Anthony Sattin
Walking the World
Odd Tom Coryate: The English Marco Polo
By R E Pritchard
Sutton Publishing 288pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
HAD YOU BEEN standing on the Calais dockside at around 5pm on Saturday 14 May 1608, you would have seen a dishevelled young Englishman stagger off the open deck of a cross-Channel ferry. He looked pale, having ‘varnished the exterior parts of the ship’ with his breakfast. More significant than what he had left behind was what lay ahead. He was at the start of an extraordinary journey.
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
'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