Jonathan Mirsky

Flesh & Fur

The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs

By

William Collins 273pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

This is the only book I have read, and in eighty-one years I have read thousands, that has made me happy. Many others have interested, fascinated, taught, amazed or moved me, but only The Great Grisby made me not just contented or pleased, but actually happy. Mikita Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the “real world” out there, towards which I’m increasingly ambivalent’. These words alone could have done it.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The erecting and immediate destruction of a series of straw men rather detracts from what is for the most part an… ,
    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    • The author 'seethes with contemptuous indignation at the shiny junk that an unregulated construction industry dumps… ,
    • 'The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man [...] gave way to intellectual power; radical thought, gifted… ,
    • 'While Jane Austen didn’t perhaps achieve the full recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, even then she out… ,
    • 'All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And t… ,
    Follow Us