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ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Blemished perfection
TOM KING browses approvingly through the compendium from London Review of Books, though not without sporadic disappointment
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
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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KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
A chance find when clearing out our old office led us to renew a friendship across 5,000 miles and almost nine decades of history, explains ROGER McKENZIE