Geordie Greig
Dear Dad
My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father
By Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber 198pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
THE SWEET FAMILY snap of a doleful-looking little Indian boy in a party hat being held by his formally suited father on the dust-jacket of this rather strange memoir gives no warning of its occasionally shocking contents. 'It is disconcerting to be entering a brothel with your father,' Hanif Kureishi tells us at one point. He is referring to the experience of reading an unpublished novel found amongst the papers of his dead father which is closely based on the elder man's own adolescence, and reveals the hidden parts of his life.
Hanif Kureishi, best known for My Beautifull Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, which laid bare the modern twist and edge of Asian life on the peripheries of Britain's cities, believes that it is a waste of time and effort not to be searingly honest in his writing. So nothing
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
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford
'That they signify something is not in question. Yet how to interpret the symbols of a long-vanished society? What would the inhabitants of the 50th century make of the ubiquity of crosses in Europe?'
Hilary Davies on the art of the Lascaux caves.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/poems-of-the-underground