Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Beaujolais – a refuge for impecunious wine lovers

With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine wanker’ who ran the London marathon, stopping every mile to taste a wine blind and guessing most of them right. Now we have the inevitable book; and while Gilbey isn’t an elegant prose stylist in the manner of Oz Clarke, Thirsty: 100 Great Wines and Stories (Square Peg, £20) is an enormously entertaining read. It’s

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Nat Jansz: Comet in Moominland turns 80

36 min listen

Nat Jansz joins Sam Leith to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Moomin novels. The first of these, Comet in Moominland, was revised by author Tove Jansson a decade after the original publication date. To celebrate the anniversary Sort of Books, co-run by Jansz, is publishing this revised edition for the first time in English. Jansz discusses why she finds the books so compelling, the influence of the war on author Jansson and why she feels Jansson’s ‘quest for the truth’ was written in a way that was easy for children to understand. For Jansz, the Moomin novels had a mix of light and dark which broke the mould of

Tuesday

Charlotte Stroud

Even as literate adults, we need to learn how to read

Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white rhino might feel a little smug. Anyone seeking a glimpse of this endangered reader could be forgiven for thinking that a university English department was its most likely habitat, but they would be wrong. Behind the brown office doors where academics labour, one is more likely to find the common squirrel, hoarding information and burying

Hugh Thomson

How the terrorists of the 1970s held the world to ransom

At the end of the 1970s, the Illustrated London News printed a special edition to commemorate the decade. What did it focus on? Music, from David Bowie to Bob Marley? Some of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, from The Godfather on? Political crises, such as Watergate and the end of the war in Vietnam? No, there was only one headline: ‘The 1970s: The Years of Terrorism.’ We forget – and perhaps we want to – quite how brutal and random that time could be, with plane hijackings, the Munich Olympics atrocity and bombs going off from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore, where the Japanese Red

Travis Elborough

Unhappy band of brothers: the Beach Boys’ story

Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark

Katja Hoyer

What drove the German housewife to vote for Hitler?

‘It happened, therefore it can happen again,’ warned the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, explaining why witnesses to the horrors of Nazism and genocide must be listened to, and why it is important for future generations to stay vigilant against a repeat of such atrocities. The underlying assumption is that the Nazis’ rise to power and the terrible crimes that followed were preventable. We believe that German democracy need not have died; that Hitler could have been stopped from plunging much of the world into a horrific war and from eradicating the vast majority of European Jews. Yet, despite the widespread conviction that studying these events inoculates future generations against totalitarian

Sarah Ditum

Will the ‘bunny boiler’ tag continue to haunt single women?

Even if you’ve never seen Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, you’ll know what a ‘bunny boiler’ is. When Alex (Glenn Close) slaughters her lover Dan’s family pet and leaves it simmering on the stove, she invented a universal shorthand for the obsessive, unstable woman who can’t take romantic rejection. In the film, Alex is portrayed as the destroyer of domestic happiness: an embittered career woman on the wrong side of 35, who is made literally sick when she spies on the contentment shared by Dan (Michael Douglas), his wife and his daughter. Audiences loathed her. Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash, reported cries of ‘Kill the bitch!’ and ‘Punch

Ian Thomson

Zadie Smith muses on the artist-muse relationship

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us from her beloved Kilburn High Road (Afro-wig emporia, pound shops) to an appreciation of a Stormzy concert at Glastonbury. This fourth essay collection is unfailingly interesting: Smith is uniquely placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Some of the greatest essayists of the 20th century were American. (Only a wordy journal

Lynn Barber

Was Cat Stevens the inspiration for Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’?

Essentially this is a book of two halves –before and after Cat’s conversion to Islam in 1977 – and the first half is immeasurably the more engaging. He was born Steven Georgiou in 1948, the youngest of three children, to a Greek-Cypriot father and a Swedish mother, with a much older brother and sister. His parents ran a café, Moulin Rouge, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London’s West End, and the family lived above it. He went to a Catholic primary school near Drury Lane and then, having failed the 11 plus exam, to a secondary modern in the City. But he left school at 16 with only

Anne de Courcy

Paul Poiret and the fickleness of fashion

Such was Paul Poiret’s influence that he is the only couturier whose clothes are known to have caused several fatal accidents. At a time (1910-11) when fashion was loosening up he persuaded chic women into the hobble skirt, a garment so narrow round the ankles that only tiny, mincing steps were possible, with the result that several tripped over when stepping down from a pavement and one toppled from a bridge into a river where, unable to swim from the constriction around her ankles, she drowned.  In Mary E. Davis’s book, however, this dangerous garment gets only a brief mention. Instead, what we have is not so much a biography

Melanie McDonagh

A treasure chest of myths: The Poisoned King, by Katherine Rundell, reviewed

You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration,

Francesca Wade

The lonely passions of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’. Living, to Mansfield, was a challenge to be confronted head-on, a restless and active process of ‘shedding and renewing’. Her passion for life fortified her through a horrifying succession of troubles. It fed her art; it also exhausted her.  ‘Life’, in its most capacious sense, is the subject

The Spectator

Books of the Year I – chosen by our regular reviewers

Antony Beevor In Captives and Companions (Allen Lane, £35), Justin Marozzi has brought together a scholarly yet vivid history of slavery in the Islamic world in all its varied forms. Everything is covered, from the former slaves recruited by the Prophet, who achieved immense influence, to agricultural slavery, military conscription with Mamluks and Janissaries, the Barbary Coast corsairs who roamed the Mediterranean and the English Channel, and concubinage, right up to Daesh atrocities against Yazidi women. Slavery still exists in a number of countries and the dishonesty surrounding the whole subject has been clouded by the overwhelming emphasis on the Atlantic slave trade. It is a brave project, superbly researched

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Are Vermeer’s paintings really coded religious messages?

The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work. One foreign observer who did see a painting owned by a baker (probably handed over in security for a large overdue account) was incredulous at what the owner claimed was the value of a small picture by an unknown artist. After Vermeer’s death, and the sale of the collection for very little on the death

Christopher Akers

The Wall Street Crash never ceases to fascinate

When Winston Churchill dined with the crème de la crème of American finance in New York on 28 October 1929, a facetious toast was made to ‘friends and former millionaires’. Despite a 13 per cent drop in the Dow after another day of market turmoil, the assembled banking titans felt they wouldn’t just survive the maelstrom, they would make more money from it. Churchill, whose finances were perennially chaotic, had caught stock market fever and lost today’s equivalent of almost $1.5 million. On returning to England, he declared the Wall Street crash ‘only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people’. In the end, US stocks

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

A celebration of friendship – by Andrew O’Hagan

When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was: Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort of deliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your ambition, your hopes and your thoughts in a way that family can’t always do. I mean what is family but a lovable collection of prejudices, some in your favour and some not? Although I agreed with him, I was intrigued that someone who was both a parent and a sibling would feel this way. The

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Peter James: Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed

40 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the crime writer Peter James. Peter has contributed the introduction to a new edition of the classic thriller The Eagle Has Landed, which is 50 years old this month. He tells Sam what it was that made Jack Higgins’s novel so groundbreaking, about what it takes to make you root for the bad guys, how thrillers and detective stories differ – and about his own history with Jack Higgins. Plus, he tells me about his own new novel The Hawk Is Dead — which comes, more or less, by Royal Appointment…   

Tuesday

Simon Ings

Thrilling tales of British pluck

December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no resources left to prevent the Turkish empire from expanding into India.  Edward Noel, an aristocratic Catholic political officer who is supposed to be in Persia, sends a telegram to his betters from the city of Baku, perched on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and the source of half the world’s oil. He wants

Nicolette Jones

Farewell to Lyra: The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman, reviewed

In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust novels is how much they make us feel – about the tie between characters and their daemons, the fear of Lyra’s sinister mother Mrs Coulter, the love between Will and Lyra, the protectiveness of the courageous pot boy Malcolm Polstead… The driving emotional force that carries us through The Rose Field is our

Guy Stagg

The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen

In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While