James Walton

Those weren’t the days

A review of Upstairs at the Party, by Linda Grant, a story about the long-lost world of 1970s student life that doesn’t ever quite cohere

Linda Grant [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 21 June 2014

If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined.

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