Francis King
A Very Greek Affair
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
By Eileen Warburton
Jonathan Cape 510pp £25 order from our bookshop
SAM GOLDWYN NOTABLY remarked: ‘Folks shouldn’t write autobiographies until they are dead.’ He might have added: ‘Folks shouldn’t write biographies until their subjects are dead.’ If, in addition, the biographer has not merely been a friend of the been the subject’s choice for the task, then the odds on an absolutely truthful, and therefore worthwhile, biography are even longer.
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
'She drank a lot of wine and some of the great bottles she savoured are listed here. But her biggest appetite was for love, no doubt fuelled ... by the lack of it in her early childhood.'
Cressida Connolly reviews a new biography of Sybille Bedford.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-romantic-jigsaw
I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none