Carole Angier
Mourning For His Mother
Most people’s childhoods shade imperceptibly into their adult lives, writes Andrew Motion. Not his. That ended abruptly at the age of seventeen, on the day his mother had a riding accident from which she never recovered, and of which she slowly died. In the Blood is Motion’s elegy for his lost childhood and his lost mother. It is also the portrait of a whole English world that thought it was finished (but, judging from my Cotswold village, isn’t). And last but far from least, it’s the story of the growth of a writer.
Motion’s home was not a natural one for a writer. His father sounds like Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew, who, if he catches a child reading, bellows ‘If you have nothing to do, go and muck out the stables.’ Richard Motion’s passions
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
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw