John Dugdale
Prophet & Loss
It is the summer of 1985, and Galen lives with his mother, Suzie-Q, in her childhood home in a dusty Californian valley. His father left his mother on learning that she was pregnant, and Galen has never been told anything about him. Aged twenty-two, he has no job and has yet to attend college, possibly due to mental illness or his propensity for wildly eccentric behaviour.
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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.