London Review of Books
How I used to love and now hate the London Review of Books
Speaking words of wisdom, LRB
Hitchens: Safe and unsafe
He thought America’s leaders were unworthy of its potential as a great Enlightenment republic
Two cheers for the LRB
The magazine that declares its main aim is to review books does anything but
Life gets worse for verse
Poetry has been put through the academic wringer and obfuscated by jargon
Who let the dons out?
Leave literary reviews to reviewers rather than score-settling academics
Ghostbusted
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is heroically pointless
Canals go national
Canals gave Britain a single national economy, one that connected resources, factories, population centres and ports
What’s with all the fuss over Simon Fanshawe?
The writer and activist’s nomination as Rector of Edinburgh University has been oddly controversial
Why not the Taliban Line?
These new overground lines are not sufficiently progressive
Brexit and the dubious doppelgangers
Doppelganger models are an unreliable guide to how Britain would have looked had Brexit never happened
The EU’s war on Hungary
As news breaks of secret EU plans to cripple the Hungarian economy, who can still believe it respects national sovereignty?
Sloane danger
Obvious, expensive and tasteless, Azzurra’s food perfectly echoes Mr Angell’s ambience
Playfulness and tedium
Stravinsky, Petrushka; Debussy, Jeux and Prelude (Decca)
Equal opportunities fleecing
This blinkered trade’s endless thwarting of talented homosexuals has gone on too long
Devolution has been a disaster
SNP incompetence is a feature of the system and not a bug
Tragedy of the common spaces
It is sadly in keeping with the modern British mindset to prefer something good not to be done
