Tony Parsons
From Tarry Stool to Teenage Icon
Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean
By Donald Spoto
HarperCollins 275pp £18 order from our bookshop
When the biggest American rock star of the Nineties, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, removed the top of his head with a shotgun, his mother commented that her boy had ‘joined the stupid club’ – meaning the crowded fraternity of star-crossed young celebrities who died before their time.
James Dean would have been sixty-five last February – a rebel with a free bus pass. He never made it, of course, expiring in the gloaming of a California freeway after wrapping his Porsche Spyder around a station wagon driven by a young man called Donald Turnupseed. That was September
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
'Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria ... was as full of trouble and strife as the most harrowing of hard-luck case histories.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise