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.
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
'This book takes in a lot of territory, all solidly researched and footnoted. But dry? Fuhgeddaboutit.'
Patricia T O'Conner on E J White's 'You Talkin' To Me? The Unruly History of New York English'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/tawk-of-the-town
'The identification of a mighty force sparkling intermittently seems to me to constitute the finest and most consistent poetic achievement of Goudie’s book.'
Candia McWilliam on @lachlangoudie's 'The Story of Scottish Art'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-that-glisters
Though 'the hotel had a reputation as the area’s best, its staff were not used to looking after world leaders, so the arrival of Cuba’s new strongman, Fidel Castro, came as something of a shock.'
@dcsandbrook on @simonhallwriter's 'Ten Days in Harlem'.
http://ow.ly/I63850Bvs10