LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (Janaury 15, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Reagan’s Make-Believe’….
Reagan: His Life and Legend
by Max Boot.
On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy
by Simon Critchley.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Jessica Olin
By Adam Tooze
‘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.’
James Meek
‘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.’
Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason de León
By Michael Wood
By James Butler
The first time the man heard God, he uprooted his entire life, though he was very old. Then God appeared to him in person, an event which would embarrass later thinkers. God made the man an impossible promise in the shape of a son. His wife was ninety, and she laughed. When the child arrived, it was hardly unreasonable to think it a miracle. They named the child after the laughter.
By Colin Burrow
In 1904 Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume. It didn’t include everything: ‘I want to quietly disown a few things by not thus supremely adopting them,’ as James put it. The ‘disowned’ works included some early gems such as The Europeans. The labour of ‘supremely adopting’ the stuff he still thought worthy was grinding. He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it doesn’t sell.’
By Jean McNicol
A week before the start of the Paris Olympics, Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese women’s gymnastics team, was forced to withdraw from the competition by her national association. She had been reported to the Japan Gymnastics Association for smoking and drinking (on separate occasions, once for each offence). The president of the JGA, Tadashi Fujita, announced that Miyata had been sent home, and bowed deeply.
Stephen Sedley
Rae Armantrout
Thomas Meaney
Boomers Daily 