LRB’s Greatest Hits

As the London Review of Books celebrates its 30th birthday today, JW Arble picks out ten of his favourites from the new online archive

Until I read Stefan Collini’s essay on the state of British universities I didn’t know what they were for, why so many of them seem to be in a mess or what I should be aiming to get from them. (Unfortunately, like the poet’s 1963, this all came too late to make much difference to my life. I’d already left.) Though a few years old, the article is still required reading for current university students.

The original ‘snark’: although James Wood’s essay ‘Hysterical Realism’ – a review of Zadie Smith’s first novel ‘White Teeth’ is not in the LRB’s archive, his short review of her second novel ‘Autograph Man’ is. Anyone interested in writing literary fiction (and being reviewed by the LRB) would be well advised to avoid the errors Britain’s arch literary critic usually seizes upon…

If you want to know what Britain will look like under the Tories, Ross McKibbin has a good line in prophesy…

Some of the most thorough, and by far the most amusing, analysis of the banking crisis I’ve read came from John Lanchester. His articles Cityphilia, It’s Finished, Cityphobia and Bankocracy are much easier than slogging through Robert Peston’s blog.

Booker winner Anne Enright’s diary, ‘Disliking the McCann’s’ drew tabloid opprobrium when published but was funnier than the satire I saw in the comedy clubs at the time. It will make you cackle, then it will make you feel guilty and persuade you to go and do something more useful with your time…

Less easy reading is the fallout from 9/11 where Mary Beard’s suggestion that many people ‘had the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming’ led to months of angry exchanges in the letter pages.

Frank Kermode has been writing reviews for over 70 years and is arguably the best known living literary critic. His review of Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a typically sensitive and nuanced reading.

‘Unemployment, of course, has gone up, not down. Disparities between the regional components of the economy have grown. We are manufacturing only a little more than in 1979 and investment today is little higher than it was then. International comparisons are grim. In Japan manufacturing production increased over the same period by 38 per cent, in the USA by 25 per cent, in Italy by more than 15 per cent. Britain has managed only a 6 per cent increase. Details on productive investment are just as discouraging. The result is that we have produced less than most of our major competitors, exported less, and grown more slowly… we are top of the league only for our capacity to import and to create the worst balance of payments deficit in our history.’ No ― not an attack on New Labour written some time since the crash ― but Gordon Brown on Thatcherism in 1989…

Reading his essay on Bill Clinton it’s no wonder that the younger, more sceptical Christopher Hitchens, is so missed.

And some joyful nostalgia ― Ian Hamilton on World Cup 1998 ― or at least on the hairstyles of World Cup 1998.  ‘…another thing we’ll never know – for which, perhaps, much thanks – is what Gazza would have done about the hair thing. After all, he has strong claims to be thought of as a pioneer of trichological neurosis. Over the years, he has been wavy, close-cropped, bald, even bewigged. When at Lazio, he appeared briefly in a Roberto Baggio-style hair-piece, or tail-piece. For Euro ‘96, he showed up with a bleached convict cut. In 1990, he warmed all English hearts by tugging at Ruud Gullitt’s dreadlocks, and some of his most ghastly japes have been to do with hair: shaving off the eyebrows of a blotto drinking pal, putting shaving foam into a team-mate’s kettle, and so on. All in all, hair troubles Gazza, as it now seems to trouble so many of his colleagues…’

Check out JW Arble’s interview with senior editor, Paul Myerscough, to mark the 30th birthday of LRB. Here’s to the next thirty years!