Dennis Sewell
Relations Sexual and Diplomatic
Bill Clinton: An American Journey- Great Expectations
By Nigel Hamilton
Century 784pp £25 order from our bookshop
Madam Secretary: A Memoir
By Madeleine Albright
Macmillan 562pp £20 order from our bookshop
NIGEL HAMILTON's ACCOUNT of Bill Clinton's life and early career - up until the Arkansas governor was elected President in 1992 - must surely rank as the most peculiar political biography ever written by a respectable academic author. The book is hvided into fragments (typically a page and a half long), each suggestive of a scene in a television docu-soap. Smart wheeze, you'd think: saves on adaptation costs. But the writing doesn't match up to the standards of the genre, tending to mimic instead the breathless style of TV preview columns, right down to their exasperatingly inappropriate exclamation marks!
Some kind of 'experimental' approach to this subject was perhaps inevitable, given the restrictions placed upon the author from the outset. When Hamilton turned up at the state archives in Little Rock to begin researching Clinton's record in Arkansas volitics. he found onlv two or three pages of bare fact
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
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers