Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

The Alchemy of Exile

The Disinherited: The Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture

By

Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 507pp £30 order from our bookshop

Home thoughts are best from abroad. Memory is a better nurse of patriotism than experience, generally because memory is more easily deluded, and distance lends enchantment. Love for Jerusalem flows by the waters of Babylon. Improbably but convincingly, Macaulay’s Jacobite preferred Scargill to Florence. Almost the only poem all Dutch people know is Denkend aan Holland – a heart-wringing evocation of flat landscape and cloud-filled skies. It was written in Sweden. To imagine England, go to some corner of a foreign field. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us