John Sutherland
Pulp Non-Fiction
The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World’s Greatest Invention
By Alexander Monro
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 368pp £20 order from our bookshop
By the universal sod’s law of bus travel, two books on the history of paper have trundled into publication simultaneously. I haven’t read Nicholas A Basbanes’s On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (smart title), published in the US by Knopf, but it will have to be very good to match up to Alexander Monro’s own everything on the same subject.
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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.
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James Hogg—best known today for his amazing novel The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which “voluptuously tormented” André Gide—died #OTD, 21 Nov, 1835.
In this @Lit_Review article, Alan Taylor visits Hogg’s birthplace in the Borders
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-ettrick-shepherd