William Palmer
Why Are You Telling Me This?
In the distant past, autobiographies concerned themselves largely with the public life of their protagonists. In the last century a looser form came into fashion, detailing the travails of the writer’s childhood and his or her emotional entanglements. In our generation, memoirs have progressed to baring family secrets and intimate acts. We’ve gone from evening dress to knickers off in a hundred years.
Fortunately, Maggie Gee’s My Animal Life is not rife with incest and dark doings. Born in 1948, she was the product of two sets of opposing genes: the staid Gees on her father’s side, who had ‘backbone’, and the altogether more ‘easy-going, anarchic [and] sensual’ Churches on her mother’s.
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
For two decades the Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote an anonymous column for a literary journal, inviting writers to send in their writing for her to critique.
Joanna Kavenna peruses her feedback.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/have-you-considered-accountancy
Mazower turns 'the Greek Revolution from a simplistic, two-dimensional story into a vast colourful fresco populated by a cast of characters that is astonishing in its diversity.'
Stathis N Kalyvas on a new book about the Greek Revolution of 1821.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/freedom-or-death
'The subtitle of this biography, "Never a Dull Moment", refers to the momentous events of George V’s reign, but the book’s real surprise is that its author, having laboured through the king’s deadly diaries, does not find him dull.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/colonel-blimp-enthroned