Irving Wardle
They Laughed, They Cried
My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
By John Major
HarperPress 365pp £20 order from our bookshop
During John Major’s years as prime minister it always seemed to me that he and the opposition leader had swapped roles. The nimbly legalistic Blair, oozing snake-oil salesman’s charm, was surely a predestined Tory, while Major, with his man-of-the-people credentials and honestly prosaic platform manner, was clearly a missing link in the Labour tradition of Attlee and Keir Hardie.
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
'This rude spectral activity was a far cry from the moaning and chain-clanking traditionally associated with hauntings. It had a distinctly modern flavour.'
@LucyLethbridge on a real life haunting.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-woolworths-poltergeist
'I inadvertently saw "Saturn Devouring His Son" in my early teens and it was a very unsettling thing to come across.'
@robinsimonbaj on Goya.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-painted-it-black
'The narrative moves fluently between the raffish ... life he was living there, his main love affair and friendships – most of them kept up for a lifetime – and his journalism.'
Jeremy Treglown weighs up Hermione Lee's biography of Tom Stoppard.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-long-road-to-leopoldstadt