Frank McLynn
The Hoyden Within
Kate: The Woman who was Katharine Hepburn
By William J Mann
Faber 600pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
More nonsense and claptrap has been written about Katharine Hepburn than about any other personality in the movies. Mostly this is because Hepburn herself gave new meaning to the word ‘manipulative’: she could have given masterclasses on spin to Alistair Campbell and on reinvention to Madonna. If the blemish in William Mann’s book is an almost total failure to analyse the many films she appeared in, its great merit is that it deconstructs the Hepburn legend, lets in daylight and allows us to sift the facts (mainly detrimental to Hepburn’s reputation) from the fantasy she and her agents sedulously peddled.
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
'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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress