Not since Giles St Aubyn snatched the papers of Edward VII ‘s private secretary, Francis Knollys, from under the nose of the Royal Archives more than twenty years ago has any biographer added appreciably to the story of Edward’s long apprenticeship and shorter reign. Professor Stanley Weintraub has nevertheless been bold enough to write yet […]
The story of Sarah and Abraham in the Old Testament might seem familiar to anyone brought up on Bible stories, but Jenny Diski makes it convincingly strange and new. She takes the bare bones of the story so laconically related in the original version, and clothes them with ample flesh. Writers have been fascinated by […]
At eighty-five, Saul Bellow is the Grand Old Man of American Letters. A recent Sunday Times poll of his peers established him as ‘greatest living novelist’, while an even more imposing US survey identified him as one of the hundred most important people in the world. He has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the […]
Boasting Irish origins and born in India in 1912, Lawrence Durrell was a product of the British Empire and of its more or less glorious decline. The Alexandria Quartet, his greatest (and only durable?) work of fiction, began to be published in 1957, by which time the world which it depicted had already been disassembled […]
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On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings
'If, as James Wolcott once claimed, Roth was a miracle of modern medicine, he was also one of therapy’s notable failures.'
@leorobsonwriter on Philip Roth, that 'walking, wanking paradox'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist