Josh Glancy
The Great Emancipator
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
W W Norton & Co 426pp £21 order from our bookshop
When Barack Obama took to the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park in November 2008 to make his presidential acceptance speech, it was no great surprise when he turned to the words of Abraham Lincoln as he sought to emphasise his desire for bipartisanship. ‘We are not enemies, but friends,’ he told his Republican opponents; ‘though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection’. The quote was written into the speech on the advice of Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who told the speechwriters to ‘figure out a good Lincoln quote to bring it all together’.
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
'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
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish