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Tag: Reviewer: Dunbar M

February 1, 2022

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Review by Max Dunbar The House of Tradition The grand houses of American history attract plenty of visitors wanting to learn about the Civil…

January 18, 2022

A Will to Kill by R.V. Raman

Review by Max Dunbar Slayer Rules: R V Raman’s A Will to Kill Mysteries are hard to write, and hard to review. Because of…

December 14, 2021

Skylark by Alice O’Keefe

Review by Max Dunbar The Arrow of Hope Dorothy Parker’s ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’ goes like this: By the time you swear you’re his,Shivering and sighing,And…

July 15, 2021

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

Review by Max Dunbar A nineteenth-century psychiatrist defines paramnesia as The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen…

June 3, 2021

Civilisations by Laurent Binet

Translated by Sam Taylor Review by Max Dunbar Reviewers of fiction, trying to make sense of Laurent Binet’s Civilisations, have reached for video game metaphors….

May 25, 2021

Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

Review by Max Dunbar How the Other Half Lie There is a fabulous new genre in commercial fiction. I call it ‘Posh People Getting…

May 13, 2021

The Hard Crowd, Essays 2000-2020, by Rachel Kushner

Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Gallery of Souls I’ve Known Many years ago, novelist Rachel Kushner worked in a bar called the Blue Lamp…

April 29, 2021

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox

Reviewed by Max Dunbar In Lords and Ladies, his Faerie novel, Terry Pratchett quotes an old folk rhyme: My mother said I never shouldPlay…

April 8, 2021

A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel

Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Age of Acceleration In 2019, the Unherd website carried an article by Gerard DeGroot, about the Chang’e 4 moon landing….

Expectation anna hope
July 9, 2020

Expectation by Anna Hope

Review by Max Dunbar Looking back at her hard living past, singer Florence Welch writes in Vogue: I wonder if my young self would be…

This Really Isn't About You Jean Hannah Edelstein
July 30, 2019

This Really Isn’t About You by Jean Hannah Edelstein

Review by Max Dunbar There’s a common British anecdote that goes: ‘We had some American friends here on holiday, and on the third day…

Metropolis Philip kerr
April 25, 2019

Metropolis by Philip Kerr

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Swan Song (For A City) Stephen King once wrote of the ‘Grey Havens’ as a kind of afterlife where fictional…

I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
February 14, 2019

I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux

Review by Max Dunbar Alpha males in print tend to be omega males in real life. Friedrich Nietzsche was not rich during his lifetime….

June 14, 2018

The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Why Everything Old Is New Again If I had to recommend a historian on the twentieth century terrors to someone…

March 13, 2018

The Good Mothers by Alex Perry

Review by Max Dunbar Operation Shame Nowadays, when we think of the mafia, it’s with a sense of nostalgia. David Chase captured the feel…

February 27, 2018

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Command the Mermaid Speak Last year a monster emerged from London’s sewers. The ‘fatberg’ – as the city’s waste disposal…

american war akkad
December 7, 2017

American War by Omar el Akkad

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Altered States of America  Joan Didion’s recently released notebooks capture the feeling of the American South as it must have…

Ma’am Darling
November 7, 2017

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Nightshade Upon Magic The online OED defines starstruck as ‘Fascinated or greatly impressed by famous people, especially those connected with…

July 14, 2015

Preparations for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Lish’s novel is mostly about institutions. He writes about armies, prisons, service-level workplaces – his characters sleep in hostels and…

Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies Millar
April 30, 2015

The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies by Martin Millar

Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Altar of Pity: Martin Millar’s Athens ‘I’ve tried setting a novel in ancient Athens before,’ writes Martin Millar, in…

April 22, 2015

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Reviewed by Max Dunbar There’s an episode of the classic US prison show Oz where a new governor brings back the death penalty and sentences Jefferson Keane,…

January 20, 2015

Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, illustrated by Allen Crawford

Written by Max Dunbar Moments Before the Wind: The Illustrated Whitman  Has anyone tried to illustrate Whitman before? Has anyone not felt dizzy and…

October 30, 2014

J by Howard Jacobson

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Milan Kundera wrote that ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Winston Smith, of…

October 16, 2014

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

Reviewed by Max Dunbar Perfect Tenn: A Life of Tennessee Williams An inconvenience of biography is that before the interesting stuff is revealed, one…

July 24, 2014

The Most Dangerous Book; The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham

Reviewed by Max Dunbar This study of how James Joyce’s Ulysses came to be published and set in type is almost as essential as the book…

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