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’. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • From the Archive: Martyn Bedford on Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' ,
    • In 'Silenced Voices' reports the ongoing story of the human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has been… ,
    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    Follow Us