Peter Conrad

1 month ago | msn.com | Peter Conrad

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1 month ago | theguardian.com | Peter Conrad

Early in 2020, as society shut down, I retreated behind closed doors with Charles Dickens, who kept me company and cheered me up throughout the pandemic. Carried along by narratives that Dickens thought of as speedy locomotives and warmed by a combustible imagination that he compared to an industrial forge, I soon felt no need for tame timed circuits of the local park, and I even stopped fretting about the imminent end of the world.

2 months ago | bloomsbury.com | Peter Conrad |Sarah J. Maas |Gillian Anderson |Kamila Shamsie

Since I first read one or two of the novels at school in Australia, when what struck me was his outrageous humour but also the oddity of the society he describes, so remote from what I knew. But even back then I thought of Oliver Twist as the most disturbing novel about childhood, and Great Expectations as the best account of growing up into adulthood.

2 months ago | literaryreview.co.uk | Peter Conrad

Great Affectations By Bloomsbury Continuum 304pp £22 Subscribe or Sign In to read the full article For People Who Devour Books...

Jan 19, 2025 | theguardian.com | Peter Conrad

Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”.