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London Review of Books 45 (2023), 12
In April 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 10
‘My only country/is six feet high,’ Norman MacCaig wrote in 1973; ‘and whether I love it or not/I’ll die/for its independence.’ This sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 9
Pensions – and ‘the fiscal impact of ageing’ – have long troubled the EU. A European Commission paper published in 2016 noted with relief that ‘most EU member states’ were reforming their pension systems. France is one of them. During his first term in office Emmanuel Macron envisaged an ambitious…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 11
On a Berlin street corner, just off Friedrichstrasse, there is a faded bronze plaque set into the wall. ‘Here on 18 March 1848, barricade fighters defended themselves against the troops of the Second Royal Regiment of Prussia who, hours later, refused orders to resume the attack.’ Then come three…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 8
Alice Spawls writes about the diminution and degradation of NHS services ( LRB , 30 March ). As a GP I meet patients almost daily who have been obliged to seek private treatment. They are often rueful about the cost, and say that they’d rather pay a little more in tax than spend tens of thousands of…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 7
Genealogy – the records of descent, the pedigrees of mortals and gods, of genos , race, kind and offspring – is one of the great feats of the human imagination: a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead and to one another, the past to the present and…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 6
Rosemary Hill discusses John Smeaton’s ingenious design for the reconstructed Eddystone lighthouse ( LRB , 16 February ). She doesn’t mention that in order to anchor the lighthouse securely at the base, Smeaton sliced off a fair chunk from the top of the House Rock on which it stands. This gave rise…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 4
Few of those who lived in New York City during the Mussolini reign of mayor Rudolph Giuliani would have pictured him playing out his sallow years as a dwarfish punchline – a cheap laugh. It is near impossible to think of any once respected figure who has subjected himself to such dunks of dank…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 3
We socialists like to hark back to better days, when ideals shone bright and principles stood tall: equality, fairness, democracy, internationalism, mutuality, jobs, education, food, housing, medicine, pensions, peace, friendship and love. But there is one strand of the tradition we prefer not to…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 2
I knew Buster Keaton. I carried his ukulele to Grand Central Station, where he and my father, Bert Lahr, were boarding a train to Toronto to make a film called Ten Girls Ago . It was 1962; I was 21, old enough to know I was walking with two comedy legends. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 1
When I try to reconstruct the way information about books travelled in the time before the internet, I remember a friend standing in front of my bookcase more than thirty years ago and asking what was really good, what was only all right and what was imperative for her to read. When I praised Song…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 5
When I deleted my Twitter account in September last year, provoked not by Elon Musk’s imminent takeover but by the suffocating quantity of royal coverage gushing from every media source, I was left feeling bereft, as any addict is when their drug is taken away. How was I supposed to react to the…
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 13
Arif Ahmed, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, has been appointed the UK’s first ‘free speech tsar’. The position – Ahmed’s official title will be director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into…