Pamela Norris
Bearing Witness
Pat Barker’s new novel begins in the life class at the Slade School of Art in London, where a young artist, Paul Tarrant, is struggling to draw a naked female model to the exacting standards of Henry Tonks, a teacher obsessed by anatomy. It is spring 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the First World War. By the end of the novel, Paul will have become closely acquainted with the bones, nerves and arteries that, as Tonks insists his students remember, animate the smooth surface of the skin.
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
'Of all modern English poets, Larkin is perhaps the one with whom most readers feel some imaginative affinity, a sense of having lived in the same world, with the same streets, the same unvoiced longings and anxieties.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/hull-revisited
For the summer issue of @Lit_Review I wrote about THE GOLDEN RULE, @AmandaPCraig's latest: a lean, high-stakes drama touching on domestic violence, Generation Rent and video game design.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-they-spoke
'He wrote obsessively and at tremendous length – as a youth William drew a witty sketch of his father vigorously beating a dead horse – and frayed his nerves in the process.'
John Banville charts the turbulent life of William James.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress