Reviews for Diary of a War Artist

The average rating for Diary of a War Artist based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-28 00:00:00 Skylar Kingdon A fine sympathetic biography of Thomas De Quincey. Well worth a read.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-17 00:00:00 Jacob Conrad I am reading Mitchison's autobiographies despite having only the barest idea of her life and having barely read any of her fiction-- so far only Travel Light -- so I have very few pre-conceptions about who she is or what she cares about. I am not certain if this is to my advantage reading these books, but I am certainly finding Mitchison very interesting. This autobiography starts with her earliest childhood, and is I think more true to the experience of being a child in that it is organised by the things she cared about -- places, events, people, ideas -- rather than any attempt at chronological order or a narrative of development and growth. Instead she looks at her child-self from many different angles, and writes as much about the times and places and other people as she does about her own self. I found that it worked very well, and made me eager to continue to the next volume which is more about her adolescence, although I do wonder how much my general background in upper-class Edwardian England helped me to have context for what she writes about -- would it have been confusing without that background knowledge? Regardless, I enjoyed it, and I am well into the next one now, and looking forward to her novels as well.