The London Review of Books

As if I didn't have enough to read I have just taken out a subscription to the London Review of Books (LRB from now on). This isn't quite as mad as it sounds as it's the kind of newspaper size that I read flat on the table at breakfast, where a book never stays open easily at the page you are on. Currently that kind of reading material is restricted to the Saturday issue of the Guardian and the New Yorker magazine, so I often run out of suitable material by Wednesday.  First thought is that the LRB is just that, it is just book reviews by and large (I had bought it on the strength of the serialization of Jenny Diski's In Gratitude, so thought there was quite a lot of other kinds of writing in it), so that was at first sight a little bit disappointing. That being said the first few pages of the LRB consisted of a load of verbatim quotes from Donald Trump, and these I had come across all but a few before, and they were frighteningly familiar and depressing to read - what a dangerous idiot the man is) It was only when I started to read the reviews, that's when my disappointment disappeared completely.

The first review I read was "Great Again", by Malcolm Turnbull which was a review of a translation of Martin Heidegger's Ponderings II-IV: Black Notebook 1931-1938. I've got no previous knowledge of Heidegger - no knowledge at all except for a very unfortunate and ignorant classification of him as someone who had some thing to do with Hegel, who I also have very little knowledge of), and it has to be said, not that much interest. But I ploughed on anyway, and then ceased ploughing on  and began reading with a kind of rather wonderful joy about this Nazi and antisemitic philosopher. The review is beautifully written - that does help in keeping your interest, both in terms of its prose and in terms of the way it throws in little snippets of history and story about Heidegger's life and in terms of the way it knits in a little contemporary context. Hidden away in this review (hidden because you would be forgiven in thinking the review was about Heidegger only) are some very interesting perspectives on Brexit and the rise of far right nationalisms in Europe, and of course their counterpart in Trump.  It's worth quoting a whole paragraph:

Officially, such nationalisms reject biological racism, but by placing great emphasis on geographical origin and citizenship, they are both exceptionalist and exclusive. Decline is universal, and only if you were born in the right place can you exempt yourself from it. ‘The day I was born I had already won the greatest lottery on earth,’ Trump writes in Crippled America. ‘I was born in the United States of America. With that came the amazing opportunities that every American has. The right to become the best person that you can be.’ The crucial point here is that the right to become the best you can be is a birthright and not as (Obama and Hillary suppose) a universal human right. That’s both why illegal immigrants must be deported, and why ‘we can restore America and unleash the incredible potential of our great land and people.’ To think otherwise is to deny that there is something ‘special or exceptional about America’.

LRB 20th October 2016,  p10


A brilliant skewering of the way such nationalisms  "replace" pure outright racism with a culture of "birthright" and "place" which all too many people buy into with its fake nostalgia and pretence of some kind of golden age of British-ness or some other kind of "ness" . This is explained rather well by what the economist Branko Milanović calls "citizenship rent (the increased income you get from doing the same job in one country rather than another)."
The thing is that this kind of citizenship rent has a built in adjustment - as people move from areas of low income to areas of higher income so there is a levelling out of earnings - and this is what the cosseted earners of the West do not want (albeit they are happy to use their differential wealth to pay cheap cleaners and keep their health service going  and their old people looked after and their bars run - the list goes on). It's your birthplace that determines the extent of poverty or not that you will grow up in, not your class anymore, and the likes of Trump and Farage are cashing in on this nativism. 

Well so far so good - there is more I could say about this review, which is as much an essay as a review, but then there is the very next article / review which, in parlance long gone out of use "blew my mind" with its literacy, its comfortable situating of itself in the old British class system (this inelegant difficult phrasing is trying to get across the sense of privilege and establishment insider insight with which this article is written, which is perhaps, a signature style of the LRB), and its easy gloss on the review author's own situation, best summed up in the opening paragraph. I have to quote it, it's just too good to miss. So here goes, the first paragraph of Herberts & Herbertinas, which is Rosemary Hill's review of Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw

"I met Steven Runciman several times towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince Consort..."

LRB 20th October 2016,  p11

This portrait of privilege  (Eton, Cambridge, Bloomsbury etc.) is I think a portrait of a life that could not be lived now, but maybe I am wrong, maybe you can still float from Cambridge to the head of the British Council in Greece, but I think probably not - as the end of the review says this man who knew everybody was: 

" finally defeated by the ascent of Tony Blair, the only prime minister in his lifetime apart from Bonar Law with whom he had no mutual acquaintance – and ‘nobody knew’ Bonar Law. Blair was distasteful on many fronts. ‘How can anyone marry a wife called Cherie?’"

LRB 20th October 2016,  p14

We're only left with the unfortunate nationalism of the West, privilege of income and life that arise out of where we are born, more than who we were born too. You may be born into the right family now but the effortless ascent isn't what it used to be - you have to go into politics and at least make some effort. There's that lovely little twist in the jibe about Cherie Blair's first name, so out of touch, so far behind. Or maybe I'm wrong and it all goes on the same, we just don't have the far off perspective of a biography and a review to see it all  with.