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“... On the face of it, autobiography and travel should be the simplest forms of literature to write: the facts are there, there is a life or a country to be crossed. Yet they have their own special difficulties of tone and approach, and of all forms they are perhaps the most subject to the fictionality of truth, while paradoxically demanding a core of inner truth if they are to become literature ...”

“... on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and ...”

“... a fire burning in a hole in the ground (a method recommended by the sorely-tried slaver, Thomas Phelps, on the Barbary coast). The affected part could be scourged with a whip of nettles or painted with caustic; or tiny bonfires of moss could be started in strategic parts to drive the pain elsewhere. As an alleviating drug, colchicum enjoyed a long ...”

“... Madden’ are introduced to the reader in a bewildering welter of names: Dean Moran, Nick Yew, Gilbert Swinyard, Nicholas Briar, Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to ...”