Letters from London
by Julian Barnes
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Description
With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.Tags
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Member Reviews
Britain in the first half of the nineties: Barnes takes us from Thatcher to Blair in essays written for the New Yorker. Whilst political journalism obviously isn't quite his métier, he shows us - as he always does - what an elegant, witty writer can do with material that has been done to destruction already by others. Just occasionally we get a touch of his schoolboyish side, where he can't resist pointing out gleefully how clever he's been: the notoriously comic index, of course, but also the way he highlights things like his alertness in spotting the Pugin hinges in the Shadow Cabinet room, for instance, but fails to give us any information about what he actually asked Tony Blair in their interview there.
perfectly recreates these times
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Letters from London reproduces Barnes’s reports as London correspondent to the New Yorker, political and partial. He is a supremely witty writer in several genres, and has employed particular techniques here to produce an index of high comedy. It is fascinating to see how cleverly – and selectively – Barnes has contrived his index entries from passages of text.
added by KayCliff
Author Information
89+ Works 43,122 Members
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, on January 19, 1946. He received a degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford University in 1968. He has held jobs as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review, and a television critic. He has written show more numerous works of fiction including Arthur and George, Pulse: Stories, The Noise of Time, and England, England. He received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1980 for Metroland, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1985 and a Prix Medicis in 1986 for Flaubert's Parrot, and the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. He also writes non-fiction works including Letters from London, The Pedant in the Kitchen, and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He received the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation in 1993, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011. He writes detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanaugh. His works under this name include Duffy, Fiddle City, Putting the Boot In, and Going to the Dogs. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Gallimard, Folio (3027)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Lettres de Londres
- Original title
- Letters from London
- Original publication date
- 1995
- Important places
- United Kingdom; England, UK; London, England, UK
- Dedication
- to Jay and Helen
- First words
- As a child, I was a brief devotee of I-Spy books, those spotters' guides for the short-trousered.
- Quotations
- Last month I took part in a fund-raiser for a cash-strapped Oxford college: . . . . The organizer began by apologizing for the fact that my advertised fellow-novelist was at the last minute unavoidably unable to make it (he h... (show all)ad unavoidably gone skiing, but the fictioneers’ free-masonry does not permit me to finger him).
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)But millenarians would be premature in renting space on mountaintops.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 942.12082 — History & geography History of Europe England and Wales London City of London Historical periods of City of London
- LCC
- DA688 .B28 — History of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania Great Britain History of Great Britain England Local history and description London
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 531
- Popularity
- 56,040
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.87)
- Languages
- 5 — Dutch, English, French, German, Russian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 13
- ASINs
- 4
