RaveThe New Statesman (UK)Gordon’s account of the fate of these two caches is as exciting as a detective story. She catches the drama of the sealed boxes brilliantly. But it is the story behind—or rather within—the boxes that makes these revelations so important.
Rebecca Solnit
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... an extraordinary mixture of heterogeneous ideas yoked together not exactly by violence but by curiosity, happenstance and a fair amount of perseverance. This hybrid volume blossoms with a somewhat random succession of insights, non sequiturs and epiphanies, as Solnit would probably cheerfully acknowledge ... The lack of a known connection [among ideas] worries Solnit not at all. She makes her own connections, and tells a good story ... At times the lack of connection can be unnerving, and for my taste Solnit is a little too fond of gnomic Zen and Buddhist utterances ... There is at times in Solnit too much lateral thinking, too many free associations ... And there are some banalities ... One should not, however, take her to task for her ramblings, for they are of the essence of her technique. And, appropriately, she has a fine section on rhizomes and rhizomatic thinking ... Nevertheless, the most impressive section of this book is also the most specific, and, in a positive way, the most Orwellian. She has done a grand investigative job on commercial rose-growing in Bogotá, in Colombia.
Jenny Diski
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The volume is introduced by the LRB’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who gave her the freedom to roam and suggested many of the subjects, and ends with an afterword by Diski’s daughter Chloe, who observes (as Wilmers does) that all her writing was essentially personal ... This is not to say that they are lazy, self-indulgent or attention-seeking. They are hard worked and scrupulous and illuminating ... In her autobiographical writings Diski displays a gift for ruthless self-examination as well as a need to confront the unacceptable and explore the unknowable ... The book reviews also tell us a good deal about Diski, and one of the things they tell us is that she was attracted to the \'dangerous edge of things\' ... the real substance of the volume lies in the well-researched essays on complex but minor figures such as Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, George Orwell’s second wife Sonia, and Sigmund Freud’s wife Martha ... What it is to be Jewish is one of the undercurrents in much of Diski’s writing, and inspired two of her more eccentric LRB essays, both very entertaining, studded with bits of interesting and eclectic information ... This wide-ranging collection is a tribute to her, and to her friend and editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, who brought out the best in her. Many writers envied the space that Wilmers gave her, but few could have made such good use of it.
Matthew Beaumont
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The essays in this volume predate Covid-19, some by several years, yet they offer an uncanny and haunting foreshadowing of our cities as they now appear to us ... This is a male-dominated book, but many of its most familiar subjects are given revelatory new interpretations.
Dorian Lynskey
PositiveThe Times Literary SupplementDorian Lynskey’s book amounts to a comprehensive survey of the history of utopia and dystopia, centring on Orwell’s immensely influential novel, and it is full of connections that make the reader’s mind spin off in all directions ... There are several biographies of Orwell, and innumerable commentaries on his work...but there is always something new to think or say about him. And in the age of Trump, some Orwellian concepts have taken on a new meaning ... we can’t help treating Orwell as some kind of prophet, and wondering what he would have had to say about Brexit or the rise of religious fundamentalism ... One of his last messages to his publisher, Fredric Warburg, was \'Don’t let it happen, it depends on you\'. This thought-provoking book explores the many possibilities of what he may have meant by \'it\'.
