The New Yorker – January 15, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresBarry Blitt’s “Back to the Future” – The artist depicts a goose-stepping Donald Trump, determined to march back into political relevance.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
Shakespeare, renowned biographer of Bruce Chatwin, reveals a story worthy of a Bond novel in his life of Ian Fleming. The painstakingly researched yet fast-paced book explores Fleming’s childhood, dramatic war years and complex personal life and reveals how they shaped his hugely successful books.
A follow-up to his 2015 biography of le Carré, who died in 2020, Sisman’s latest book exposes the great spy writer’s duplicitous and deceitful relationships with the women in his life, providing new insights into the secret life of the man behind George Smiley. A fascinating, revelatory appendix to Sisman’s fuller life.
Osip Mandelstam: A Biography
by Ralph Dutli, translated by Ben Fowkes (Verso)
This life of “legendary literary saint”, Osip Mandelstam, provides a timely reminder of both the long history of repression in Russia and the powerful role that literature can play when in the right hands. Dutli’s rounded portrait of the Russian poet unafraid to speak truth to power brings to life the man and his time.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
by Anna Funder (Viking/Knopf)
Funder, author of Stasiland, her prizewinning account of the East German secret police, takes six letters written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, as the imaginative springboard for a deep dive into their relationship and her impact on his writing and legacy. A haunting, tragic and revealing book.
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus)
A former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary herself, Ogilvie has written a “people’s history” of the great literary endeavour. Begun in 1879, the OED is an epic, crowdsourced attempt to pin down slippery, evolving language and this book tells the fascinating story of the eclectic and unsung contributors to this living monument to language.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
by Nathan Thrall (Allen Lane/Metropolitan Books)
This quietly heartbreaking work of non-fiction reads like a novel. At its centre is a tragic road accident outside Jerusalem in the West Bank from which Thrall, a Jewish American journalist, carefully traces the labyrinthine lives of those involved and the tangled web of politics, history and culture that ensnare them all.
Literary Review – October 2023: The new issue features How Bond Was Born; Impressions of Monet; Inequality through the Ages; Adam Smith the Socialist, and more…
Anthony Powell, two and a half years older than Ian Fleming, remembered him as ‘one of the few persons I have met to announce that he was going to make a lot of money out of writing novels, and actually contrive to do so’.
You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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