Eric Rochant’s TV series Le Bureau des légendes, known in English as The Bureau, is everything Homeland isn’t: an understated, subtle and nuanced espionage drama. In the first season there are no explosions, the body count is negligible, and there’s hardly any talk of patriotism. The hero, undercover agent Guillaume Debailly (played by Mathieu Kassovitz), has risen to the top of the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, by adhering to a rigorous, almost ascetic set of principles, but these principles are more artisanal than patriotic, and he eventually finds himself forced to abandon them. The focus is on the work, and most of that work takes place in the cramped offices, and in front of the computer screens, of the DGSE. More »
Resident Pathogens
I lived for several years on the 10th floor of a tower block in Cumbernauld. It swayed a bit in the wind, but had been strengthened after the Ronan Point disaster. Ronan Point in Canning Town was built from large prefabricated concrete panels. Ivy Hodge was one of its first tenants, moving into a corner flat on the 18th floor on 15 April 1968. At 5.45 a.m. on 16 May, she struck a match to light her gas cooker. A friend had fitted the cooker. He tested for leaks using a lighted match, but had used a substandard nut, and there was a leak. The explosion blew out the external load-bearing walls of her living room and bedroom. The corner walls of the flats above collapsed and fell. Their weight took out all the corners of the flats below. Four people were crushed to death. More »
Out of the Bloomsbury Mud
In the summer of 1932, Kenneth and Jane Clark visited Duncan Grant’s studio. They found it filled with dusty pottery, ‘unappetising’ faded flowers and ‘brown and purple canvases’ which made Clark’s heart sink. But his despair was stalled by the discovery of some ‘brilliant pastels … where the medium had saved [Grant] from the virtuous application of Bloomsbury mud’, and the ‘beautiful drawings and oil sketches’ which his wife found languishing under Grant’s bed. ‘In an attempt to revive his interest in decorative art,’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘we asked him and Vanessa to paint us a dinner service.’ Two years later, Bell and Grant presented Clark with 140 pieces, including 50 Wedgwood plates illustrated with portraits of famous women from history – 12 writers, 12 queens, 12 beauties and 12 dancers or actresses, and one of each of the artists, painted by the other. ‘It ought to please the feminists,’ Bell wrote, offhandedly, to Roger Fry. More »
Run-ins with the Gatekeepers
‘Whitmanesque’ is how Colin Ward, writing in the LRB, described Heathcote Williams’s book Whale Nation (1988). Williams, who died on Saturday, was a difficult catch. We persisted for a time, trying to get him to write for the paper, then lost heart; gathered up our courage, only to fall back again in despair. There are just two pieces by Williams in the LRB archive. The first is a poem – though there isn’t much dolling up, and nothing conspicuously ‘poetic’ – which plays with the idea of wars as music festivals (‘The music was mainly percussive … There have been several attempts to get the show on the road again’). In the second, a review of Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, Williams follows the author and ‘his trusty snorkel’ on ‘a swimmer’s journey through Britain’. More »
Leave it to Osborne
In Psmith, Journalist (1915), P.G. Wodehouse’s most enterprising character stumbles into the world of New York journalism and transforms a sleepy and sentimental family paper, Cosy Moments, into a campaigning publication. He sacks all the regular columnists and launches a crusade to improve the living conditions of tenement dwellers and unmask their anonymous landlord, despite threats encouraging him to stop: ‘Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!’ he declares. More »
Read everywhere!
It’s July, which means #readeverywhere is back. Enter our annual photo contest by taking a picture of yourself, or somebody else, reading the London Review of Books or the Paris Review in a scenic/dramatic/eccentric/perilous etc. setting, to be in with a chance of winning one of 30 expensive-smelling prizes from Aesop. Post your photograph on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook before the end of August, using the #readeverywhere hashtag (and don’t forget to tag us). We’ll be reposting our favourite entries throughout the summer, as well as reminders of the real point of #readeverywhere, which is that for two months only, you can subscribe to both the LRB and the Paris Review for one low price, anywhere in the world. (The offer unfortunately isn’t available to existing subscribers. We’re really sorry.) More »
Children of Men
Earlier this year I was teaching an evening class for part-time degree students in Bristol. A woman in her late twenties approached me, to check that I knew she would be breastfeeding. She introduced her classmates to her son, a few weeks old. The university does not have a policy for student parents, although it has one for staff. One of the slides I had prepared for our discussion showed a page from a 1972 essay by Adrienne Rich, ‘Towards a Woman-Centred University’. Rich argued that childcare should be central in a higher education system remade for the demands of women’s lives. More »
‘I can taste the smoke’
My five-year-old son goes to school near Grenfell Tower. Nadia Choucair, his teaching assistant, was last seen waving a makeshift flag from her window on the 22nd floor. ‘I’ll remember her even if I’m 100,’ my son said. Nadia’s mother, her husband and their three daughters, Fatima, Zeinab and Mierna, are also dead or missing. So is Yaqub Hashim, a friendly six-year-old, who a few weeks ago I watched running around Grenfell Tower’s playground, with its superhero murals. He lived with his parents, older brother and sister, Firdaws, who was deputy head girl at the school before she left last year. Other families with children at the school were hospitalised. Some escaped the fire; others evacuated their nearby homes; others heard the screams or watched as flames engulfed the tower. More »
Hostile Territory
At 6.20 p.m. on 14 June, a migrant-advocacy group in Arizona tweeted: ‘URGENT: Border Patrol agents have surrounded and are actively surveilling the No More Deaths humanitarian aid camp.’ The camp was raided the next day by around thirty armed agents with fifteen trucks, two quad bikes and a helicopter. More »
Gingrich Returns Again
He’s back, like Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and with a brand new book, Understanding Trump, his 28th or so, and hard on the heels of his two 2016 thrillers, Duplicity and Treason (written with Pete Earley). Newt Gingrich – one of the three amigos, along with fellow failed politicians Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, who hitched their wagons to the star from Queens during his campaign for president, all three desperately jockeying for the position of vice president or secretary of state, only to be spurned and humiliated – is back in the mix. More »