Lucy Lethbridge
Broad Church
In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult
By Rebecca Stott
Fourth Estate 394pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Priestdaddy: A Memoir
By Patricia Lockwood
Allen Lane 336pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Those who search for reckless extremes are found in every sphere of human experience. The spirit of religious fundamentalism, with its quest for a single, purifying flame, can be found in the staunchest atheist – and in the addict, the delinquent, the workaholic and dogmatists of all flavours. These memoirs by the daughters of priests both illustrate this in entirely different ways.
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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.