The Miner's Tale
The Miner’s Tale
DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ‘The only thing new in this world is the history you don’t know.’ It is a statement that illuminates much about Peace’s purpose – particularly his interest in grounding his fiction in the verifiable, in order to get at the unverifiable: speculative history that could not be told in another setting. In this book about the miners’ strike of 1984, telling a story he describes as ‘a fiction, based on a fact’, Peace ranges beyond the history we know – the television images of police and pickets battling in the sunshine – into a secretive world of murk and mendacity.
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
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'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