LRB at the Beach

		He Roared Hilary Mantel: Danton Danton by David Lawday If you put your head out of the window of the café Procope, almost everyone you needed to overthrow the regime was within shouting distance. The Revolution was dreamed here before it was enacted, beneath the dark corners of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. Read more

C (for Crisis)
Eric Hobsbawm: Fear and the 1930s

• The Morbid Age by Richard Overy

Such emotions – the extremely widespread dislike of Jews in the West, for instance – were obviously not felt or acted on in the same way by, say, Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf. Emotions in history are neither chronologically stable nor socially homogenous, even in the moments when they are universally felt, as in London under the German air-raids, and their intellectual representations even less so. Read more

All Eat All
Jenny Diski: The Cannibal in Me

• An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Catalin Avramescu translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

Meiwes gave a TV interview and explained: ‘I sautéed the steak of Bernd, with salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg. I had it with Princess croquettes, Brussels sprouts and green pepper sauce.’ You begin to see, as the suburban lace curtain drifts into place, that the reality of cannibalism could be far less interesting than the idea of it. I think it’s the Princess croquettes in particular that cause the disappointment. Read more

Diary
R.W. Johnson: ‘Author Loses Leg in Lagoon’

They had amputated the toes on my left foot and then, when the leg continued to swell, amputated my leg at the knee. But the poison had already invaded other parts of my body and all my systems – kidneys, lungs, heart etc – began to switch off. Multiple organ failure: that is, I began to die – that’s what dying is. I came close to fulfilling one of Woody Allen’s ambitions: ‘I don’t mind dying,’ he once said, ‘I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ Read more

Also in this issue

Short Cuts
Michael Dobson: Deutschland ist Hamlet

At the Movies
Michael Wood: ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’