Books: Out in Paperback
Read our roundups for books now out in paperback:
YOUNG ROMANTICS by Daisy Hay
“doubtless some scholars will complain loudly that there is nothing original or revelatory to be found in Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics. But to do so is to miss the point. For the non-scholar, Hay’s group biography of the Shelleys, Byron and their circle is complete bliss”
_____________
THE FRY CHRONICLES by Stephen Fry
“It’s a lovely, comfy book… But he does not strive after truth, and he knows it.”
_____________
THE LIFE OF AN UNKNOWN MAN by Andreï Makine
“If the novel has one flaw, it’s in its differing tones … the book becomes a history of 20th-century Russia masquerading as simple, romantic novel. Yet this is also its strength.”
_____________
ILUSTRADO by Miguel Syjuco
“The pleasures of Ilustrado are not in the rather creaky evocations of the past nor in a rhetoric that grows increasingly sententious as the book goes on, but in its sophisticated and seductive evocation of modern Manila”
_____________
FULL CIRCLE by Ferdinand Mount
“Mount is an entertaining guide to ancient Rome, but his grip on the present feels less assured.”
_____________
ENLIGHTENING: LETTERS 1946-60 by Isiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy
“The letters are not worth the effort required of them. There is not one which comes anywhere near being a good letter, and nearly all of them are thunderingly boring.”
_____________________________________________________
Visit The Omnivore for our latest book, film and theatre review roundups