Harry Strawson

Dec 4, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Harry Strawson |Mia Levitin |Alberto Manguel |Christy Edwall

“If it keeps on rainin’”, sings Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track, “levee’s gonna break.” The song is a cover of a 1929 recording by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, inspired by the Great Mississippi flood of 1927; the untitled (fourth) album on which it appeared went on to sell more than 37 million copies. In the world of record-label scouts known as “song-catchers”, conjured up in Xan Brooks’s well-crafted new work of historical fiction, that is what is known as a very big fish.

Jul 31, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Michael Gorra |Harry Strawson |Alberto Manguel |Mia Levitin

They are old friends, these prefaces. You will find one or another of them reprinted in almost every contemporary edition of Henry James’s work, in Penguin or Norton or Oxford World’s Classics, and sometimes even when the book doesn’t reproduce the text of his late-life revisions for the New York Edition (1907–09), the twenty-four-volume set of his fiction for which they were written.