Books

For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid "salaryman" business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight — but only for a while. A techno-optimist, the now sixty-seven-year-old has repeatedly reinvented himself, urging doubters to see beyond the immediate: "You’re limiting your field of vision to thirty years… Start bold and think 300 years ahead.

"Gliff" is a word which can mean "a short moment," "a wallop," and "a post-ejaculatory sex act;" to "dispel snow," "to frighten," and to "escape something quickly." It’s "really excitingly polysemous," says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its center are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of "Unverifiables.

In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office. A fifty-seven-year-old bachelor without a London home of his own, he lodged for the next several months at a small Westminster flat owned by his political secretary Timothy Kitson. The man who had served as his nation’s head of government for the previous four years was left with a typist, a single daytime detective and a part-time driver at his disposal.

“Very fine people on both sides” was one of the first Trumpisms to enter our national lexicon. In the heady days of 2017, when Donald Trump’s presence in the White House was still a novelty and liberal resistance at its peak, the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia precipitated a full-blown political crisis. Trump, in his inimitable fashion, clumsily suggested that those protesting the statue’s removal had a point, an argument that was widely interpreted as proof of his secret affinity for Confederate sympathizers, white supremacists and other far-right fanatics. In truth, Trump was awkwardly defending a version of the Civil War that has lately been eclipsed in our national consciousness. Is Trump a history buff?

Film The Substance Seeing Dune: Part Two in IMAX, with the floor shaking as Paul Atreides’s forces charged the palace was my second-best cinema-going experience of the year. Trumping it was watching a DC audience recoil every other minute at Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror The Substance, a film that nods to Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg while declaring itself the most original of 2024. Two-thirds of the way through, I stopped wincing and started laughing, probably because my body didn’t know how to react. The film is a brutal parable of female self-loathing and insecurity — exacerbated, of course, by a venal male-led system, which Dennis Quaid’s producer Harvey personifies in a manner as grotesque as any of the movie’s gross-out special effects.

I wouldn’t have thought a book about America’s decline would cause me to laugh out loud, but having enjoyed its author Matt Purple’s work for years now (full disclosure: he’s a personal friend and former Spectator colleague), I should not have been the least bit surprised that his debut book is as funny as it is insightful. Decline from the Top: Snapshots from America’s Crisis and Glimmers of Hope is a veritable joy to read. Though he declares himself to be a “cranky conservative,” Purple’s humor and wit offer a diagnostic examination of the American condition that exudes warmth and obvious heartfelt concern for our nation’s wellbeing.

Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written The Voyage Home, a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid, her intimate “catch-fart.” (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.) Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim.

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a seventeenth-century craftsman and a twentieth-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to lgo on the journey. Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes?

During his lifetime, author Cormac McCarthy was renowned for being one of literature’s most retiring, even reclusive figures. Although his books and original screenplays were adapted into high-profile films by the likes of the Coen brothers and Ridley Scott, he barely gave interviews and preferred to lead a quiet and low-key existence in his own home own Santa Fe. Most believed that his solitude simply came about because of his desire to be left alone, but now an explosive new Vanity Fair feature has put a metaphorical rocket under McCarthy’s posthumous reputation. The article, written by Vincenzo Barney, reveals that, when McCarthy was forty-two years old, he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, Augusta Britt, who he met by a motel pool.