William Palmer
The Cretan Paradox
Falling For Icarus: A Journey Among the Cretans
By Rory MacLean
Viking 334pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
THERE IS A classic logical paradox which is cited in St Paul’s Epistle to Titus and in older Greek texts and which may be summarised as, ‘All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan.’ A proud and ancient people should not be libelled as liars; it might be more diplomatic to say that, in Rory MacLean’s new book at least. the bars of Crete abound in unreliable narrators. This is not surprising on an island where gossip is mixed with legend and stirred with myth; where, as one man tells the author, Alexander the Great ‘came to fight the Communists’. No doubt MacLean’s own stow has already entered the rich memory pool and is now being creatively embroidered.
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
'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire