Sarah Bradford
Diamond in the Rough
Madam, Where Are Your Mangoes? An Episodic Memoir
By Desmond de Silva
Quartet Books 304pp £25 order from our bookshop
Anyone who thinks lawyers are boring should read this book. Desmond de Silva has outfought, outwitted, outdined and outdrunk everyone, from warlords, criminal dictators, Hollywood stars and top footballers to major political figures and serial murderers. It reads like a real-life thriller.
In his foreword Julian Fellowes, who has known de Silva for thirty years, recounts how his friend, as the first British QC to be appointed chief prosecutor at a case before an international war crimes tribunal, succeeded
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'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions