Selina O’Grady
Remember, Remember
Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night
By Brenda Buchanan, David Cannadine, Justin Champion, David Cressy, Pauline Croft, Antonia Fraser, Mike Jay
Allen Lane 188pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
By Alice Hogge
HarperCollins 445pp £20 order from our bookshop
Ever since Samson brought the temple crashing down around his and the Philistines’ heads, we have ricocheted between admiration and hatred of civilian killers of a civilian enemy. Are they the morally tortured terrorists of Camus’s Les Justes, fatally misguided, but reluctantly believing their violence is justified? Or are they the loathsome, amoral losers of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, who want to bomb their way out of their own powerlessness with no thought for their victims?
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‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore
'As we read, we know that in a short time the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and colour television will sweep that age over the balustrade and into the sea, but for now everyone is happy.'
Simon Baker is charmed by Graham Swift's new novel, 'Here We Are'.
http://ow.ly/uDL050ylh80