Blair Worden
Fear of Foreigners
Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War
By Mark Stoyle
Yale University Press 297pp £18.95 order from our bookshop
Over the past fifty or sixty years, interpretations of the English Civil War, which have always been controversial, have become so in a new sense. Previously the disputes were about the rights and wrongs of the war. Now they are about the causes of its outbreak and course. Historians are expected to have, not a preference for one side, but an analytical line.
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In 2017 Jan Morris, who died last week, wrote a paean to George Borrow's 'Wild Wales' – 'the most celebrated book written in English about Wales'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stanzas-at-the-summit
'She drank a lot of wine and some of the great bottles she savoured are listed here. But her biggest appetite was for love, no doubt fuelled ... by the lack of it in her early childhood.'
Cressida Connolly reviews a new biography of Sybille Bedford.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-romantic-jigsaw
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!