Bryan Appleyard
Let Us Withdraw
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
By John Gray
Granta Books 246pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
It is often casually assumed that we have assimilated Charles Darwin. He established the mechanism of our relationship to the natural world and thereby completed the project that began with Copernicus – the displacement of humankind from its throne at the centre of creation. Darwin, Richard Dawkins has said, made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist.
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