Review 31 Reviews

A War of Position

Owen Worth, Morbid Symptoms: The Global Rise of the Far-Right

reviewed by Neil Dawson

In the post-Cold War world, a commitment to free market capitalism became widely accepted as the only legitimate approach to economics and politics. In other words, neoliberalism achieved hegemony. Challenges to this order have emerged in recent years, and as the academic Owen Worth shows in Morbid Symptoms, the most serious have come not from the left, as we might expect, but from the far right, from the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen. Worth’s aims in his book are... [read more]

The Limits of Personality

Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

reviewed by Mathis Clément

Annie Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness is both a new and an old book. It was written from 1983 to 1986, published in French in 1997, translated into English in 1999, and has been republished by Fitzcaraldo Editions in 2019. Its author is a renowned memoirist, at 79 years old the grande dame of French literature. But when she wrote this book she was in her forties, not especially well-known, and yet to win the major prizes that would come to litter her career. As readers of this new edition then,... [read more]

He Knew He Was Right

Owen Bennett, Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry

reviewed by Lee Shining

Michael Gove was worried. It was the beginning of 2013. He had been Education Secretary for nearly three years. His friend and patron, David Cameron, had given him huge freedom to implement a radical right-wing programme to transform England’s schools. Gove had fought savage battles and made powerful enemies, but the Education Secretary felt he was making progress. The modern Conservative Party was meant to be all about his ambitious agenda of domestic reform. But now the Prime Minister was... [read more]

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]

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