Virginia Ironside
Not So Swinging
Am I being an old curmudgeon or am I right to feel completely cheated and confused when I pick up a book called The Sixties only to find, within the first few pages, that the author didn’t mean the Sixties at all? ‘The Sixties, of course, were not the decade of the same name. They began in the mid-sixties … and ended in the mid-1970s,’ writes Jenny Diski, the author of the latest in Profile’s Big Ideas series.
Excuse me. Says who? I was actually there. While Jenny Diski was thirteen in 1960, I was sixteen, had already left school and was going to go to art school, write my first book (published in 1966), and follow it up
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'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