Diana Athill
Family Fortunes
Mosaic: Portraits in Fragments
By Michael Holroyd
Little, Brown 283pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Michael Holroyd says in his preface that he intended this book to be a postscript to his family memoir Basil Street Blues, but that it became a separate entity, composed so that ‘anyone can follow the narrative without having read, or remembered, the earlier work’. And of course it can be so followed; but I think a reader of it gains a good deal from familiarity with the memoir. Much of the new book is taken up with accounts of how Holroyd discovered more about people he already knew (or knew about), and filly to appreciate this ‘more’, one needs to have shared with him the ‘less’ he started out with.
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
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress