LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Mrs. Dalloway’s Demons

Unconditional Looking

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ 
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9

‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel 
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3

Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2

Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3

Ouvriers de luxe

Gustave Flaubert et Michel Lévy: Un couple explosif 
by Yvan Leclerc and Jean-Yves Mollier.
Le Livre de Poche, 224 pp., €8.40, November 2024, 978 2 253 94112 5

Fish in the Wrong Place

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World 
by Corey Ross.
Princeton, 447 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 691 21144 2

In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 220 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 27849 1

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Pico in Purgatory; Can cellos remember?; Britain’s Europe Problem…

Pico in Purgatory

Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?

Britain’s Europe Problem

From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken. 

Computers that want things

For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember that existing iterations of AI can’t care. The chatbot doesn’t not care like a human not caring: it doesn’t care like a rock doesn’t care, or a glass of water. AI doesn’t want anything. But this is bound to change.