Was expecting a 'classic account of [romany] life in nineteenth-century england' but that part fills about 20 pages of this 570 page book. Barrow is not Romany and only really discusses them for a little bit.

Petulengro (Barrow's Romany friend) appears a handful of times then leaves just as quickly.

Difficult book to assess. The closest thing I have read to this, weirdly, is Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men.

The first 200 pages had almost no pattern, but once Byron's hearse passed by, it began to cohere, and there was some satisfying interconnecting of the tales. This then became pushed

Lavengro is part of a work which, whether novel or not, is completed in its sequel ‘Romany Rye’ written seven years later. ‘Lavengro’, which in gipsy language means ‘Wordmaster’ or ‘Philologist’, was the name given to Borrow by Ambrose Smith, a real contemporary gipsy of Norfolk. He appears in the n

A fascinating read. The part autobiography of George Borrow, famous for having lived with and recorded the lifestyle of English Romanies 200 years ago. Although I would have liked the book to have dealt more with that now almost disappeared community.
He describes his childhood during the Napoleonic

What a badly-written hash this is, infuriating because of the author's habit of telling half a story and presumably expecting us to guess the rest. He also does that 18th/19th century think of leaving dashes for place names, so the geography isn't always easy either. The book does end abruptly, but