Michael Arditti
Meeting the Other
The old adage about not judging a book by its cover should be amended, in the case of Matthew Kneale’s latest, to not judging it by its blurb. Nowhere is there any indication that this is a collection of short stories. On the contrary, it is described simply as a ‘new work’, and the diversity of the settings, from Europe to North and South America, to Africa and the Middle East, is made to seem the expansiveness of a single fiction.
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'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