Andy Martin
Liquid Cathedrals
William Finnegan makes slowcoach Donna Tartt look like Usain Bolt. He once took eight years to write a single article for the New Yorker, thus blowing her ten for The Goldfinch right out of the water. His book Barbarian Days took him almost an entire lifetime to write (he is now over sixty and still surfing). It was definitely worth the wait. On the other hand, I’m not holding my breath for volume two.
As I read through this far-ranging, unique and bewitching memoir, I kept on thinking, Finnegan, c’est moi!
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
'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!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none