Tom Fort
Eeler’s Choice
Moonlighting: Tales and Misadventures of a Working Life with Eels
By Michael Brown
Merlin Unwin Books 255pp £15.99
In Germany the freshwater eel, Anguilla anguilla, is regarded with reverence. The Germans love it smoked – ‘eating them with their fingers like sweet corn, the juice running down their chins,’ as Michael Brown describes it in his thoroughly engaging eel-catching memoir.
The eel’s undeniable drawback is its looks. But what it lacks in glamour it makes up for – many times over, in my partisan view – with the mystery and wonder of its habits and its excellence as food. Some years ago I wrote my own celebration of it, called
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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
literaryreview.co.uk
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