Philip Womack
Man of Mystery
Jonathan Barnes’s new book is a labyrinthine literary thriller that cleverly plays with ideas of authorship and text, while satirising our obsession with money and celebrity. With the rise of the internet and e-books, the terrifying question arises: can a text be stable? Would we notice if, say, Orwell were edited, subtly, year on year, until the text became something entirely different? What if it weren’t a human editing the texts, but something else entirely? And what if those edits had an actual effect upon reality itself?
Dr Toby Judd is a bumbling lecturer at a provincial university, always in the shadow of his smart, media-friendly colleague, J J Salazar. Both have a passion for Matthew Cannonbridge, Britain’s favourite writer, whose novels and poetry rank above Dickens and Shakespeare in popularity. The minutiae and backbiting of university
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'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind