Diana Athill

Shoot For the Moon

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight

By

Hamish Hamilton 320pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

This book may become many people’s favourite, for reasons which they will find hard to explain. ‘Moonlight’, says James Attlee in his opening chapter, ‘is a subject almost universally regarded as off-limits to contemporary writers, too kitsch, debased and sentimental to be worthy of serious consideration. This alone would make it a subject worth exploring.’ Particularly so because it had occurred to him that we have paid for the boon of electricity by an almost complete loss of darkness and the moon’s lovely alleviation of it – certainly so in towns, under their rusty, pinkish glow of diffused electric light. So he sets out to rediscover and explore the night, and leads us with him in a way so far from being kitsch and sentimental that we become hungry for more.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    • The author 'seethes with contemptuous indignation at the shiny junk that an unregulated construction industry dumps… ,
    • 'The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man [...] gave way to intellectual power; radical thought, gifted… ,
    • 'While Jane Austen didn’t perhaps achieve the full recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, even then she out… ,
    • 'All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And t… ,
    • 'You are interested in a particular subject; basic research hardens this interest into an obsession, after which th… ,
    Follow Us