John Hopkins
Sweltering Skies
Travels: Collected writings, 1950-93
By Paul Bowles
Sort of Books 480pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
When entering Paul Bowles’s flat in Tangier the first thing you noticed were the suitcases. Piled high, the well-travelled cases were exotically decorated with steamship tags and first-class hotel stickers detailing his worldwide wanderings: Paris, Rome, Madrid, Mexico, Central America, Morocco, Algeria, Kenya, India, Turkey and Ceylon. His friend Brion Gysin quipped that Paul kept those suitcases stuffed with traveller’s cheques in case he had to make a quick exit from Tangier.
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
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3