The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE recommends an impressive impersonation of Bob Dylan
Delicious literary journalism
JAN WOOLF savours the essays of Hilary Mantel: high calorific brain food that slips down nicely
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Here, Vermiglio, William Tell and Wolf Man
New releases from Thorpe and Morrison, Daria Kulesh, and Will Finn and Rosie Calvert
RINA ARYA confronts the brutal operation of Francis Bacon’s approach to portraiture
Emphasising his continuous engagement in labour movement struggles, ALISTAIR FINDLAY salutes John Foster’s contribution as activist, strategist, intellectual and defender of the Morning Star
ANDY MIAH advocates the use of AI to assist people by expanding access to global literature and culture
EWAN KOTZ relishes a veteran Glasgow band that have lost none of their verve for live performance
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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