James Le Fanu
Pickled Parts
The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, the Father of Modern Surgery
By Wendy Moore
Bantam Press 482pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
The eighteenth century had the usual drawbacks of pre-modern times – pestilence, slavery, amputations and dental extractions without anaesthesia – and much else besides. But this self-styled age of enlightenment had one decisive factor in its favour, an irrepressible conviction that reason would prevail and knowledge, zealously pursued, would abolish ignorance. This was a world full of promise, whose wonders, thanks to British naval power, were just waiting to be discovered: an era in which, for example, James Cook, during his three-year circumnavigation of the globe, could fill his ship’s hold with thousands of new and extraordinary specimens of plants and animals.
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
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3