Miranda Seymour
Lares Et Penates
Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions
By Deborah Cohen
Yale University Press 336pp £25 order from our bookshop
‘No nation has identified itself more with the house,’ a German visitor remarked of earlier twentieth-century Britain. Looking from the outside, this comment would seem only to apply to the lucky handful of people who have the money, and the requisite number of acres, to indulge their taste for idiosyncratic magnificence. Deborah Cohen’s book looks in another, and more rewarding, direction. It isn’t the splendours of aristocratic collections that interest her, but the rise of the middle class and, much slower, that of home-ownership.
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
'As readers, we are immersed in Tambu’s self-alienation, at one and the same time reached out to and held at arm’s length.'
@ellekeboehmer weighs up Tsitsi Dangarembga's Booker-shortlisted novel, 'This Mournable Body'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-tambu-did-next
'Trump has done China another favour by manifestly not caring a jot about human rights issues. Win-win, as they often say in Beijing, which is why the Chinese leadership wants this biddable figure to defeat Biden.'
@BurlM11 https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-beijing
'We are blessed at the moment with an abundance of farmers who have powerful stories to tell.'
@herdyshepherd1's 'English Pastoral' is 'lyrical and passionate', says @CharliePyeSmith.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/peak-soil