Max Leonard
@maxleonard
Writer. Mountain Style (Isola 2024), A Cold Spell (Bloomsbury 2023). Previous inc. Higher Calling, Bunker Research, Lanterne Rouge etc. I also run Isola Press.
This is central Paris. It’s an authorised bathing place. You can’t even swim in the sea much of the time near London. Fuck the water companies and the governments that let that happen.
22/2026 With a cover like this, how could it be anything other than great?
Always find it bananas that I can be doing this and 50km away it’s 29C and people are swimming in the Med. 🍌🍌🍌
21/2026 Perplexed as to how this was so popular. Great revival cover tho.
70km to lunch with a change of clothes and a bottle on an unexpectedly nice day 👌🏼
19/2026. Even the finest writing cannot make me care about e.g. baseball.
18/2026. Some great passages, but I think I would have enjoyed this more when I was a teenager.
17/2026. Re-read this as I’m republishing it later this year. Pretty out there and just as good as I remembered. Excited!
In other news have started stamping my books with date finished. Should I also stamp with date acquired, or date started? Or both?
15/2026. Honestly the prose was tiresome at points. I guess you had to be there.
Discovery of the day: the hyrax. A rodent-like African mammal that is actually most closely related to elephants and manatees.
13/2026. A good yarn but it kind of fluffed the punchline in assuming that everyone reading knew the result…
12/2026 “Whatever one thinks of the arrogance of the dollar or the multinationals, it is this culture which, the world over, fascinates those very people who suffer most at its hands, and it does so through the deep, insane conviction that it has made all their dreams come true .”
Yeah it’s great, I make a pilgrimage every year! First time in winter, it’s completely different…
11/2026. Academic intrigue and clash of egos written as thriller. Not as good as 3/
10/2026. The new one by the guy who wrote Empire of Pain and Say Nothing. Very readable, but he seemed sort of surprised that London is full of oligarchs and gangsters… 🤷♂️