LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 11, 2025): The latest issue features Mussolini to Meloni; A trip to Mar-a-Lago; The Brothers Grimm and Europe’s Holy Alliance…
Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years.
On Sunday, 9 March, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will be collaborating on an evening of music and readings inspired by Edward Said’s last, posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.
Marion Milner believed in the importance of creative fulfilment (the ‘genius’ inside every one of us) and offered a kind of manual for finding it. From her earliest self-experiments through decades of psychoanalytic practice she took seriously the need to feel ‘real in living’, and tried to theorise the therapeutic potential of aesthetic experience, however minimal.
William had spent most of his life in the care of the state. His story was one of intergenerational trauma, common to many families in the West of Scotland, and of the lies Scotland tells itself about its treatment of its most vulnerable young people.
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe.
While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste.
Tom Stevenson: Hamas: The Quest for Power by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell
Jessie Childs: The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin
Michael Wood: At the Movies: ‘The Brutalist’
Alex de Waal: How to Measure Famine
Michael Dobson:
White People in Shakespeare: Essays in Race, Culture and the Elite edited by Arthur LittleShakespeare’s White Others by David Sterling BrownThe Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare while Talking about Race by Farah Karim-Cooper
‘Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both at home and abroad. To formulate and articulate those, the Democrats need politicians, not algorithms. They need personalities capable of responding to the profound questions facing contemporary America.’
‘Would the army as a whole rise up against a government that made territorial concessions to Russia? Perhaps. But the more widely the recruiters spread their net, the more the army reflects a society that is starting to talk openly, if bitterly, about swapping land for peace.’
Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border by Ieva Jusionyte
Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason de León
London Review of Books (LRB) – October 30 , 2024: The latest issue features ‘What was Bidenomics?’; Jenny Turner returns to Gillian Rose and Julian Barnes – Drinking for France…
Jenny Turner
Love’s Work by Gillian Rose – Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson
Josephine Quinn – At the British Museum: ‘Silk Roads’
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain and Their Many Enemies by Andy BeckettA Woman like Me by Diane AbbottKeir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
London Review of Books (LRB) – October 16 , 2024: The latest issue features Bee Wilson – Bad Samaritan; Sheila Fitzpatrick – Learning to Love the Dissidents and Adam Shatz – Israel’s Forever War…
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans
By Michael Wood
At the Movies: ‘Megalopolis’
Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn
After Nasrallah
Short Cuts: Reading J.D. Vance
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious