James Purdon
The Adventures of Snooky
To connoisseurs of the early British spy fiction published during the decade or so before the First World War, purity constitutes part of the nostalgic appeal. Look back to the dashed-off novels of Headon Hill or E Phillips Oppenheim – or even to Erskine Childers’s more thoughtful The Riddle of the Sands – and you gaze on a simpler version of the Great Game, unclouded by the murky ambiguity that would later descend upon the hunched shoulders of the Ambler or Le Carré spook.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3