Kevin Jackson
The Critic’s Critic
The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961–1993
By Anthony Burgess (Edited by Will Carr)
Carcanet 274pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
This volume is made up almost entirely of Anthony Burgess’s book reviews and literary essays for The Guardian, The Observer, The Listener, the New York Times and The Spectator – for the most part, that is, for publications aimed at a fairly literate general readership, not at scholars and academics. He needed, then, the talent to amuse as well as to instruct, to praise, to question and to pooh-pooh, and he had those talents in abundance. Burgess also had another crucial virtue, as one of his literary editors, Peter Green, once pointed out in a BBC interview: he was a pro. You could always rely on him to file on time and at the agreed length, and his copy was so well crafted that only a fool or a creep would feel the need to tinker with it. As Green said, these are qualities for which an editor would cheerfully kill.
The Ink Trade begins with his jape – well known to Burgess fans – of writing a review for the Yorkshire Post of a novel by one Joseph Kell, who was in fact Burgess himself. Guessing that his editor had sent him the book as a kind of
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
'Within two days of arriving at the retreat, he is called away to attend the funeral of a friend killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ... Carrère is soon divorced and suicidal, interned in a psychiatric institution where he must slowly rebuild his life.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lunge-twist-pose
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford