Christopher Hart
Bald Heads and Boiled Eggs
Between his mammoth, 1,000-page biographies of writers and cities, Peter Ackroyd clearly likes to toss off the occasional slim volume of fiction, and he does it with practised ease. These are high entertainments, both lively and evocative, combining all the author’s usual preoccupations: the past, memory, fakes and forgeries, an unfashionable but darkly gripping sense of the material world being haunted by unseen forces, and an impeccable sensitivity to spirit of place.
In The Fall of Troy, Ackroyd takes the story of Heinrich Schliemann and turns it into fiction with bravura and a healthy lack of respect for the facts. His Schliemann is ‘Herr Obermann’, a domineering Hellenophile, bald and moustachioed, with a belligerent and entirely unfunny sense of humour. Echt deutsch
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
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima