Tim Stanley
Escape from Neutrality
The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II
By Nicholas Wapshott
W W Norton 464pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
I’ll start with a mea culpa. For a long time, I have dismissed the West’s enemies as small fry, unambitious and far away. And, for a long time, I have advocated an anti-interventionist line in dealing with them. But the massacre of Christians in the Middle East and Russia’s transparent abuse of ceasefire agreements in Ukraine has made me fear that I might have mistaken cowardice for realism. Nicholas Wapshott’s The Sphinx tells the story of an unnervingly similar epoch, in which canny interventionism proved to be a wiser course.
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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings