Life on Grub Street can be challenging, but it’s not without attendant attractions. One of those is the potential to have a platform to tell the unbidden truth. As the prolific D. J. Taylor writes in the introduction to his new collection of essays and reviews, “One of the heartening features of the literary landscape . . . is how tenaciously the freelance reviewer endures and how regularly, in an age where most people are terrified of saying in public what they really feel about anything, there rises from a newspaper arts section or magazine book column the sound of someone declining to follow the party line.” Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews, 2010-2022)* *(Shoestring Press, 2023) ranges widely, from contemporary novelists such as Salman Rushdie, to Victorians such as George Gissing, to oddities of the twentieth century such as Brian Sewell, collecting pieces from both British and American publications.
Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.
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