In the latest Times Literary Supplement, Harold reviews a biography of the late writer Larry McMurtry by Tracy Daugherty.

“That McMurtry would create an epic saga of the Old West seems both preordained and paradoxical. Born into a West Texas ranching family in 1936, he grew up, as he put it, in “prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation American pioneers”, his own grandparents having arrived in the region when white settlers still had cause to worry about the occasional Comanche raid”