Mike Phillips
A Backpacker in the Banlieues
Johny Pitts’s otherness isn’t straightforward. The son of Richie Pitts, a notable African-American performer who arrived in Britain to join the Northern Soul movement, graduated to the West End stage and ended up making his life in Britain, Johny grew up in Sheffield’s Firth Park. As a black northerner, he expresses frustration at what he describes as the ‘Brixtonization of black Britain – that is, the reduction of the black British experience into a single, neat London-oriented narrative’.
Ironically, Pitts repeatedly refers to Britain’s north–south divide, a favourite trope of the white Left, without apparently being aware of the differences between black migrant communities in separate parts of London or of the dispersal of black Londoners throughout the country. He goes on to describe being fooled
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
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