Tom Fort
Roadkill & Camomile for Tea
The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology
By Mark Boyle
Oneworld 266pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
I suppose the obvious next step for someone who has already written a book about how he gave up money for three years is to repudiate the technological advances of the modern world and write a book about living by candlelight and without running water. By conventional standards these are singular, not to say bizarre, choices, but good luck to Mark Boyle if they bring him contentment and enable him to write as eloquently and memorably as he does.
Having briefly resumed handling lucre, Boyle set off for the west of Ireland with enough of it to buy a small farmhouse and some land in a green and empty part of County Galway. Modest the farmhouse was, but not modest enough, since it had sockets and switches
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
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity