Peter Davies
Make Wing to the Rooky Wood
Esther Woolfson is, in the nicest possible way, potty about birds. And she is interested in their existence not as you or I might be, merely in the ornithological sense, but in birds as sharers of human living space.
As one brought up on a rural smallholding to which the local people brought for harbourage a stream of stricken avians – the concussed gull, the unfledged house sparrow and the, alas, irreparably broken-winged peewit – I am familiar with the mental condition that simply cannot say ‘no’ to any bird that is proffered.
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
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings