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Lead book review

The constant inconstancy that made Italians yearn for fascism

Jan Morris finds Tim Parks’s A Literary Tour of Italy a portrait of a nation — one rich in double lives and double thinking

11 July 2015

9:00 AM

11 July 2015

9:00 AM

A Literary Tour of Italy Tim Parks

Alma Books, pp.369, £16.99, ISBN: 9781846883521

This hefty volume is misleadingly titled. It is not an escapist sort of travel book, ushering the visitor around the homelands and houses of the Italian literati. It is a selection of the author’s previous literary articles, mostly book reviews for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and believe me it is hardly a sunshine ramble or a splash in the pool.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £15.29 Tel: 08430 600033. Jan Morris’s many books include Venice, The Venetian Empire and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.

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