LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Seamus Perry: Pluralism and Poetry; James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered; James Meek on Romania’s Far Right;

Seamus Perry · Pluralism and the Modern Poet: Pluralism and Poetry

‘Art arises,’ Auden writes, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.

Jonathan Rée – Kojève v. Hegel

Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on The Phenomenology of Spirit is not only misleading but slapdash, dogmatic, frivolous and flamboyant. The characters he filled it with, from the Master and Slave to the Sensualist and the Sage, sound rather like Mr Worldly Wiseman, Madam Bubble and Mr Sagacity in Pilgrim’s Progress.

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Visions of America’

Made in Tehran

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History  by Vali Nasr.

No King

Daisy Hay

Friends until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution by James Grant.

One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment by Samuel Scheffler

El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary by Nora Berend