After a TV programme on the horrors of nuclear war, a woman rang the BBC to ask whether fallout shelters could be fitted with cat-flaps. It is the kind of item that gets into This England (it did) as an example of our native dottiness. It could equally well have gone into The Bookseller as […]
I hate cats, I have no particularly strong feelings about pigs and I am vaguely fond of mice. Presumably these are the emotions I am supposed to have towards the Nazis, Poles and Jews from Art Spiegelman’s unsettling comic book of the holocaust Maus. In a pictorial biography of his father, Spiegelman sends us scurrying […]
I read this sublimely silly book while enduring the hideous experience of flying to New York on the quaintly-named ‘People’s Express’, an airline where they wait until you’ve fallen asleep to wake you up and make you pay for your ticker, have no hot food and charge you six dollars for a disgusting ‘picnic’ which […]
When Henry VIII’s dynastic and leg-over considerations led him to break with Rome, he can have had no idea what an odd institution he was creating in the Church of England, or how much anguish he was storing up for generations of sensitive young Englishmen. Three of the more anguished, the editor of the Spectator, […]
Roy Shaw was appointed Secretary-General of the Arts Council in 1975. He came from a working class background in the North of England, went to university late, found his career in adult education, became a Roman Catholic in the early fifties and saw the Arts Council as an extension of his wish ‘to help others […]
Sometimes it seems that the real division between people has nothing to do with talent, wealth or beauty. For some people, life’s hard, and for some it’s easy; there’s not much logic attached to the division, and one half of humanity certainly doesn’t understand the pleasures and pains of the other. In A Life of […]
When Daniel Farson became a television interviewer in 1956, the critics were inclined to accuse him of brutality: MR FARSON PULLS NO PUNCHES, as one newspaper headline put it mildly. In fact, the brutality is simply the appearance created by his honesty: a determination to tell the flat truth about any thing he discusses. This […]
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Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Philip Womack
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Juggling balls, dead birds, lottery tickets, hypochondriac journalists. All the makings of an excellent collection. Loved Camille Bordas’s One Sun Only in the latest @Lit_Review
Natalie Perman - Normal People
Natalie Perman: Normal People - One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
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Despite adopting a pseudonym, George Sand lived much of her life in public view.
Lucasta Miller asks whether Sand’s fame has obscured her work.
Lucasta Miller - Life, Work & Adoration
Lucasta Miller: Life, Work & Adoration - Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
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