GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
The Great Dissembler
JOHN GREEN appreciates a meticulous dissection of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency that exposes political and economic structures in the US
SITUATION ROOM: Walt Rostow shows President Lyndon B. Johnson a model of the Khe Sanh area 02/15/1968. Johnson ordered the US military to hold Khe Sanh at all costs, and with the eventual abandonment of the base "Khe Sanh became etched in the minds of many Americans as a symbol of the pointless sacrifice and muddled tactics that permeated a doomed U.S. war effort in Vietnam”.
[Public Domain]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol 4: The passage of Power
Robert A Caro, The Bodley Head, £30
WHO wants to read a biography of Lyndon Johnson?
His presidency of the US from 1963-69 was hardly a memorable one. But this is not so much a book about a bland US president but a meticulous dissection of political and economic structures in the US. It is also a riveting read by one of the modern masters of historical writing.
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