Richard Canning
Art Attack
Outsider: Always Almost, Never Quite – Volumes I & II
By Brian Sewell
Quartet Books Vol I 344pp Vol II 300pp £25 each order from our bookshop
Naked Emperors: Criticisms of English Contemporary Art
By Brian Sewell
Quartet Books 368pp £15 order from our bookshop
Coming across octogenarian art critic Brian Sewell’s late appeal to Truth in Outsider II, his second volume of autobiography, I thought of Keats’s familiar equation of Truth with Beauty (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). Sure enough, a paean to Beauty soon follows, in Sewell’s reflections on the flawless skin of the young and the ‘ridiculous’ responsiveness of the elderly to the allure of youth. Truth and Beauty propel these books, and are present on every page.
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
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
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish
Our pre-publication copies of #OneLoveChigusa by #SojiShimada have just arrived! An homage to Osamu Tezuka from #Japan’sManOfMystery
- trans by Sir David Warren (former UK ambassador to Japan). The 6th title in the #RedCircleMinis series. Pub date: 6/08/20 #島田荘司 #手塚治虫