Christopher Bray
The Life of Bryan
Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood
By Bryan Magee
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,
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
'Typical of Dickens to leave us with an unsolvable game of Cluedo. Was it John Jasper with the necktie in the cathedral, Stony Durdles with the fibula in the graveyard or Mrs Crisparkle with the arsenic in the close?'
Frances Wilson does some sleuthing.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-he-wrote-2
Sign up to our e-newsletter and get highlights from the new issue and gems from the archive, as well as exclusive competitions and subscription offers straight to your inbox.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/freenewsletter
They 'disliked Georgian architecture because it was identified with the enclosure movement ... their preferred style was Elizabethan: half-timbered and gabled'.
Jane Ridley on the houses Edwardian Liberals built.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/liberal-habitats