The London Review of Books

After years of reading the TLS and being exasperated by its antiquated editorial policies, I used to turn with relief to the London Review of Books for some informed and passionate writing.

Unfortunately, the LRB does not always oblige. The brief for reviewers to the LRB seems to be: create lengthy reviews (at around 3,000 words per review, over twice as long as the average TLS review), don’t worry about including your personal life and attitudes, and don’t worry too much about the book you are reviewing.

Thus, for example in one issue (5 October 2017) the LRB devotes almost 8,000 words on a review of two biographies of Freud, almost unintelligible to a non-specialist. It is full of word-play at the expense of meaning:

Strachey’s translation is of course part of this story. It was overseen by Jones, and is forever accused of forsaking Freud’s idiom for a scientistic lexicon, which misled some Bloomsburies (as Roudinesco calls them) to deplore the materialism of psychoanalysis, as offering not an excess but a poverty of news from the nowheres of unconscious life.

Some reviews are a such a foregone conclusion that we wonder why they were commissioned at all. Jonathan Ree, for example, carries out a hatchet job on a life of Darwin by A N Wilson. Wilson is an opinionated and untrustworthy writer at any time, but Wilson on science is a very unlikely combination. So the reviewer behaves as I would, spending around half the review chatting pleasantly about Darwin, before getting down to the matter in hand, which is a demolition of Wilson’s accuracy and approach.  You feel that even this number of words is wasted on such an inadequate object.

Reviewers are encouraged to add personal notes, some of which are at odds with the review they are supposed to be writing. For Rivka Galchen, writing about women astronomers in the early C20 at Harvard, at the same time as duly noting their achievements, she feels “seasick” that they entitled a New Year’s Eve musical put on by the women “The Observatory Pinafore”.  Worse, she claims she has “an irrational if predictable fear that reading this stuff might somehow result in having to live alongside these people. One admires but doesn’t want to be the women in this book.” Such middle-class nimbyism! It’s as if the slightest lack of conformity with 2019 sexual attitudes might affect our reviewer terribly.  

There are times when the LRB carries a magnificent insight into a topic or book, but those moments of insight are far too often outweighed by indulgent commissioning and failure to edit the supplied copy. Are these reviewers paid by the word? It reads like it, at times.