligent television journalist. She […]
‘The God of the Germans’, wrote Jung in a notorious essay of 1936 which was said to lend support to Nazi anti-Semitism, ‘is not the Christian God but Wotan.’ Leo Abse agrees. The leitmotiv of his profoundly disturbing and compulsively readable book is that a destructive aggressiveness, a Wagnerian megalomania, lurks at the root of […]
When I first went to university I was determined to rebel against my middle-class Catholic parents. The only problem was that I wasn’t sure how. This was the early Eighties: the era of revolutionary politics was over; drugs and casual sex were frustratingly unavailable (to me, anyway). And then, unexpectedly, a brilliant solution presented itself, […]
There are nearly one and a half million people locked behind bars in the United States. This is a threefold increase since 1980 and the numbers are rising by more than 8 per cent a year. Over 2,700 prisoners were under sentence of death in thirty–six states at the end of 1993. In that year […]
The anthology wasn’t always the thing we know and publishers love . The first ever anthology was an epic undertaking, a collection of six thousand elegiac Greek poems, collated over the ages from 60 BC to the tenth century AD. By 1856 the anthology had shrunk to ‘A collection of the flowers of verse, ie […]
African Women tells, ‘in their own words’, the harrowing yet ultimately uplifting story of the experiences of three generations of women from Mark Mathabane’s immediate family: Granny, now in her eighties, his mother, Geli, and his sister Florah. All three live in Alexandra township near Johannesburg, and each in her own time has endured overwhelming […]
This book is the product of two different kinds of legacy. The first was in 1698, when a young man named Elias Ball, son of poor tenant farmers in rural Devon, learned that he had inherited – from an aunt he never met – a part share in a plantation in South Carolina, together with […]
On the cover of Out of the Night is a weeping face. Or is it a wax death mask? At its edges pink drops fall towards a shadowy pillow, above which they float as if in some exquisitely painful dream. It seems the perfect metaphor for the death-in-life state of the condemned prisoner, which in […]
The Nuer compute time according to male maturity rites, whether events happen before or after the last incision ceremony.The Mayan calendar started at the time the rains came, then ran for 260 days – a human gestation period. The Trobriand islanders set their clocks by the palolo worm. When it comes to the surface […]
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This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.
Congratulations to @HanKangOfficial, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
We've lifted the paywall on Joanna Kavenna's review of The White Book from November 2017.
Joanna Kavenna - Carte Blanche
Joanna Kavenna: Carte Blanche - The White Book by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)
literaryreview.co.uk
Few surveys of British art exist. Those that do have given disproportionate space to recent trends and neglected the 150 years between Hogarth and Turner.
@robinsimonbaj examines what launched British artists of this era into the European stratosphere.
Robin Simon - The Wright Stuff
Robin Simon: The Wright Stuff - The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor
literaryreview.co.uk