J W M Thompson
‘My Name is A L Rowse…’
The Diaries of A L Rowse
By A L Rowse, Richard Ollard (ed)
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 462pp £25 order from our bookshop
RICHARD OLLARD’S BIOGRAPHY of A L Rowse, published some four years ago, profited greatly from the egocentric old historian’s compulsive habit of diary-keeping. Ollard has now completed his task with this substantial edition of the diaries, which began during Rowse’s Cornish schooldays. He died aged ninety-three in 1997 and they constitute a remarkable record of an extraordmary life.
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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.