Tom Fort
Cockles of the Heart
Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells
By Helen Scales
Bloomsbury 304pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
On quiet nights in the BBC Radio newsroom, a former colleague of mine used to supplement his income by churning out features for an old-fashioned news agency. The agency was more interested in quantity than in-depth research, and one of these features – I forget if my friend was responsible – concerned the alleged extreme rarity of sinistral, or left-coiling, whelks. A regional newspaper, possibly in Grimsby, went big on the whelk story, inviting readers to submit samples of this exceptional shell. The upshot was an angry phone call from the editor of the paper to the boss of the news agency casting doubt,
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
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