ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Delicious literary journalism
JAN WOOLF savours the essays of Hilary Mantel: high calorific brain food that slips down nicely
Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall (2015)
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
A Memoir of my Former Self
Hilary Mantel
John Murray, £25
A MEMOIR of my Former Self, or “Messages from people I used to be” is a selection of journalism from one of our finest writers.
Harvested by her long-time editor Nicholas Pearson and published a year after her death last year, the range is 2007-2017. The book is divided into sections – essays, film reviews (from her time at The Spectator), Reith Lectures and an enticingly named collection called The Moon Was a Tender Crescent. Although journalism they read as literature, with the writer in an artist’s resonance with her subject; whether another writer, the past or the act of writing itself. Ink is a generative fluid.
Not academic, yet academically impeccable, she often defies the litocracy of the creative writing industry. In terms of “showing, and not telling” she demonstrates what needs showing, and what telling, and how these styles of writing form the aesthetic balance of a book, much like cold and warm colours do in painting or tapestry.
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JAN WOOLF marvels at a rich brew of steam-punk Victoriana, homosexual scandal, and contemporary reference
JAN WOOLF ponders the images of humanity that emerge from the tormented, destructive process of the Kindertransport survivor Frank Auerbach
