Valerie Grove
Demon Barber of Fleet Street
This is the most riveting memoir you will read this year. It is short, pithy, fast-paced, comic and tragic by turns. Lynn Barber, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, who has terrorised celebrity interviewees and labelled them ‘mad’, ‘paranoid’, and ‘seriously screwed-up’, has looked into the mirror and dissected, unsparingly, her own peculiar life. It’s every bit as good as Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, a comparable tale of a writer emerging from a potentially catastrophic episode in her teenage years.
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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
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.