## Metadata - Author: [[LRB]] - Full Title: London Review of Books - Category: #articles - Summary: Europe’s leading magazine of ideas, published twice a month. Book reviews and essays (and much more online) renowned for their fearlessness, range and elegance. - URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/ ## Full Document She received so much post, much of it hate mail, that it had to be delivered to her on special trucks; three secretaries, all called Madeline, helped her sort through her letters and turned the most threatening ones over to the FBI. In front of the White House, a group of women attempted to hang her in effigy: they said that they were all mothers, and that Thompson wanted ‘to give away a million boys’ lives in blood and pain’. Senators from Idaho, Montana and North Dakota called for her to be investigated as a ‘British agent’. How else to explain her comment, during the Battle of Britain, that if ‘democracy perishes in Britain, it will not be because the British people did not fight Hitler with all they had; it will be because ... the world’s greatest democracy and brother free nation allowed them to perish without adequate aid’? [Read more of Dorothy Thompson at War Deborah Friedell](https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/deborah-friedell/everyone-is-terribly-kind) I knew Buster Keaton.​ I carried his ukulele to Grand Central Station, where he and my father, Bert Lahr, were boarding a train to Toronto to make a film called *Ten Girls Ago*. It was 1962; I was 21, old enough to know I was walking with two comedy legends. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the platform and the waiting silver carriage. I remember my surprise at Keaton’s gravelly voice ... There are three opposed elements: the towers, the street and the shaft. The gaping maw of the Super Sewer goes down as far as the surrounding towers climb, but it is covert, safe behind barrier walls, protected by yawning security operatives in hard hats, charged with stalling appointments. This buried London, a labyrinth of antiquated tube tunnels, abandoned stations, Crossrail advances, medieval burial pits, utilities, intersecting sewers, lost rivers, bomb shelters, escape hatches for royalty, is the most disturbing of the three layers. We feel the cuts of earth surgery, even when we have no knowledge of where they are happening. We shudder in ignorance as monstrous machines chew through clay. We feel a physical shift in the balance of things. But we have no reliable chart. The story is told before it happens. And it has to be experienced, in order to confirm its CGI fictions. The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s *Poems* features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows ... The realisation that one might be show-offy in a good way is among Donne’s chief bequests to English literature, a salutary corrective to the 16th-century cult of Sidneian sprezzatura. The embrace of effort – the wish to impress, to delight, to dazzle, to convince or convert, and the willingness to be seen working at it – is the secret to the deathless charm of ‘The Flea’ and the pathos of the ‘Holy Sonnets’. [Read more of Who was John Donne? Catherine Nicholson](https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/catherine-nicholson/batter-my-heart) Diary On​ 17 March 2022, a judge in the Immigration and Asylum First Tier Tribunal heard the case of AB, a 21-year-old man facing deportation to Jamaica. The case rested on AB’s criminal history. He was convicted in 2019 of offences relating to the supply of heroin and cocaine and sentenced to more than four years in youth custody. While he was in prison, the Home Office made a deportation ... [Read more of At the Deportation Tribunal Luke de Noronha](https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/luke-de-noronha/diary) [](https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02) Exercise Your Mind The existence​ of the Five Eyes wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2010, but accounts of its activities have been circulating for years. The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide. The physical infrastructure alone operates at a Promethean scale: a network of satellite monitoring facilities shielded by radomes ... [Read more of The Five Eyes Tom Stevenson](https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/tom-stevenson/friends-with-benefits) Oh my God, how rich and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself ... [Read more of Chips’s Adventures Geoffrey Wheatcroft](https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/geoffrey-wheatcroft/not-even-a-might-have-been) Podcast Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from *Sight and Sound* of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what considerations could, or should, go into compiling such a chart. They also discuss Wood’s most recent review for the *LRB*, of Bergman’s *Fanny and Alexander*, and whether there is such a thing as a Christmas ... Podcast Alan Bennett reads his 2022 diary (with some extra bits), in which he buys his dad a violin, goes to Venice with a goat, and tries to make the queen laugh. *Image: Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in* Beyond the Fringe*, which they performed to the queen in 1961.* Video Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting required a sharp scalpel, a parallel-motion board and plenty of glue. As the *London Review of Books* celebrates its 40th anniversary, we look back at what paste-up used to involve in the ... Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting ...