Malcolm Forbes
Lives of the Poet
Blake Morrison’s 2010 novel The Last Weekend starts out as a carefree catch-up between two couples at a country house on a sunny bank holiday. When the narrative homes in and centres on the two men, storm clouds gather. Past differences and petty rivalries rear their ugly heads, souring the atmosphere and threatening the friendship. ‘You know how it is with friends,’ the book’s narrator says at the outset, ‘the closer you get, the less you see them for what they are.’
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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
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.