Patrick Skene Catling
Old China Hands
The Potter’s Hand
By A N Wilson
Atlantic Books 505pp £17.99
The prolific and versatile A N Wilson has written an old-fashioned family saga that is ‘meant to be read as fiction’, he says, ‘even though it is intended, in part, as an act of homage to one of the great men of our history’. That man was the master potter who founded the industrial dynasty Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, of which the author’s father was a managing director. Before Josiah established his pottery in Burslem, England used to eat off pewter and wooden platters; since then, the tableware has become finer.
The story is a collaborative product of Wilson the biographer and Wilson the novelist. It displays the most important aspects of English political, economic, intellectual and social development late in the 18th century and early in the 19th, in a plot constructed as neatly and elegantly as a chair by
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
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm