Jon Mitchell, Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military's Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange
reviewed by Venetia Welby
When monsters in horror movies roar grotesquely into view, it’s often the revelation that they’ve been there all along that’s the big scare. It’s a powerful trope: the axe murderer is locked in the house with you, the bomb is in the attic. We have always known that the US military does some dubious things to protect us. It has had to, we understand, for the safety and happiness of the free world; it has been constantly at war for peace for the best part of a century. Every so often,... [read more]
Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
In the millions of pages written about Karl Marx, his final years have been somewhat neglected. Sven-Eric Liedman’s biography A World to Win, published in English translation in 2018, assesses Marx’s late notebooks and correspondence on Russia in depth but gives limited attention to the other aspects of Marx’s latter years, including his important trip to Algeria. Mary Gabriel’s excellent Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx attends to the later years but nevertheless treats Algeria... [read more]
Paul Wright is a thirty-something part-time bookseller and magazine writer. With self-conscious downbeat humour, Paul-as-narrator tells us how he writes two pages for a magazine called White Jesus; one about books, one about haircuts:
I set forth in Hackney and Peckham, approach strangers, and ask if I can snap a picture to feature in the London Review of Haircuts. Alongside their picture in the magazine and online I award their hairstyle between one and five pairs of scissors. . . Hair... [read more]
Hilary Mantel, Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
reviewed by Alex Diggins
Friday 12 February, 1993, Liverpool: an ordinary day, in an ordinary time, in an ordinary place. And here’s an ordinary sight: two boys, barely into secondary school, walking with a small child, a toddler really, in tow. Sometimes the child smiles, apparently content to bump along with the older boys; other times, he bursts into tears, eddying his feet on the pavement, and they tug him along roughly. Adults notice this strange threesome; they are hardly inconspicuous. But the boys are... [read more]
Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
reviewed by Andrew Key
I miss Jenny Diski. I started reading the London Review of Books in earnest when she started publishing her cancer diary there, from September 2014 onwards. At that time I was living on the West Coast of the US, somewhere far enough away that the LRB only arrived (and was placed in the reading room of the library of the university I was attending) two weeks or so after it had been published in the UK. I would use the arrival of each edition to avoid my responsibilities, often skipping class,... [read more]
It is unfortunate the way that good writing — and particularly writing by women — can be prodded into banal book jackets. The promise offered, for something sweepingly emotional in which the reader will become helplessly involved, pigeonholes writers and readers in a way that undercuts the idiosyncrasies of individual authors' books, often along gendered lines. Looking at the titles of Evie Wyld's books, it would be easy to presume that they are gentler and less serious than they are. The... [read more]
Kevin Hickson, Jasper Miles & Harry Taylor (eds.), Peter Shore: Labour’s Forgotten Patriot
reviewed by Robin McGhee
Why Europe? For more than half a century, a small but committed cadre of Eurosceptics have obsessed over our relationship with the continent. It takes precedence over almost every other issue: health, inequality, defence, even the other great questions in foreign policy like our relationship with America or China. Occasionally this monomaniacal obsession has bubbled to the surface and exploded, enveloping our whole country in the smelly gobbets of trade negotiations and fishing rights, always... [read more]
Some way into Lisa Roberton’s first ‘novel’, Hazel Brown attends a party. She recalls how it was ‘one of those parties in a large and elegant Haussmannian flat on the Right Bank.’ We’re in Paris, the flat’s occupant is a young American and her guests, too, are young Americans, ‘from Columbia and NYU and dressed down.’ Hazel Brown recognises a Haussmann building but hasn’t heard of Columbia or dressing down, and we believe her. Hers is a literary knowledge.
Hazel Brown is... [read more]
Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes, Hurricane Season
reviewed by Liam Harrison
One day, on her way home from school, Norma, a pregnant 13-year-old who is groomed and sexually abused by her stepfather, discovers in a book of fairy tales where the phrase ‘Sunday seven’ comes from. At home she has often been told that it is a terrible thing. Norma initially thinks the phrase might refer to getting her period: ‘on the toilet she discovered her knickers were stained with blood, a maroon, putrid blood that came out of precisely the same hole Pepe had been poking around in... [read more]
Christina Lamb, Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
In 2014, Angelina Jolie joined the then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, at a summit in London to promote the United Kingdom’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI). In the years since its introduction, the movie-star sheen provided by Jolie has faded from PSVI. An Independent Commission for Aid Impact report, released in January of this year, declared that ‘the initiative lacks a clear strategy and overall vision to guide its activities’, and that there is ‘little... [read more]
