Patrick O’Connor
How We Laughed
Alexis: The Memoirs of the Baron de Redé
By Hugo Vickers (ed)
The Dovecote Press 176pp £45 order from our bookshop
One day, lunching at the Elysée, Alexis de Redé found himself sitting next to the wife of the then Mayor of Paris, Mme Tibéri. She asked him what he did in life. Nothing, he replied. Impossible, she said, there isn’t a soul who does nothing. ‘On the contrary, I’m always very busy,’ Alexis assured her. ‘One never has enough time in which to do nothing.’
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
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
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