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.
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'Together the Marcoses established a new style of deluxe autocracy, one characterised by glitz and kleptomaniac graft.'
Peter Conrad on Lauren Greenfield's new documentary about Imelda Marcos, 'The Kingmaker'.
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PLUS, @NJCooper_crime picks her favourite crime novels of 2019.
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