David Sexton on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy (Evening Standard)
‘It all feels very GCSE … there’s too much verbal prancing, too little that’s original being said, particularly when the poems are not personal. You end the book thinking that if this is poetry, it’s a trivial art. But it is not.’
David Annand on Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (Literary Review)
‘Part Judy Blume homage, part Wiki-guide to theological anthropology, part metafictional meditation on the autonomy of imagined characters, part Breakfast Club pastiche, part juvenile fantasy romp and part Brangelina character assassination: it manages, beyond all reasonable expectations, to be worse than this makes it sound.’
Nicholas Tucker on The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Independent)
‘… however lavish the exotic icing on this literary cake, nothing can ultimately disguise the underlying doughy reality of a repetitive story, flatly narrated … [This] is reminiscent not so much of The Tempest as of a mild but persistent attack of trapped wind.’
David Cannadine on A Short History of England by Simon Jenkins (Financial Times)
‘… 1066 and All That, but without the jokes … There is nothing here that is new and his account is devoid of context, analysis or explanation, falling back on such banalities as “England had a genius for opportunistic social change” and “new forces were now coming into play”. The Black Death, the “rising middle classes” of Tudor and Stuart times, and the Industrial Revolution are dismissed in little more than a few lines. The marriage of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer is thought of more importance than the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or the Indian Mutiny.’
Colin Tudge on The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins (Independent)
‘Richard Dawkins has no sense of irony. He rails endlessly against fundamentalists yet he defends old-fashioned, Thomas Gradgrind-style materialism as zealously as the Mid-West
Creationists defend the literal truth of Genesis. He accuses others of misrepresentation yet he seriously misrepresents religion. Also, which is irony writ large, he misrepresents science, in whose
name he is assumed to speak. He condemns the Catholics for filling the heads of children with a particular view of life before they have had a chance to think for themselves – and now, in The
Magic of Reality, written for readers as young as nine, he has done precisely that. As somebody said of Miss Jean Brodie, it’s time he was put a stop to.’
Anna Baddeley is editor of the Omnivore
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