thecommonswings 's review for:

All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook

5.0

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Astonishing - ostensibly a nimble travelogue/ psychogeographical jaunt around the Kent coast, but really a dizzying excuse for Seabrook to join several dots to create a sort of parallel history of 20th century Britain. We get true crime; Carry On films; Performance and The Servant; John Buchan; Oswald Mosley and Lord Haw Haw; Charles Hamilton; T S Eliot; Freddie Mills; Somerset Maugham; Dickens and Collins and so much more. The best of it is that Seabrook has this extraordinary ability to combine brilliant ideas into a greater whole, to push them into a shape you only really see looming as they all come together. Some of it may seem a reach when you think about it afterwards, but while you’re reading it everything feels important and vital and part of wider, murkier whole. An extraordinary book