Henry Hitchings
Dripping with an Easy Sensuality…
What image do the words ‘book reviewer’ conjure? For me, thanks no doubt to George Orwell’s essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, they bring to mind a bespectacled tea-drinking man who sits in a dressing gown at a wobbly table, surrounded by unpaid bills and volumes that bear inauspicious titles such as Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa.
A critic of this kind is inevitably jaded. (I shall use the words ‘reviewer’ and ‘critic’ interchangeably.) Among the more obvious vices of the jaded critic – or the merely talentless one – is lexical laziness. We are all aware of the argot of the more lethargic sort
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Is the regulation of speech necessary for achieving wider social goods?
Jonathan Sumption examines the question.
Jonathan Sumption - War of Words
Jonathan Sumption: War of Words - What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors.
Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.
Peter Marshall - Down with the Ox Tax!
Peter Marshall: Down with the Ox Tax! - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
literaryreview.co.uk