A year or two before Peter Cook died, I arranged a meeting between him and my editor at Century, Mark Booth. Mark wanted him to write an autobiography. They met at Rules. Peter arrived announcing that he had just finished his autobiography, and that he had it with him. ‘I’d love to see it,’ said […]
‘Writing about one’s own work carries with it certain risks, including that of seeming egocentric,’ David Lodge acknowledges in this collection of essays, ‘but I have never felt that there was any conflict between being a self-aware creative writer and an analytical, formalist critic at the same time – on the contrary. T S Eliot […]
Since 1945, there have been about 150 conflicts of all kinds; perhaps 20 million people have perished in them, not to speak of the maimed, the bereaved and millions of refugees. In this grim catalogue of mayhem, the Lebanon occupies a unique place. It used to do so, in the troubled Middle East, as an […]
In 1982 Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln wrote a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which revealed-a number of surprising facts. The wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine, had in fact been Jesus’s own wedding, to Mary Magdalene. The happy couple had had issue, including one unruly […]
There is a respectable quantity of accredited poetry by women – respectable, that is, compared with other art forms – and it is striking that these two anthologies, though they obviously overlap in major areas, do not, overall, contain the same work. Women have always composed poetry – the first identified writer in the world […]
‘What do you believe?’ For most of us the question is embarrassing. Even the minority who subscribe to a particular faith, or denomination within one, find it difficult to distinguish between what they ought to believe and what, at root, they actually believe. For the non-believer, perhaps, the question deserves to be more embarrassing than […]
I am tired of people telling me that penises aren’t interesting, because they are; and, though I’m no Freudian analyst, I strongly suspect that these ignorant folk are trying to conceal a preoccupation which is embarrassing to them. How can anything be boring that has, through the course of human history, been worshipped, admired, feared, […]
Several full-length biographies of Miles Davis have been published since his death in 1991. Davis’s album Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959, still sells five thousand copies a month in the United States alone. He is the one modern jazz musician likely to be represented on the meagre jazz shelves of shops; in amongst the […]
Upon the deep and unalterable foundations of the male and female sexes, people have constructed the fragile castles of the masculine and feminine genders. These structures have been re-embellished, refortified and sometimes entirely rebuilt in order that each sex should retain its mystery, its charm and its danger for the other. And one mark of […]
What do we mean by ‘rare’? That may sound a little like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The online Cambridge Dictionary offers a more mundane answer: ‘1. not common; very unusual: 2. (of meat) not cooked […]
In the June 2017 issue of Literary Review, I wrote about the detention of Oleg Sentsov, a prominent Ukrainian writer and film-maker best known for his 2011 film, Gamer. Sentsov took part in the Euromaidan demonstrations that toppled former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. He was detained by the Russian security services at […]
For decades – in terms of prizes rather than sales – crime fiction has been a poor relation of literary fiction, studiously snubbed by those who give out awards (except for those specific to the genre, such as the Crime Writers’ Association’s Daggers). But to the delight of some and the consternation of others (who […]
Pavel Vilikovský’s novel is a miracle of origami: an extensive and elaborate narrative unfolds from a very slim volume. The reader may be dismayed at first to learn that each chapter (often just a page long) bears a number from one to five, followed by a letter. Each number represents a thematic thread – life, […]
What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.’ But if this sounds like an eye-catching […]
After the introduction in 1997 of new combination therapy drugs that began to save the lives of many (though not all) HIV patients, the genre of AIDS fiction effectively shrank, certainly among gay male writers. Long considered a commercial no-go for publishers, it also seemed now to lack an ethical imperative, since the prospects for […]
Sebastian Faulks’s fourteenth novel shares many of the preoccupations of the previous thirteen. As in his early trilogy (Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray) and in much of his most recent novel, Where My Heart Used to Beat, France is the setting, and the story draws heavily on experiences of war. […]
In Transcription, Kate Atkinson recasts the bildungsroman within the fertile genre of the spy thriller. The novel’s heroine is Juliet Armstrong, who in 1940, aged eighteen and newly orphaned, is recruited by MI5 to assist in an undercover operation to monitor the activities of fifth columnists. Discreetly cocooned in a Pimlico flat, Juliet transcribes the […]
Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This yearning for a notional elsewhere and the keenly topical subject of migration are at the heart of Donal Ryan’s Booker Prize-longlisted […]
Sally Rooney’s second novel begins with an unlikely romance between two sixth-formers in County Sligo. Connell is a ‘culchie’ from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, a popular lad who plays centre forward for the school football team. Marianne, by contrast, is friendless and aloof. His mum works as a cleaner for her mum, […]
As a theme, the decline of the privileged white male is a hardy perennial of the American novel. The rich white man may fall from the grace of youth (like Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom); he may crack up under the pressures of a bad marriage (like Bellow’s Moses Herzog); he may blunder into adultery and scandal […]
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It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
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Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk