Keith Miller
Bypassing a Jackpot
There are worse things, it turns out, than being a prophet without honour. Just ask William Gibson, whose predictions have hit the mark so nearly and so often that his prodigious powers of invention are all too easily mistaken for mere observational skills. His gloomy near-future thrillers are so fully imagined and minutely rendered that they play out like that quaintest of narrative modes, realism – and there is indeed something Balzacian about his work (it is tirelessly informative, and unrelentingly pitiless).
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It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings