A C Grayling
Man and Beast
So You Think You're Human?
By Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Oxford University Press 179pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
A Brief History of the Human Race
By Michael Cook
Granta Books 385pp £20 order from our bookshop
I ADMIRE FELIPE Fernández-Armesto’s erudition and the elegance of his writing. From his broad and copious talents has issued a stream of illuminating history in recent years, and in this short new book their wonted extent is again on display. This time, however, though the mellifluous manner remains, the substance is much more questionable. He seems to me to have got the wrong ends of several sticks, and made a muddle where none need exist: and on a crucial matter to boot.
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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'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