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Literary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkers
URL: http://www.lrb.co.uk/
Updated: 13 hours 25 min ago

Lessons of Zimbabwe · Mahmood Mamdani: Mugabe in Context

13 hours 25 min ago
There is no denying Mugabe's authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country's economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country's growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe's crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa.

Sons and Heirs · Robert Vitalis: The bin Ladens and Their Money

13 hours 25 min ago
Steve Coll's book tells two stories: a big one about how the bin Laden family cashed in on the oil bonanza in Saudi Arabia, and a smaller one about Osama's role in the family business before he turned to holy warfare. Although well written, lucid and packed with useful detail, The Bin Ladens doesn't establish much of a connection between the family firm in Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden's jihad in Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and America, except that oil wealth funded both. The bin Laden group isn't among the world's largest engineering businesses, although readers might finish this book believing that it is: Coll calls it Saudi Arabia's Halliburton, even though the latter is an oil services firm, not a construction company. He is at his best excavating details from the mountain of documents generated by various bin Laden brothers in the lawsuits and divorce settlements that have followed on several decades of deals gone sour.

A Chance to Join the World · Neal Ascherson: A Future for Abkhazia

13 hours 25 min ago
On the way to the frontier, we stopped the car for a last look at Abkhazia. A new monument stood by the road, the effigy of a scowling, whiskered Abkhaz chieftain with sword and shield. The statue commemorates the war of 1992-93 which routed the Georgian army, cost ten thousand dead on both sides, and established an 'independent' Abkhazian state.

An Address in Mayfair · Donald MacKenzie: How to Start a Hedge Fund

13 hours 25 min ago
You could walk around Mayfair all day and not notice them. Hedge funds don't - can't - advertise. The most you'll see is a discreet nameplate or two. An address in Mayfair counts in the world of hedge funds. It shows you're serious, and have the money and confidence to pay the world's most expensive commercial rents. A nondescript office no larger than a small flat can cost £150,000 a year. Something bigger and in the style that hedge funds like (glass walls, contemporary furniture) can set you back a lot more. It's fortunate therefore that hedge funds don't need a lot of space. Two rooms may be enough: one for meetings, for example with potential investors; one for trading and doing the associated bookkeeping. Some funds consist of only four or five people. Even a fairly large fund can operate with twenty or fewer.

Self-Made Aristocrats · Adam Phillips: The Wittgensteins and Their Money

13 hours 25 min ago
'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent': it's a notion children pick up quite quickly. It is also, of course, a remark about the limits of what we can use language to do, but Wittgenstein is unusual as a philosopher because he so often writes about the difficulties a child has growing up in a family. His wish to clarify the world as he finds it, his stress on 'perspicuous representations' and 'just that understanding which consists in "seeing connections"', turns the figure of the philosopher into the kind of child who wants to understand what is going on in his family, as opposed to the child who takes refuge from his family in a fantasy life. For Wittgenstein, this is the difference between working out what people are using words to do in a more or less shared family life and being a metaphysician living in a world (or a system) of your own making.

Short Cuts · Thomas Jones on Malcolm Gladwell

13 hours 25 min ago

After the Movies · Michael Wood on Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma

13 hours 25 min ago

Letters

13 hours 25 min ago
The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 23

Table of contents

13 hours 25 min ago
Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 23

On Complaining · Elif Batuman: How to Stay Sane

13 hours 25 min ago
Flaubert the satirist buried Bouvard and Pécuchet alive beneath an avalanche of names and things and methodologies; Roudinesco the philosopher is offering us a conceptual shovel. What one immediately notices about this shovel is its close resemblance to the avalanche: Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida looks very much like a vast ledger full of entries for 'people who have become things'. (Would Bouvard and Pécuchet feel or think any better if they found such a thing in the garden shed?) For most of its length the book has the same 'talking-head' effect that initially seemed to be an object of parody. As in Flaubert's dictionary, ideas and names rain onto the page in a chronologically chaotic barrage: Roudinesco is the kind of writer who breezily refers to 'the tradition of philosophical conceptuality to which belonged names like . . . Gaston Bachelard, Spinoza, Hegel, Montesquieu and Freud'. As Flaubert's dictionary is alphabetically ordered, so Roudinesco proceeds from one argument to the next on the basis of puns or metaphors.

