D J Taylor
‘He Wrote This Specially For Me’
In ordinary circumstances the link between a novel published last autumn on the fashionable topic of multiculturalism and the memoirs of a late-Victorian man of letters might be thought rather tenuous. Nevertheless, reading the reviews of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time as they poured from the presses three or four months ago, I found myself returning, with a kind of homing instinct, to Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and his paean to the decisive hold exerted on his imagination sometime in the late 1850s by W M Thackeray’s novel The History of Pendennis:
Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That did not seem to be one’s vocation. But the story of Pen made one wish to run away to literature, to the Temple, to the streets where Brown, the famous reviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella. The writing of poems ‘up to’ pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the suppers in the back-kitchen, these were the alluring things.
Swing Time attracted a mixed response from reviewers and readers. Certain critics – among them Houman Barekat in these very pages – diagnosed a brand of moral box-ticking and hazarded that Smith was a good deal keener on ventilating issues of the kind that appear in leading articles
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
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk