Andrew Lycett
Hard on Their Heels
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
By Tim Jeal
Faber & Faber 570pp £25 order from our bookshop
Dr Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers & Empire
By Clare Pettitt
Profile 244pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ is one of those well-known phrases whose deeper significance is strangely elusive.
I first heard it as a child, while living in what was then called Tanganyika in the 1950s. Somewhere not so far away at Ujiji in that same country, one white man had once greeted another thus. The man who spoke the words was Henry Stanley, an American journalist with a questionable reputation. The other was the famous missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone, who seemed to be one of the good guys.
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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!