Andrew Taylor
Uncharted Waters
The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea
By Jordan Goodman
Faber & Faber 347pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
The English Dane
By Sarah Bakewell
Chatto & Windus 324pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
It’s refreshing, and unusual, to pick up a couple of books about travel and exploration that don’t leave the reader feeling slightly battered and inadequate. Who are these people who fill the pages with their determination, bravery and derring-do, and who greet each new disaster and discovery with a finely turned and incisive comment in their diaries?
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'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings