Andrew Taylor
A Hero at the End
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis
By Paul O'Keeffe
Joanathan Cape 697pp £25 order from our bookshop
Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer
By Paul Edwards
Yale University Press 583pp £50 order from our bookshop
Readers of a biography may expect to ‘get inside the subject’s head’: but the squeamish may find that getting on first-name terms with his brain tumour is carrying intimacy a little far. Paul O’Keeffe opens his exhaustive study of Wyndham Lewis’s life, Some Sort of Genius, with a pitiless description of the tumour that eventually blinded him, a ‘morbid excrescence … pink in section and stippled with blood vessels’, and thoughtfully named FA1008 by the Westminster Medical School.
There is more to come: by the last of these 600-odd pages, barely a cranny of the unfortunate Lewis’s brain, mouth, eyes or genitals remains unexposed. This, it seems, is literary biography for medical students.
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
'Reading Taylor’s book has also made me join a book club. I did not like the January book; I did enjoy drinking gin while saying why.'
@clamorousvoice explores the history of women readers.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-readers
'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe