Can a book save one’s life? I used to think so when stationed in Mogadishu, avoiding thoughts of murder or suicide in that sunburnt madness only by immersing myself in Gerald Hanley’s Warriors (1971). Day after day I would throw myself on to my bed after another utterly fruitless, pointless day in the president’s office, and lie down, sweating beneath squadrons of flies and mosquitoes, and try to forget about it all.
Read MoreJohn Hillaby Reviews Jackdaw Cake (1985)
George Orwell says somewhere that autobiography is to be trusted only when it reveals something dreadful. Almost any sort of life when viewed from the inside consists largely of a series of defeats.
Read MoreMartha Gellhorn on Naples '44
On an early Monday evening in November Norman and Lesley made a rare trip to London together. The occasion was a birthday party at the Groucho Club for Martha Gellhorn, a few month younger than Norman. Both were now eighty-five. Lesley recalls that the dinner was "fascinating. Her coterie of young men [was there], John Simpson, Jon Snow, Nicholas Shakespeare, John Hatt. It was predominately a male occasion." Gellhorn had been asked, as had Norman, by the Daily Mail to write a piece about her best of all time travel book for its New Year's Day edition, and told him she had chosen Naples '44.
Read MoreAnthony Burgess Reviews Empire of the East (1993)
'Empire' is undoubtedly the right technical term for a mass of sea-sundered territories ruled from a single centre. When I lived in Malaysia I was aware of Sumatra a few sea miles to the west; when I was in Brunei (which on Norman Lewis's map has, with Sabah, been swallowed by Sarawak) I was to the north of an unexplored mass of jungle that belonged to Indonesia.
Read MoreBook Review: A View of the World
A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth established Norman Lewis as a writer of uncommonly well-written prose, who, as Cyril Connolly noted, had a remarkable gift for making even a lorry seem interesting. Both books, published in impressively short succession, were lavished with superlatives from the critics of the time . . .
Read MoreBook Review: Golden Earth
For many of its practitioners, travel writing is entirely a romantic venture by which the writer imagines himself as the hero of his own account, tramping his way through uncharted sands like Lawrence of Arabia. A more modest writer might see things less conceitedly and make himself the fool instead; but surely only a truly self-effacing one could resist the temptation of making himself the central character in his own travel book . . .
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