Diana Athill
Coleridge, Potter & King Pocky
In the 1720s, when Daniel Defoe, in his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, came to the ‘unpassable hills’ of Westmorland, he concluded that ‘all the pleasant part of England was at an end’. To him and his contemporaries mountains were ‘horrid’, being uncultivable, cold and likely to drop rocks on you. It is amazing that only about twenty years later the poet Thomas Gray reported about the French Alps that ‘not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry’. Poets and painters: it was they who first responded to untamed nature, and thus became the heralds of the eight million or so people who flock every year to the part of England we now call Cumbria.
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
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad