Tom Williams
All You Need Is an Island
In 1967, an island off the west coast of Ireland was put up for sale in a newspaper advertisement. John Lennon sent The Beatles’ trusted assistant, Alistair Taylor, to the auction on his behalf. Taylor secured Dorinish for Lennon for the sum of £1,550. The island offered some of the best pasture in Clew Bay and local sheep farmers had been interested in the opportunities it offered. Lennon dreamed of building a house there.
Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone is a reconstruction of Lennon’s return to the island,
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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
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.