MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
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Blemished perfection
TOM KING browses approvingly through the compendium from London Review of Books, though not without sporadic disappointment
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
ED WAUGH introduces a special event to commemorate the centenary of the 1926 General Strike
Reviews of Charlotte Cornfield, Michael Weston King, and Gun Outfit
London Review of Books: An Incomplete History
Faber & Faber £35
THERE was a strike at The Times in 1979, a dispute over manning levels and new machinery, which lasted almost a year. No tears to shed over that paper’s absence from the stands, even before the Murdoch years, but there were other consequences too.
The Times Literary Supplement, a periodical relied upon by writers and publishers to review the works they had written and commissioned, wasn’t being printed either. With the literati growing increasingly desperate for an alternative, scholar and critic Frank Kermode called for a new publication to fill the irksome void.
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At the very moment Britain faces poverty, housing and climate crises requiring radical solutions, the liberal press promotes ideologically narrow books while marginalising authors who offer the most accurate understanding of change, writes IAN SINCLAIR