Henry Hitchings
Dripping with an Easy Sensuality…
What image do the words ‘book reviewer’ conjure? For me, thanks no doubt to George Orwell’s essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, they bring to mind a bespectacled tea-drinking man who sits in a dressing gown at a wobbly table, surrounded by unpaid bills and volumes that bear inauspicious titles such as Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa.
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'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me