Latest editorial
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
A surprisingly satisfying read
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
Barnhill
by Norman Bissell
Luath Press, £12.99
THIS partly factual and partly reimagined account of George Orwell’s final years is a surprisingly satisfying read for those of us who are the inheritors of his slurs against so-called “Stalinists.”
There are imagined conversations between Orwell and various intimates, self-justifying accounts from his second wife Sonia Brownell and excerpts from some of his letters and novels.
Author Norman Bissell is clearly in sympathy with his main subject and the various lovers, family members and literary types who experienced Orwell’s growing literary acclaim and deteriorating health in the latter half of the 1940s.
More from this author
An absorbing metaphor for contemporary Western societies is recommended by PAUL SIMON
PAUL SIMON falls under the spell of little known authors from an island at the edge of the world
