Reviews

Having recently been in conversation with Hisham Matar at Hatchards, I then wrote this piece for the Biographers’ Club website earlier this week: The Return is the account of Matar’s return to Libya in 2012 in search of his father who had been abducted from Egypt in 1990 by Qaddafi’s henchmen and sent to the…
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Condé Nast Traveller – June 2008 So I want to catch up on two jewels missed earlier this year. Chief among these is Sarah Anderson’s Halfway to Venus: A One Armed Journey. Anderson lost an arm as a young girl; as an adult she set up the Travel Bookshop, in 1979. These and other life…
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At first sight, you could be forgiven for thinking that Halfway to Venus, a “one-armed journey”, was going to be a “poor me” book. But what makes it so different is that, despite having had her arm amputated due to cancer when she was 10, Sarah Anderson is at pains to tell us that she’s…
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Just before her tenth birthday, Sarah Anderson complained of a lump in her left arm. An hour later, she was sitting in the doctor’s surgery (a telltale sign that this was 1957 and not 2008). By the evening, her parents had been told by the doctor that their daughter was most probably suffering from a…
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A request for assistance cutting up food leads to a jaw-droppingly ignorant comment from an airhostess, “Do you mind being my baby?” Thus Sarah Anderson felt compelled to write about what it’s like to live with one arm, in a two-armed world. You could say Sarah isn’t the luckiest person in the world. Her left…
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The unkindest cut Sarah Anderson’s poignant memoir Halfway to Venus describes life with one arm gone, says Andrew Barrow The author of this fascinating odyssey is better known as the founder of the Travel Bookshop, made famous in the film Notting Hill, than for losing an arm to cancer at the age of 10. Never…
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Tuck your thumb between your second and middle finger, sit down in a Turkish cafe, and those you are with may either thump or laugh at you. You’re making as obvious and vulgar gesture in their culture as giving them the finger. This trait of mine is something that runs in families, I now learn,…
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Halfway to Venus sounds like a Science Fiction novel… but when the Venus in question is of the de Milo variety, things become clear. I don’t know how to introduce this non-fiction book, as… well, it is about living with one arm, and the history of amputation in literature and reality. But Sarah Anderson, the…
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I must declare an interest at the outset. Thirty or so years ago I went out, or walked out (or whatever the phrase is), with the author, until, that is, the night when, for reasons I have never been able to establish, she hit me over the head with a stainless-steel electric kettle. You may…
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Sarah Anderson had what was perhaps the epitome of the “stiff-upper-lip” childhood, says Cassandra Jardine in The Daily Telegraph. The owner of London’s Travel Bookshop and her siblings saw their parents for just half an hour a day, and were otherwise brought up by nannies who frowned on any show of emotion. Aged nine, the…
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