LRB 1st December 2022

London Review of Books 1st December 2022

Draft notes from a reading of the magazine (WiP - will be edited further)

Adam Shatz

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

On the midterm elections which were not as bad as people feared 

[A] growing number of Republicans are running away from Trump, the biggest loser in the midterms. Since 2016, the Republicans have believed they can’t win without him, given his magnetic hold on their base. But now it seems they can’t win with him, either. A growing number of Republican politicians and donors now see Ron DeSantis as a safer bet than Trump in 2024. DeSantis isn’t a ‘moderate’ Republican. He boasts of having turned Florida into a ‘citadel of freedom’ against critical race theory, ‘Faucian dystopia’, ‘Soros-funded prosecutors’ and transgender athletes.

A second Biden campaign does not sit well with most progressives, and not only because of his age. Critics of his foreign policy cite a list of mistakes: the embarrassing fist bump with Mohammed bin Salman, who repaid him by cutting oil production; the messy evacuation of Afghanistan; the failure to hold the Israeli government accountable for the army’s killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist, let alone its policy of apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories. He has replaced Trump’s abandonment of human rights with a highly selective application that favours Ukrainians over Palestinians, Egyptians and Yemenis; along with his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, he has revived the language of Cold War Atlanticism, an anachronistic idiom in an era of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.

Letters

Anthony King, Gabriel Egan, David Elstein, James Meek, Stephen Daker, Nicholas McDowell, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Raymond Rogers, Sheila Russell, Pratinav Anil, Andrew Dobson, Inigo Kilborn

Jonathan Parry

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe by Andrew Roberts

 Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail in 1896. Harmsworth’s principle was that ‘the three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things.’

For a while, he assumed that the newspaper industry would tend towards monopoly, and he intended to be the monopolist. By 1911, the Harmsworths owned the Mirror, the Observer and the Times, as well as the Mail; in 1914, they controlled 40 per cent of the morning and 45 per cent of the evening daily circulation.

[O]wnership of the Times strengthened his campaign in 1911 to persuade the Tories, in opposition, to give up the food taxes which supporters of full-scale imperial preference advocated but his poorer readers disliked. That year he sold the Observer rather than force it to adopt the same stance. For the rest of his career, he was more interested in using his papers to push whatever causes took his fancy than in building a monopoly for the sake of it. In 1915, the Mail’s circulation plummeted, albeit briefly, because of his relentless attacks on Lord Kitchener for the shortage of shells on the Western Front.

For​ Roberts, Northcliffe’s life is a balance sheet. He did Good Things and Bad Things (Roberts acknowledges his antisemitism), but the Good predominated.

As the historian Chandrika Kaul has shown, Northcliffe’s first tour of India coincided with the shocking famine of 1896-97. He made the paper publicise the suffering and attack the government’s relief effort, blaming its inadequacy largely on the domestic public’s ignorance of Indians’ living conditions. He continued to demand that Parliament pay more attention to Indian issues, in order to normalise civilian rather than military rule there.

Northcliffe’s lavish lifestyle – the hotel suites in Paris, Biarritz, Switzerland and the Riviera, the sponsorship of air travel, the twenty trips to the US – also made him an international celebrity.

Barbara Newman

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell

Albertus Magnus, the Dominican friar born sometime around 1200 and canonised in 1931, is often called the patron saint of natural scientists, but he might as well be called the patron saint of curiosity.

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Living’

Oliver Hermanus’s new film, Living, is a version of the Kurosawa movie ikiru (which means ‘to live’), with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s set in the 1950s, which is when the original film was made. Starring Bill Nighy

Tessa Hadley

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

First published in 1951. The Daughter of Time has never been out of print, and in 1990 the UK Crime Writers Association voted it the ‘greatest crime novel of all time’

Amy Larocca

A Visible Man by Edward Enninful

The mid-career autobiography of Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue. But "What was a fashion magazine? I imagine my daughters asking me this when I tell them how I spent much of my working life."
Enninful took the top job at Vogue in 2017 and became the first black editor in the magazine’s history.

Hal Foster

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by T.J. Clark

‘The fundamental wordlessness of painting’ is precious to Clark

[L]ike all art historians, he is tasked with translating pictures into words, and he embraces, even exacerbates, this difficulty. For Clark ekphrastic description* is at once necessary and doomed to fail, a verdict he extends to his own poems,

*Definition of ekphrasis: A clear, intense, self-contained argument or pictorial description of an object, especially of an artwork.

[W]hy Clark uses the term ‘uncanny’ as often as he does. It is his way of signalling the many moments in Cézanne when his ‘strangeness of vision... refuses to take anything for granted.’

Of Landscape Near Pontoise (1872), for example, he writes:

Space is not distance, says Pissarro, not a journey to a horizon: it is here where we are, an immense proximity, a total intuition of place and extent. And Time is not becoming, not endless contingency: it is a Now that goes on being Now as we live it, a unique kind of permanence.

‘Every instant deserves to be monumentalised,’ Clark adds, dissolving in a sentence the old cliché about Impressionism

‘The apples of Cézanne are not fruit any longer, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they should fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.’

‘Everything in the painting is falling – and where it falls to is where we are,’ Clark writes of The Basket of Apples at the outset.

 

Stefan Collini

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Study by John Guillory

Gazelle Mba

At the V&A: Africa Fashion

James Lasdun

Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White

Stanford University was founded by Leland Sr. and Jane Stanford in honour of their late son, Leland Jr. Jane was an ardent Spiritualist and they believed Leland Jr was telling them to set up the university. Jane interfered with the running of the university, such as resisting the admission of women. She was eventually poisoned. But who did it and is was it connected to her interference with Stanford?

 

A.E. Stallings

Two Poems

Clare Bucknell

The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim

Chris Power

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer

A novel, or fictionalised autobiography, set in Pinochet’s Chile.

Daniel Trilling

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey through the Refugee Underground by Matthieu Aikins

“In February 2020, Fuad Bedru spotted someone he recognised in the street. Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a people smuggler originally from Eritrea, was on an international wanted list, accused of holding thousands of people from various African countries captive in a ‘safe house’ in Libya, where they were starved, beaten and raped while Kidane and his fellow smugglers extorted money from their relatives. Fuad’s attempt to reach Europe had failed and he ended up back where he started, in Ethiopia. Recognising Kidane in Addis Ababa, he found a police patrol and told the officers that ‘the person standing by the electronics stall was one of the world’s most wanted human smugglers.’ Kidane offered the police officers a bribe, but they arrested him. He went on trial in October 2020.”

Sally Hayden attended the trial, but Western powers like the USA and the UK weren’t interested in this brave attempt to prosecute the people smugglers.

Laleh Khalili

Short Cuts: In Sharm El-Sheikh

COP27 "More than six hundred fossil fuel lobbyists, the most at any COP conference, were registered as delegates"

Simone Haysom

Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade by Rosaleen Duffy

Militarising conservation may not be such a good idea

Brian Dillon

At the Photographers’ Gallery: Chris Killip

Helen Sullivan

Diary: A City of Islands