London Review of Books!

IN THE 25 OCTOBER 1979 ISSUE

	The ‘London Review of Books’
	Karl Miller
	For reasons that can’t all be separated from the facts of a national decline, criticism, and the literature it serves, have suffered a loss of confidence. But it is also true that gifted performers have arrived, and survived. New papers are starting, and old ones are resuming. There is no law of history which says that literature cannot break the spell of its dependence on the economy and on the state of the nation.
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	Last call for 40th anniversary events!
	Jeremy Harding, Nikita Lalwani and Adam Shatz on Monday; Anne Carson, Amit Chaudhuri, Nico Muhly and Paul Muldoon on Wednesday.
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	Fairy Flight in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
	William Empson
	The sex life of the spirits needs also to be considered, but this review is already too long.
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	Wynne Godley asks if Britain will have to withdraw from Europe
	The implications for Britain of EEC membership are rapidly becoming so perversely disadvantageous that either a major change in existing arrangements must be made or we shall have, somehow, to withdraw.
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	A letter
	Brigid Brophy
	Puritans, who hate and fear fiction, regularly pronounce ‘the novel’ dead, using the singular because they wish there were only one. But champions of fiction often do it no better justice, with their appeals to pity and duty on behalf of the poor, démodé, tottering old thing.
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	Also in this issue:
	John Bayley: William Golding’s first novel for twelve years, Karl Miller: V.S. Naipaul, Stuart Hampshire: Human Nature, Ralf Dahrendorf: Conservative Policy and the Universities, Emma Rothschild: The Economics of Illness, Rosalind Mitchison: Malthus and population theory, Michael Holroyd: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Dan Jacobson: Lawrence and the Mince-Pies, Randolph Quirk: Dictionaries, and poems by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.

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Oliver Sacks Foundation

Happy 40th anniversary, London Review of Books! Oliver Sacks first published in the LRB in 1981, working with editor and co-founder Mary-Kay Wilmers, who helped shape many of the essays that eventually appeared in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat."

Read a selection of Dr Sacks's LRB essays here: www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/oliver-sacks

📸: London Review Bookshop