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London Review of Books
Literary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkers

Don't Ask Henry � Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness
The story of Belchamber's publication is probably better known than the book itself, which, like its author, has suffered the ambiguous fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis's novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and mild demurrals, but quickly building up to such fundamental criticisms of the book that the demoralised author said he would withdraw it altogether; at which James protested and pleaded, successfully though not with any retraction of the criticisms he had made.
Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill � Jonathan Raban: Sarah Palin's Cunning
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant strain of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man.
Why Not Eat an Eclair? � David Runciman: Why Vote?
Why would anyone vote for Barack Obama? Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no one's vote is ever going to be missed. If you want Obama to win, and plan to vote for him, but you forget, or find yourself otherwise detained, don't worry - the final result will be unaffected by your failure to show up, even if you happen to live in a swing state like Ohio or Florida. If Obama is winning the state, he will do perfectly well without you; if he is losing, there is nothing you can do to help him get over the line, because the winning line will always be further away than your paltry individual vote. Either way, you are not needed, so why bother to vote at all?
The Khugistic Sandal � Jenny Diski: Jews & Shoes
Great shoemakers of our day: Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin. None of them, I think, very Jewish. And if there had been any great pre or postwar Jewish shoe mavins they would certainly have been pointed out to me by my parents, who identified any Jewish achiever in any sphere as one of the family: Alma Cogan, Einstein, Marx, boxing promoter Jack Solomons (the Sultan of Sock), it didn't matter what they were known for, everyone counted. Even, like the Kray Twins, a little bit Jewish and murderers would make them ours and make us proud - but there was never a mention of shoe designers.
Diary � Clancy Sigal: Among the Draft-Dodgers
Short Cuts � Adam Shatz: Obsession with Islam
At the Movies � Michael Wood on Max Ophuls
Why It Matters � Ellen Meiksins Wood: Quentin Skinner's Detachment
Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, 'has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action'? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin's influential defence of 'negative' against 'positive' liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner's own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question.
What's in a Number? � Donald MacKenzie: The $300 Trillion Question
Judged by the amount of money directly dependent on it, the British Bankers' Association's London Interbank Offered Rate matters more than any other set of numbers in the world. Libor anchors contracts amounting to some $300 trillion, the equivalent of $45,000 for every human being on the planet. It's a critical part of the infrastructure of financial markets but, like plumbing, doesn't usually get noticed. Only a handful of economists, and no other academics, have ever looked in any detail at Libor, and even the financial press didn't show much interest in how Libor is calculated until this spring, when there was sharp controversy over whether these crucial numbers could be trusted.
After Kemal � Perry Anderson
In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the 1960s, Murat Belge - a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation - told his contemporaries on the Turkish left, as yet another military intervention came thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had misunderstood their own country in a quite fundamental way.1 They had thought it a Third World society among others, ready for liberation by guerrilla uprisings, in the towns or in the mountains. The paradox they had failed to grasp was that although the Turkey of the time was indeed 'a relatively backward country economically . . . and socially' - with a per capita GNP similar to that of Algeria and Mexico, and adult literacy at a mere 60 per cent - it was 'relatively advanced politically', having known 'a two-party system in which opposing leaders have changed office a number of times after a popular mandate, something which has never happened in Japan for example'. In short, Turkey was unusual in being a poor and ill-educated society that had yet remained a democracy as generally understood, if with violent intermissions - Belge was writing in the aftermath of the military putsch of 1980.
Making Do and Mending � Rosemary Hill reads Penelope Fitzgerald's Letters
In 1997, three years before her death, Penelope Fitzgerald asked her American publisher, Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who had been her cousin. 'I've so often driven about with him,' she told Carduff, 'with the zoo's first Chinese panda in the back of his car, together with a supply of bamboo shoots.' (Fisher, she explained, was working at London Zoo.) After five hundred pages of her letters the reader is, if not exactly used to this sort of thing, then perfectly prepared for it. The eruption of the startling, the comic and the inexplicable, into a life that Fitzgerald was often at pains to portray as humdrum, gives her correspondence its character and makes these letters, written mostly to family and friends on small occasion or none and with no eye on posterity, completely compelling.
Short Cuts � R.W. Johnson: Robbie Gets His Gun
Letters
The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 19
Table of contents
Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 19

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