Home > The Magazine > Books

Tuesday 7 October 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Alfred Kazin

The solitary New York Jew

Richard M. Cook
Yale, 452pp, £25,

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking:

How many of you are sick to death of hearing about City College in the 1930s, Alcove One and Alcove Two, the prima donnas at Partisan Review, who stopped speaking to whom at which cocktail party .

But it won’t be for his political writings that Alfred Kazin is remembered, so much as those memoirs, salty and idiosyncratic. Try A Walker in the City to see the heights the solitary self and the lyrical personal voice of the individual can reach.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

A safe pair of hands

Robert Salisbury

A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness, by Norman Fowler

Morality tale with a difference

Honor Clerk

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré

A laughing cavalier

Bevis Hillier

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox

The Half

Mark Amory

The Half: Photographs of Actors Preparing for the Stage, by Simon Annand

A very slippery book

Allan Massie

A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either).