Owen Matthews
The Oligarchy Will Be Televised
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia
By Peter Pomerantsev
Faber & Faber 284pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Russia is at war, and the battlefield is the hearts and minds of ordinary Russians. Information is the weapon, journalists are the foot soldiers, Kremlin ideologists are the generals. Peter Pomerantsev’s perceptive and timely book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible tells the story of how the Russian state ‘weaponized’ information in grim and telling detail. Pomerantsev’s own experiences inside the belly of the leviathan as a young producer for Russian state television give him a unique and chilling insight into the way the state-controlled media in Russia really works.
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
'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
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