Elizabeth Longford
Six of the Best
Apart from his talents as biographer and novelist, A N Wilson is the best literary interpreter now writing. I may have got the knack of generalisation from his own book: The Diary of a Nobody he calls ‘the best comic novel in the language’, Cardinal Newman is ‘incomparably the most flawless English stylist’ and Branwell Brontë’s painting of his sisters in the National Portrait Gallery is ‘one of the most inescapably emotional portraits of the whole gallery’ – nevertheless I think all four generalisations are true.
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'Of all modern English poets, Larkin is perhaps the one with whom most readers feel some imaginative affinity, a sense of having lived in the same world, with the same streets, the same unvoiced longings and anxieties.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/hull-revisited
For the summer issue of @Lit_Review I wrote about THE GOLDEN RULE, @AmandaPCraig's latest: a lean, high-stakes drama touching on domestic violence, Generation Rent and video game design.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-they-spoke
'He wrote obsessively and at tremendous length – as a youth William drew a witty sketch of his father vigorously beating a dead horse – and frayed his nerves in the process.'
John Banville charts the turbulent life of William James.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress