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London Review of Books
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Literary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkers
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Tony Wood: Siberia is Melting
The corridor we are standing in bristles with ice. Thick layers of what turn out, on closer inspection, to be delicate, hexagonal crystals line the walls and ceiling. I and a handful of other visitors are in the basement laboratory of the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk; according to the red numbers of an LED panel, the temperature is -8 °C. After a few minutes, our presence – breathing, talking – has raised the temperature to -7 °C, and we are ushered back to the surface, where it is 35 °C, a day of dazzling Arctic sunshine and heat that makes the skin prickle....
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Jonathan Steele: Neo-Taliban
The road from Kabul to Kandahar was once known as the Eisenhower highway. Built in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed peacefully for Afghan friendship, this US-funded 300-mile ribbon of tarmac was plied for two decades by lorries and garishly painted buses with no concern for security. Among the passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion. Ambushes turned the highway into a death trap until the victorious Taliban swept into Kabul in September 1996, eliminating all security problems once again. The...
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Jenny Turner: Tom McCarthy’s ‘C’
For the final part of this novel’s first movement, our young hero, Serge Carrefax, travels to Kloděbrady’, a presumably Austro-Hungarian spa town, to take a cure. It’s 1913, and Serge is two years older than the century. His problem is ‘a blockage’, ‘encumbrances’ in his bowel. ‘Morbid matter … Bad stuff … black bile: mela chole,’ the doctor says. ‘Your illness is not a thing; it is a process. A rhythm. Toxins are secreted around body, organs become accustomed and, perverted by custom, addicted.’ The deep link between spiritual state and bowel habit was well known to the ancients –...
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Michael Wood: ‘Five Easy Pieces’
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Mary-Kay Wilmers: Frank Kermode
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