Christopher Bray

The Life of Bryan

Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood

By

Jonathan Cape 343pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

Twenty or thirty years ago, when British television could still lay claim to being the least bad in the world, Bryan Magee was a familiar figure on the small screen. Dapper and avuncular, he engaged philosophers in one-on-one chats on such matters as the existential moment, the politics of aesthetics and post-Chomskyan linguistics. It sounds weird but the shows looked weirder. For Magee quizzed the likes of Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams while sitting on a Dralon-covered sofa. Come to think of it,

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us