Review 31

Oct 13, 2024 | review31.co.uk | Francis Blagburn

Garth Greenwell, Small Rain Picador, 320pp, ISBN 978-1509874699 £18.99In her 1926 essay ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.’ Almost a century on and it’s still true. There is, of course, plenty of excellent writing about illness, and more of it arriving all the time, but it’s relatively rare for this to take the form of the novel.

Sep 17, 2024 | review31.co.uk | Sam Gregory

In his 2006 film about Stalinism, Joebuilding, Jonathan Meades explains how the Soviet Union set out to bend the environment, as it did people, to its will. ‘[Stalin] was a greater force than nature, he created inland seas, his slave labourers died in their thousands digging bloated canals more ostentatious than utility demanded. . . their function was to prove the state’s might. Like many autocrats before him, Stalin determined to control the climate.

Jul 17, 2024 | review31.co.uk | Connor Harrison

James Marcus, Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Princeton University Press, 336pp,ISBN 9780691254333, £25.00‘American nature was a splendid, empty theater,’ wrote Professor Larzer Ziff on the early republic. If we are to take his lead, then Ralph Waldo Emerson might be considered America’s first actor.

Jun 28, 2024 | review31.co.uk | John Hay

In the 1890s, with the rise of electric lighting and the need for copper wiring, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, headquartered in Butte, Montana, and owned by Irishman Marcus Daly, became one of the largest mining operations in the entire world. Buttressed by an enormous vein of copper, Butte was a boomtown, and the resulting labor opportunities — potentially lucrative but extremely dangerous — attracted an influx of Irish immigrants.

Jun 12, 2024 | review31.co.uk | Archie Cornish

Around the turn of the Millennium the English — some of them — started thinking anew about their national identity, and how to disentangle it from Britishness. A catalyst, looking back, is often supposed to be the England men’s football team’s charge to the semi-finals of Euro 1996. The years since have seen a stream of enquiries into Englishness across a range of fields, from sociology to the history of pop music.