Tag Archives: Reviews

Something Borrowed

Those who follow the erratic career of Jim Perrin may be aware of his apparently leisurely project to write a biography of the Victorian traveller and writer George Borrow, whose most well-known book is Wild Wales. Indeed Perrin has laid claim to the mantle of Borrow, at least as regards his shamelessly exculpatory association, by implication, of his own book West with Borrow’s (as Perrin calls it) ‘fictivized autobiography’, as if this justifies West‘s catalogue of offences to the dead and the living.

But we believe he can lay legitimate claim to many Borrovian characteristics. In his Introduction to the 1906 J M Dent edition of Wild Wales, Theodore Watts-Dunton wrote of its author:

A characteristic matter connected with Borrow’s translation [of a work of literature in Welsh] is that in the Quarterly Review for January 1861 he himself reviewed it anonymously, and not without appreciation of its merits—a method which may be recommended to those authors who are not in sympathy with their reviewers. The article showed a great deal of what may be called Borrovian knowledge of the Welsh language and Welsh literature, and perhaps it is not ungenerous to say a good deal of Borrovian ignorance too. Continue reading

‘Guardian’ Country Diarist Jim Perrin, (alias ‘Llywarch’—alias ‘Tim Bartley’) reviews his own work

Virtually since the inception of our site we have explained why we are convinced that Jim Perrin has used ‘Llywarch’ (among a number of other names) as an alias, and we believe the mounting circumstantial evidence is by now all but conclusive. Finally he too seems to have realized that we — and many others who now see through him — are laughing at him, and his derisory foolishness in believing that his fraudulent behaviour has not been detected.

However, nothing daunted in his sense of invincibility, nor in his on-going efforts to puff his own work, yet apparently accepting at last that his continued use of the name ‘Llywarch’ was leaving him wide open to ridicule (not to mention making evident his determined deceit) he has ‘pulled’ the review of his own work Shipton and Tilman which he had posted on Amazon, 25/03/2013. Continue reading

An extraordinary volte-face

We have just received a message via our secure contact form, and whilst we must emphasize its absolute security, and would not usually refer to the content of any message received (unless it were intended that we should), this one intrigued us.

Apparently it was sent by one of our former and more vituperative online critics, ‘Liz’ and they apologized for the tenor of their earlier criticisms of us on various public sites; most interestingly, they declared that they also now recognized Jim Perrin as the individual we have been describing throughout.

It is a measure of the multiple and disordered online personalities that we believe Jim Perrin has created, and which we have detailed in our posts, that we feel unable to take this contact entirely at face value or to respond via the email address provided in it. Continue reading