Books
By Sam Leith
This week’s Books section opens with Philip Hensher’s lead review of a new book that throws a Freudian light on the wayward imagination of the children’s writer Maurice Sendak – by way of his theatrical designs for opera and the ballet. Then Alex Preston admires Adam Nicolson’s journey to the wellspring of Romantic poetry... not in the Lakes but in the Quantocks.
Claire Lowdon finds Bret Easton Ellis a grumpy old man in his essay collection White, Anne Margaret Daniel strolls through Robert Elms’s vanished London, Matthew Lesh discovers how irrational urges can be exploited for fun and profit, Nicholas Shakespeare revisits his own history with Peru’s Shining Path, Sinclair McKay roams the eerie spots of the Thames Estuary and Thomas W. Hodgkinson follows a bluestocking letting down her hair in Greece.
Sam Leith
Literary Editor
Greece is the word for the New Yorker’s Comma Queen
Thomas W. Hodgkinson
Mary Norris is in love with all things Greek, from the alphabet to Zeno, by way of sailors and skinny-dipping.
The desolate beauty of the Thames Estuary
Sinclair McKay
Its haunting landscape of old hulks, marshes and reeds reminds many visitors of Dickens’s Abel Magwitch on the Hoo peninsula
Transforming Goosefish into Monkfish: branding’s slippery secrets
Matthew Lesh
Successful advertising panders of our prejudices and irrational desires, says Rory Sutherland, in his highly entertaining analysis of the trade.
Toy theatres on the stage: the set designs of Maurice Sendak
Philip Hensher
Sendak’s entrancing sets for opera and ballet were not only decorative but full of Freudian drama.
My fictional Abimael Guzmàn turned out to be eerily accurate
Nicholas Shakespeare
When Nicholas Shakespeare wrote his Shining Path novel, he attributed characteristics to its leader which no member of the public knew.
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