Sam Leith
Walking Into Nightmare
J G Ballard is the undisputed laureate of suburban psychosis. He has achieved this, as many have pointed out, by writing a long run of novels that have been very nearly exactly the same: the working-out – in his unique, and uniquely weird, idiom – of a series of preoccupations bordering on the monomaniacal. There was the one about the blandly luxurious gated community where, under the surface, all was madness and murder. Then there was the other one about the blandly luxurious gated community where, under the surface, all was madness and murder. Then there was the other one… and so on.
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
'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