Review 31 Reviews

Delicious, But Not Enough

Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

reviewed by Dominic Fox

Richard Seymour's much-anticipated book about social media takes its title from Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a surrealist painting which expresses a kind of horror of automation, of birdsong driven by crankshaft. Although it delivers a solid analysis of the driving mechanisms of social media and the commercial imperatives that have shaped them, the insistent focus of Seymour's critique is on the eagerness with which users of these technologies have allowed ourselves to be cast as automata,... [read more]

A Joyous Shot at How Things Ought to Be

Clive James, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin

reviewed by William Poulos

The late Clive James had much in common with Philip Larkin. In verse and prose, both men wrote long, complex sentences — sometimes covering a whole stanza — without losing the rhythms of common speech; in verse and prose, both blazed with wit and wrote scores of memorable lines. (James is one of the few critics to recognize this quality in Larkin’s prose. He rightly praises Larkin’s jazz criticism, but Larkin’s literary criticism was just as insightful and well-phrased: “Whether... [read more]

Encyclopaedias in the Family Home

Kit de Waal (ed.), Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers

reviewed by Thom Cuell

In Authentocrats, the critic Joe Kennedy identified a recent trend in populist discourse for appealing to a homogenised idea of the ‘working class’ experience. Taking as a starting point Owen Smith’s disastrous challenge for the Labour party leadership, during which he attempted to display his proletarian credentials by appearing bemused by the concept of ‘frothy coffee’, Kennedy explored the way in which the working class was both fetishised and distorted by politicians such as... [read more]

The Solitary Flame of Vanity

Quassim Cassam, Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political

reviewed by Alexandre Leskanich

The ‘art of dissimulation’, remarks Nietzsche, ‘reaches its peak in man’. Subsequently: ‘Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendour, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the rule and law among men.’ As discovered with Boris Johnson, a few probing questions quickly... [read more]

It is enough!

Katharine Smyth, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

reviewed by Ben Leubner

Katharine Smyth’s memoir, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, might have been more precisely subtitled, Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, as it is by way of that novel in particular that Smyth attempts to understand certain events in her own life, especially her father’s long struggles with alcoholism and cancer, a combination that cost him his life at a young age. Smyth draws expertly from both Woolf’s life and her entire body of work... [read more]

The Socialism of Fools

Keith Kahn-Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity

reviewed by William Eichler

On a train last summer, I made the mistake of putting David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism (2018) on the shared table. The elderly, white lady sat opposite, glanced at it. It’s all a ‘smear’, she said. I asked what she meant and, identifying herself as a Labour member, she delivered a medley of the greatest hits: we’re-an-anti-racist-party; I’ve never witnessed antisemitism; and anyway what about Palestine. She then shared her own version of an old classic. Growing up under... [read more]

‘The Woman’s Question . . . began in the pocket’

Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900

reviewed by Anna Parker

Writing to Horace Walpole in 1737, the general and politician Henry Seymour Conway described a cross-country carriage journey that he had shared with ‘an immense, fat, brandy-faced female’. His discomfort grew when the woman started to eat, pulling her tie-on pocket out from under the folds of her dress and emptying its contents. It turned out that ‘what I took for a simple pocket [was] a cornucopia, for it disembogued itself successfully of 20 different stores of raisins, almonds,... [read more]

Digital-Libidinal Politics

JA Smith, Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism

reviewed by Ed Rooksby

There is no doubt that the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, closely followed by the election of Donald Trump, delivered a heavy double blow to the liberal order. Leave’s victory, like Trump’s, defied all predictions and thus brought with it a sudden sense of profound disorientation. Literally overnight, as the referendum vote was counted, the liberal centre’s taken-for-granted assumptions about the fundamental solidity of the prevailing order fell apart, producing a... [read more]

What we have is a person

Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport

reviewed by Neil Griffiths

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d manage to read Ducks, Newburyport. My mental health was not good and even much shorter books defeated me. I wasn’t reading much at all really, if you discount research, which I only managed as a distraction on the tube. Depression not only takes the general joy out of life, it likes to focus on specifically joyous things as well, and a 1000-page one-sentence novel published by Galley Beggar was likely to be a joyous thing. It was around 11am on... [read more]

The Interplay of Elements

Ian Penman, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track

reviewed by Stuart Walton

Writing about music has been the tall order and the short straw in appreciation of the arts since the advent of aesthetic theory. For elusive reasons, music signifies at deeper levels than such as can be captured linguistically, making the act of articulating its effects as fraught an enterprise as hanging ectoplasm on a washing-line. Where it speaks in its own overt languages in compositions for voices – 'Spem in alium numquam habui', 'O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!', 'E lucevan le stelle'... [read more]

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