Talking Corpses · Tim Parks on 'Gomorrah'

13 hours 25 min ago
'When Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,' Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, 'he was oppressed and tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.' Having grown up in Naples, Roberto Saviano is similarly tormented and oppressed. Gomorrah is his account of the lawless deeds of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Conveniently assonant as the two names may be, the crimes of Naples are not those we associate with the Cities of the Plain, and Saviano is not the righteous man who withdraws when God steps in to incinerate the sinful townsfolk. On the contrary, he seems to be drawn to what he abhors, and does everything in his power to see the Camorra and its lawlessness close up.

Double Thought · Michael Wood: Kafka in the Office

13 hours 25 min ago
It's certainly an excellent arrangement,' the official says, 'always unimaginably excellent, even if in other respects hopeless.' We can easily picture, or even recall, arrangements that are excellent for some and hopeless for others, and that is what the phrase 'in other respects' invites us to do. But the larger rhythm and grammar of the sentence ask us to go beyond this option, to think both contrary thoughts at once, taking excellence and hopelessness as partners in an intricate dance, each calling for and implying the other; as if the arrangement is excellent because it's hopeless, hopeless because it's excellent. Can we manage this logical feat? And where are we?

It's not the bus: it's us · Thomas Sugrue: Stars, Stripes and Civil Rights

13 hours 25 min ago
In the United States the flag has the status of a religious icon, a totem. It cannot be carried horizontally or flat, but must always be 'aloft and free'. There is a protocol for folding it, it can't touch the ground, it can't be burned except when it is worn out or irreparably damaged and then only as part of a special ritual. Military men and women salute it, civilians hold their right hands over their left breasts when singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner', and schoolchildren pledge allegiance to it. It is also a ubiquitous presence in the American landscape. The Red, White and Blue waves from people's porches, flies over car dealerships and gas stations and adorns flower-pots; cars are festooned with it in the form of bumper stickers, window decals and antenna pennants. The flag decorates the altars of churches of every denomination except those of a few dissenting sects. And it has become a necessary accessory for political candidates. Early in his campaign, Barack Obama was criticised for his unpatriotic failure to display a flag lapel pin: as president-elect he now regularly wears one.

Diary · Keith Gessen: Watching the Rouble Go Down

13 hours 25 min ago
The financial crisis - or, as we like to call it here, 'the effects of the American and European financial crisis on Russia' - has taken a little while to get going, but it's going now. Yesterday my grandmother sat me down for a serious conversation: she wanted to know if she should take her rouble-denominated life savings out of the Sberbank and put them into dollars. Everyone's a financial adviser now. Or rather, I'm a financial adviser now. This is not good.

In Bexhill · Peter Campbell on Ben Nicholson

November 27, 2008 - 4:10am

Short Cuts · Andrew O'Hagan: Voices from Beyond the Grave

November 27, 2008 - 4:10am

Letters

November 26, 2008 - 4:10am
The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 22

Table of contents

November 26, 2008 - 4:10am
Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 22

Help-Self · Jenny Diski on Alastair Campbell's Dodgy Novel

November 26, 2008 - 4:10am
Campbell's novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems . . . Oh, let me evade for a moment more. Campbell's first book was The Blair Years. That was not a novel, but an account of being spin-doctor supreme in the government of Tony Blair. As Blair's director of communications and strategy and then adviser, Campbell was involved, among much else, in presenting the massaged facts that took us to war, and dealing with the press after the death of David Kelly. He was a gleeful fixer, bully and phrase-maker for a prime minister who had streamlined the Labour Party (as in discarded anything that smacked of socialism) until it was indistinguishable from the Tories, and oversaw a government obsessed with wealth, targets and the corporate organisation of public services. Nothing in his public life inclines me to like him.

Leaving Paradise · Adam Shatz: Iraqi Jews

November 26, 2008 - 4:10am
On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company seeking to win a contract with Iraq's prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether to do so. Al-Suwaida expected that between seven and ten thousand Jews would leave out of a community of about 125,000, but a mysterious bombing in Baghdad on the last day of Passover, near a café frequented by Jews, caused panic, and the numbers registering soon outstripped his estimate. The position of the Jews in Iraq had been deteriorating with alarming speed ever since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948: they were seen as a stalking horse for the Zionists in Palestine, and were increasingly rewarded for their expressions of loyalty to Iraq with suspicion, threats and arbitrary physical assaults. By the spring of 1950 the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure.