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.
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'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
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore