Richard Barber
The Missing Monarch
The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
By Ian Mortimer
Jonathan Cape 522pp £20 order from our bookshop
Edward III has had a hard time of it from historians and biographers. At the beginning of this book, Ian Mortimer rightly points out the often extreme prejudice of Victorian historians against him, and the lack of redress in the twentieth century: chivalric and warlike kings have long been out of fashion. Edward’s champions have been unlikely and few: Joshua Barnes, while professor of Greek at Cambridge, produced in 1688 a massive work which is the most comprehensive account of his reign, with footnotes which are still useful today, while at the other extreme, William Blake tried to create the play that Shakespeare never wrote, the missing prologue to the latter’s great series of historical dramas.
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 minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'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