Despite the name, the London Review of Books does not actually review books. At no point is an opinion given whether the particular book on the dissecting table is worth three hours of your life and fifteen quid of your hard-earned. It awards no stars out of five.
It is, in fact a literary publication with brow so high as to be invisible unless accompanied by a receding hairline. It does publish lengthy literary essays broadly around the topic covered by the book in question, fortifies each strand of argument with references to other books which are at or near the apex of that particular subsection of literary endeavor, and often is a better reference on the topic than the actual book being reviewed is likely to be. Mrs. subscribes, and I'll tend to flip it between the Sunday breakfast table and the recycling bag, reading some of the less challenging essays and looking at the cartoons.
So it was with almost iconoclastic amusement that I stumbled across a review entitled Frog’s Knickers which is a review/essay/dissertation upon a recent book Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr. I think to get the full force of the article, you need to have read some of the other very worthy and/or very dense articles in the rest of the mag before alighting on this review, as it really does change gears without the clutch, but by a wide margin this passage is the best I have ever read from LRB, combining gutter erudition with complex wit in a way that--in the LRB pages--flirts with selfparody:
"As Geoffrey Hughes noted in his excellent Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, the more charged a swear word is the more susceptible it becomes to grammatical transformation. This means that the boundaries between nouns and adjectives and adverbs can all get completely fucked up by swear words, and before you know it the little fuckers are everywhere."
Five star f«««««g brilliant reviewing. I might even buy the book.
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