London Review of Books

Sionaidh Douglas-Scott: The Withdrawal Bill

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

John Lanchester: It Zucks!

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me. It goes back to that moment of its creation, Zuckerberg at his keyboard after a few drinks creating a website to compare people’s appearance, not for any real reason other than that he was able to do it. That’s the crucial thing about Facebook, the main thing which isn’t understood about its motivation: it does things because it can. That’s why the impulse to growth has been so fundamental to the company, which is in many respects more like a virus than it is like a business. Grow and multiply and monetise. Why? There is no why. Because.

Marina Warner: The Liveliness of the Dead

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

The dead are hard to think about – and, in many ways, to read about. Unlike animals, which Lévi-Strauss declared were not only good to eat but bon à penser, too, I found that I averted my eyes, so to speak, several times as I was reading this book. Not because of the infinite and irreversible sadness of mortality, or because of the grue, the fetor, the decay, the pervasive morbidity, but because the dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, if they’re forgotten as so many millions of them must be, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible.

Patrick Cockburn: Endtimes in Mosul

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Nobody knows for sure how many civilians were killed in the city as a whole. For long periods, shells, rockets and bombs rained down on houses in which as many as a hundred people might be sheltering. ‘Kurdish intelligence believes that over forty thousand civilians have been killed as a result of massive firepower used against them,’ Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s former foreign minister, told me. People have disputed that figure, but bear in mind the sheer length of the siege – 267 days.

Jonathan Raban: Granny in the Doorway

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Sheringham in the early summer of 1945 was trying to return to normal life as a fishing village and genteel holiday resort. Along the beach, the rusting coils of barbed wire, wooden stakes and concrete blocks were mostly cleared, and the anti-tank ditches were being filled in. Snipers’ pillboxes and signs warning of unexploded mines remained, and so did the now-fading self-importance that comes to a place taught to think of itself as being on the front line of imminent invasion.

Jeremy Harding: Giacometti

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Inigo Thomas: Photographing Cricket

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Michael Wood: ‘Dunkirk’

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Letters

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 39 No. 16 (17 August 2017)

Table of contents

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 39 No. 16 (17 August 2017)

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