‘He talks slowly but continuously’, said one of Henry James’s later amanuenses, who of course wrote most of it down. The writing-down in part produced what can only be called the ‘world’ of James’s Letters, with its distinctness from, yet relatedness to, the other magnificent worlds of the novels, the essays, the notebooks, the prefaces […]
It started with ardour and ended in bitterness, this affair which Simone de Beauvoir described as ‘the only truly passionate love in my life’. Documented in more than three hundred letters, her affair with the American writer Nelson Algren introduced her to the physical pleasure she had never found with Jean-Paul Sartre – and threatened […]
The heartbreaking thing about Coda is that it is Simon Gray at his very best. It is the last thing he wrote before his death, and that fact is its subject. He had learnt that he had a cancerous tumour in a lung and one on his neck that might be secondary (it was), and […]
Oh, how they drank! This massive, meticulously annotated volume of the complete correspondence between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell throws open a window on the post-war literary past. From their meeting in Manhattan in 1947 until his sudden death in New York in 1977, these two American poets wrote copiously to each other […]
Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, was one of the most venerated intellectuals of her generation, but her enemies found her arrogant and aloof, while even her admirers often saw her as forbidding and Olympian. The only time I met her, she explained to me with disdain that although she regarded herself as an authority […]
With his courtly wit, gentle manners, incisive intellect and inevitable and faintly annoying bow tie, Arthur Schlesinger always seemed a throwback to a lost age of elaborate courtesies and gentleman scholars. When I met him eight years ago, after he had graciously agreed to an interview for my doctoral project, he was both impressively sharp […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm