About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Hilary Spurling
Positive The Nation ... a perceptive and sensitive portrait that has benefited from Spurling’s access to Powell’s papers, but one that averts its gaze from the crater of \'Hieronymus Bosch activities.\' Spurling herself hints at themes that a less tactful biographer might have developed ... A lifelong insomniac, Powell suffered intermittently from depression, which he and [Powell\'s wife] Violet personified as an angry dwarf, complete with beard, boots, and bobble hat. Whether these bouts, which sometimes shaded into a death wish, amounted to a depressive personality isn’t clear, nor are the long-term psychological effects that the \'abominable\' Philip Powell had on his son ... For all Hilary Spurling’s success at presenting Powell in his milieu, the rehabilitation of [the multi-volume] Dance itself is a much greater challenge.
Ed Husain
Positive The Guardian An account of the compassion, reason and wonderment that Islam has exhibited for much of its history, this book is a powerful corrective to the widespread perception, fostered by jihadis and Islamophobes alike, that it’s a belief system for misanthropes ... His insistence that Muslim nations accommodate the tiny Jewish state in their midst is common sense but a suggestion of a Middle Eastern union including Israel reads somewhat grotesquely in the light of the recent carnage in Gaza. For all that, Husain has written a valuable book, full of suggestions for Islam’s implementation from a position of magnanimity and love.
Paul Kingsnorth
Rave The Nation The good news is that Kingsnorth is a fantastic novelist—lyrical, instinctive, and true. It’s the wild world, the sense of a nation, and a desire for freedom so powerful that it’s the neighbor of insanity which communicate in his fiction … Kingsnorth takes the protagonist of The Wake and brings him forward to our time. He also sends him properly round the bend … It’s a considerable achievement for a writer to pass from one highly distinctive register to another in successive novels, and Kingsnorth pulls it off, punching out a disjointed, staccato English that conveys Buckmaster’s fear and alienation as a storm closes in.
Pankaj Mishra
Positive The Financial Times To read Age of Anger is to learn that the world is in fact destined to become still more riven and disorderly — and deservedly so ... The anger that Mishra himself injects into the current debate over global­isation, prosperity and freedom is not that of the neoliberal or the socialist; he is sceptical of any system of belief that claims to deliver wellbeing exclusively and in all circumstances ... vitally germane to the global expressions of discontent that we are now witnessing ... Such glimpses into a western past lend credence to the idea that our present disorders follow an established pattern of behaviour that surfaces in response to wrenching change ... It isn’t entirely surprising that Age of Anger, having ascribed our present troubles to all-encompassing ideology, shies from offering a blueprint for solving the problems of the world.