Julian Barnes
Two Spinsters Learn How to Enjoy Themselves Abroad
In the Vine Country
By Somerville and Ross
Virago 237pp £5.99
A good travel book doesn’t necessarily depend upon purity of concept, previous expertise, or length of stay. Of course, not having had the idea in the first place, arriving ignorant, and bunking off as soon as possible, aren’t faultless routes to truth and vividness. But Henry James’s A Little Tour in France, pungent and authoritative, was the suggestion of an editor at Harper, and didn’t take the novelist very long: as Leon Edel perhaps over-admiringly puts it, James ‘devoted all October 1882’ to the necessary voyage. Redmond O’Hanlon’s spectacular debut, Into the Heart of Borneo, began even more indirectly, as a newspaper commission not even to him but to his travelling companion James Fenton.
So we shouldn’t be too prejudiced against In the Vine Country when we discover that the idea came from The Lady’s Pictorial, the authors spent only two weeks in Bordeaux, and that they knew next to sod-all about wine to begin with. ‘In spite of a grand and complete ignorance
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.
Congratulations to @HanKangOfficial, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
We've lifted the paywall on Joanna Kavenna's review of The White Book from November 2017.
Joanna Kavenna - Carte Blanche
Joanna Kavenna: Carte Blanche - The White Book by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)
literaryreview.co.uk
Few surveys of British art exist. Those that do have given disproportionate space to recent trends and neglected the 150 years between Hogarth and Turner.
@robinsimonbaj examines what launched British artists of this era into the European stratosphere.
Robin Simon - The Wright Stuff
Robin Simon: The Wright Stuff - The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor
literaryreview.co.uk