Dan Jones
Dan Jones Wrestles with Two Books on Fighting
The Last Wrestlers: A Far Flung Journey in Search of a Manly Art
By Marcus Trower
Ebury 387pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
Tent Boxing: An Australian Journey
By Wayne McLennan
Granta Books xxpp £11.99 order from our bookshop
The last live wrestling match I saw was at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 2002. The highlight was a ‘Fatties Match’, in which three men with a combined weight of nearly 100 stone cavorted around the creaking ring. They were wearing leotards and tiny pairs of underpants, and performed numerous unlikely somersaults that did none of them much physical damage, but made a thunderous noise.
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
'She drank a lot of wine and some of the great bottles she savoured are listed here. But her biggest appetite was for love, no doubt fuelled ... by the lack of it in her early childhood.'
Cressida Connolly reviews a new biography of Sybille Bedford.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-romantic-jigsaw
I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none