a city of prose (and its review of books)

the new London Review of Books is full of goodies--including a review from Eric Hobsbawm (who is such a rock star) of a new book about family systems in world history, and Andrew O'Hagan's "A City of Prose," a reflection on London after 7/7 from the vantage point of the Review's old offices in the BMA building at Tavistock Square, site of the bus bombing:

Several of the victims of the bus bombs were taken into the forecourt of the British Medical Association, where they were attended to by as many doctors, and where two passengers died. I was always amazed by the length and circuitousness of the corridors in the BMA building, which made one feel like a lost blood cell travelling through the arteries of some giant corporate body. Our office seemed so small and tight compared to all that expanse, but it was to those rooms, with their windows looking down on Tavistock Square, that Salman Rushdie once delivered his review of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and where it was edited, cared for, ‘washed and ironed’, as the editors would say. ‘Why,’ he wrote, ‘should we bother with Calvino, a word-juggler, a fantasist, in an age in which our cities burn and our leaders blame our parents? What does it mean to write about non-existent knights, or the formation of the Moon, or how a reader reads, while the neutron bomb gets the go-ahead in Washington, and plans are made to station germ-warfare weaponry in Europe?’ He went on: ‘The reason Calvino is such an indispensable writer is precisely that he tells us, joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as hating; and that such things exist in people, too.’

Those were the same rooms where Tony Blair arrived breathlessly one day before catching the train at Euston. The piece he delivered may have required more ironing than Rushdie’s, but it too, in October 1987, found its place in the paper’s pages. He wrote that Mrs Thatcher ‘will wield her power over the next few years dictatorially and without compunction’ and further predicted that ‘the 1990s will not see the continuing triumph of the market, but its failure.’ And it was into those same rooms that Ronan Bennett came with one of the longest pieces ever published in a single issue of this paper, a report on the civil and legal injustices perpetrated by the state in its desperate pursuit of those guilty of the Guildford bombings. Argument in the long run is louder than bombs, even if, as often happened in my day at the London Review, people would ring up to cancel their subscriptions when they violently disagreed. It was mostly after we’d run a piece by Edward Said. ‘I refuse to read pieces written by murderers,’ one of them said.

‘And we’re happy not to publish them,’ I said.

‘Said is happy to see Israelis bombed,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Professor Said is happy to make arguments, and we are happy to publish them.’

But it was Tavistock Square itself that was on my mind. It is understandable that condemnation, in such a case as this, will precede contemplation, but perhaps less bearable that we live at a time when it will overthrow honest thinking altogether. The square is a living testament to the opposite view.

Go and read it all.