Roy Hattersley
‘They Never Swung For Me’
White Heat is not short of detail. Examining the qualities which made outsider Edward Heath win the race for the Tory Party leadership, Dominic Sandbrook reveals that four different newspapers used the word ‘obsessive’ to describe him, and called him ‘tough’; Sandbrook is as eclectic in his choice of subject as he is meticulous in providing every fact about that controversial decade that even the most demanding reader could possibly desire. When ‘Twiggy’ (or Lesley Hornby as she then was) left school, ‘she weighed just six and a half stones, her shoe size was four and her dress size was six and her bust, waist and hip measurements were 30, 22 and 32 respectively.’
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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