Auberon Waugh
No Literary Mafia in This House
Several people have enquired why we carried no review of Stephen Fry’s autobiography, Moab is my Washpot (Hutchinson £16.99), in a magazine which boasts of its efforts to cover all the month’s worthwhile books at the beginning of the month they are due to appear. They will be puzzled to see no review even in this issue. The explanation is that although Moab is my Washpot was published on 2 October, it was heavily enough embargoed to keep it out of the November issue as well and has received endless attention since.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'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