Frederic Raphael

Citizen Vain

Orson Welles: One Man Band

By

Jonathan Cape 466pp £25 order from our bookshop

Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

By

Harper 820pp £20 order from our bookshop

Simon Callow’s magniloquent biographical endeavour has taken a quarter of a century to compose and is still not complete. A final, fourth volume, dealing with the last two decades of Orson Welles’s life, is yet to come. So far, in giving three very long cheers for Orson Welles, he has succeeded in ravelling the sacred monster, like a modern Minotaur, in a maze of words. Other writers might have lost some of their enthusiasm for an auto-maniac who left little oxygen for anyone else to breathe in any room, or on any stage. Everything Welles said or did was scored con braggadocio. Long before Norman Mailer coined the phrase, Welles was the fire-breathing impersonation of ‘advertisements for myself’. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us