David Profumo
No Cannes Do
Sheathed in silver and sporting a seductive sobriquet, Jim Ballard’s latest novel is as alluringly tricked out as any lame starlet from the Riviera it describes: a companion piece to 1996’s Cocaine Nights, it once again explores this startlingly talented author’s fascination with the way crime and recreation may interact with the technological temptations of the new millennium. So chilling was it in places that, as I read it last month on a yacht in the Med, I had to resort to cashmere to stop myself shivering in the sun.
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
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.