Tag Archives: London Review of Books

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – April 13, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – April 13, 2023 issue:

Let’s go to Croydon – Jonathan Meades

Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain

Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain By John Grindrod Cover Image

Its appeal is part of the recurrent cycle of the centripetal giving way to the lure of the burbs. Save that, in this instance, it’s not the lure that accounts for an invasion of beards and craft beer but the unaffordability of housing in East London. Let’s go to Croydon! For want of anywhere else.

Rewriting the Marcos Years – Sheila S. Coronel

Which archival sources are used and whose voices are silenced? The Marcoses have – for now – claimed the archive and seized the narrative. They tell the story of a golden age followed by a fall and a quest for redemption. In the Philippines, a deeply Catholic country, the story has a satisfying narrative arc.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – March 30, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – March 30, 2023 issue:

The Pocahontas Exception

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History by Francesca Morgan.

In A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), historian Francesca Morgan tracks Americans’ obsession with tracing family ancestry. Morgan sheds light on the evolution of genealogical knowledge from the early republic to the present day. Although our New Books Network conversation concentrates on African Americans, in her text, she looks explicitly at how Anglo-American white, Mormon, Jewish, African American, and Native American people wrestled with locating and documenting their kin and ultimately shaped the practice of genealogy. A Nation of Descendants also explores the transformation of genealogical practices as it becomes commercialized and commodified.

When Thieves Retire

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies―vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – March 16, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – March 16, 2023 issue:

Libel Tourism

Defamation isn’t the only legal threat to investigative journalism. Data protection and privacy laws are increasingly used as alternatives to a libel claim. Unlike a defamation writ, which claimants generally have only a year to file, data protection and privacy actions can be taken up to six years after publication, and there is no defence of truth.

Medieval Selfhood

Medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to God and the devil, and they saw themselves as vulnerable to interference from human and supernatural forces, to both good and bad ends.

Revolutionary Portraiture

The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits or portraits of other women artists, presenting, implicitly, an idea of the female painter as both a subject for portraiture and a professional in her own right.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – March 2, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – March 2, 2023 issue:

This Concerns Everyone

All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. We are shaped by individual, consequential but highly contingent acts of care, or their absence. 


Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care by Madeleine Bunting

The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? by Emma Dowling

Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet by Nancy Fraser

Top of the Lighthouse

It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse that while its raison d’être is to be visible, durable and stable in the most adverse conditions, it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: London Review Of Books – February 16, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – 16 February 2023

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor By Andrew Kirtzman


Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man by Paul Newman, edited by David Rosenthal

The Last Movie Stars directed by Ethan Hawke


The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy by Philippe Sands

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: London Review Of Books – February 2, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – February 2, 2023:

‘Island nations tend to be complacent about border problems, seeing them as things that happen to someone else. But then you have Brexit and Northern Ireland, and it suddenly becomes clear that no one is safe.

Russia is fighting Ukraine about borders. This means that, as well as dodging bombs and getting used to living in the dark, residents of the border zone have to decide if they are “really” Russian or “really” Ukrainian.

Some will no doubt be keeping the non-chosen identity in a trunk in the attic, to be retrieved in case of future need. But the logic of war is stern: those who choose to be Ukrainians are also opting to hate Russians as the enemy invader, while those in Ukraine who choose to be Russians are contemplating the possibility of having to move east.

Wherever the border ultimately settles, there will be fortifications and troops stationed on either side and a series of tightly controlled crossing points. Villages and families will be divided and the normal commerce of economic and social life disrupted. Schools will teach in the language of the victor. Roads that used to lead somewhere will end abruptly.’


The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border by Timothy Phillips

On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border by Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: London Review Of Books – January 19, 2023

Leave a comment

Contents · Vol. 45 No. 2 · 19 January 2023 · LRB

London Review of Books (LRB) – January 19, 2023:

Puzzled Puss

Buster Keaton by James Curtis

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis.

From acclaimed cultural and film historian James Curtis—a major biography, the first in more than two decades, of the legendary comedian and filmmaker who elevated physical comedy to the highest of arts and whose ingenious films remain as startling, innovative, modern—and irresistible—today as they were when they beguiled audiences almost a century ago.

READ AN EXCERPT

Look Inside

I want to be queen

The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti

Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith.

‘Everyone is terribly kind’


The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn Olmsted

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: London Review Of Books – January 5, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – January 5, 2023:

The first issue of LRB volume 45 is now online, featuring Alan Bennett’s diary for 2022, @_jamesmeek on flooding, Anne Enright on Toni Morrison, Jenny Turner @neepmail on Colette, @xlorentzen on Cormac McCarthy and a cover by @Jon_McN.

Eyes that Bite

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Underwater Living

James Meek on housebuilding in the aftermath of the 2013 floods

Arts & Literature, Books, Classics, Podcasts, Readings

Literary Readings: ‘The Illiad’ (London Review)

Leave a comment

London Review of Books (LRB) – December 9, 2022: Among the Ancients, with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones, which we’ll be re-running from January next year. With a new episode each month, Among the Ancients will consider some of the greatest works of Ancient Greek and Roman literature, from Homer to Horace. In this sample Emily and Tom discuss the Iliad.

Among the Ancients: The ‘Iliad’

A sample from the first episode of the Close Readings series from Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones.

Dating to the ninth century B.C., Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox observes in his superb introduction that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it coexists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: London Review Of Books – December 15, 2022

Leave a comment
Laleh Khalili · LRB

London Review of Books (LRB) – December 15, 2022:

In Clover: What does McKinsey do?

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.

The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. This holds that workers are expendable. They can be replaced by machines, or by harder-working employees grateful they weren’t let go in the last round of redundancies. Managers are necessary to the functioning of corporations – or universities, or non-profit organisations – and the more of them the better.

Down among the Press Lords

Writing about the press by Andrew O’Hagan, Ross McKibbin, Jenny Diski, James Meek, Suzanne Moore, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Rusbridger, Thomas Nagel and Raymond Williams.