The Critic Magazine

24 June 2021

The July edition of The Critic, the magazine of ideas, offers a wealth of summer reading. Sarah Ditum finds young adult fiction utterly dismal, D.J. Taylor charts the decline of the founder-publisher as literary patron, and there are portraits of authors as diverse as Flashman’s creator, George MacDonald Fraser, and France’s novelist of modern discontents, Michel Houellebecq. Jonathan Glancey looks forward to Great British Railways redesigning a more glamorous livery than the privatised franchises managed over the last twenty years, Sir Matthew Pinsent leads the sporting coverage, and a trip to Privolnoye reveals what the locals really think of their most famous son, Mikhail Gorbachev. Plus all the latest books, cultural events and social trends are picked over by The Critic’s reviewers and “table talkers.”