Harry's Place Arts

Howard Jacobson can write prose in a rhythm that can really move you along.  I’ve just picked up Roots Schmoots and come across this paragraph:- I don’t recall any family rambling or cycling, but we could  have rambled or cycle, so many resemblances did we bear to the cheerful, thoughtful, self-improving gentile lower-lower middle classes [...]

Chapter 1 “You’ve done well, Nicky,” said Duke, as they sat in the back seat of the bullet proof car. “You’ve pulled that party together. It was a rag-tag mob of criminal gangsters and street fighters before you re-organised it.”   Nick Griffin bent his head. “All learned through you, El Duke.” Only David Duke’s [...]

Radio 4 are currently broadcasting The Death of Grass [caution spoiler], part one and two of which are on iplayer. After overcoming the difficulties of taking the likeable David Mitchell seriously as a narrator, I’m finding it an interesting distraction. I always thought John Christopher’s Death of Grass was under-rated in comparison to Day of [...]

I get my books lukewarm from the library rather than hot off the press so I’ve only just read Zoe Heller’s The Believers. I liked her Notes on a Scandal, which was an amplification of the lines “People in love cannot be won by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.” The martyr in [...]

According to this article in The Atlantic, Virago is re-issuing six novels by the underrated English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Virago’s website isn’t working so I can’t say which six novels these are but evidently The Soul of Kindness, my favourite, is not one of them. A character that turns up often in Elizabeth Taylor is [...]

Guest Post by Mikey Book Review:  Philip Roth, American Pastoral, (London: Vintage, 1998)   The tributes on the back of the British edition of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral that I have includes one from Tim Adams of the Observer who refers to the novel both as a “masterpiece” and “momentous.” Having recently read and enjoyed [...]