Andrew Barrow
Absolutely Confabulous
A good conversation can come close to heaven, turn a stranger into a friend, save lives and marriages, engender reason and bring out the best in everyone. The oldest and most captivating of all the arts, the ability to talk, listen, enthral, be enthralled, find common ground or in other words ‘click’ with someone, nevertheless remains a rare skill.
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'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings