Books

It was recently announced in the Daily Telegraph that the novels of P.G. Wodehouse — much beloved by millions, including me, for their combination of wit and soufflé-light evocation of an England that never really existed but which almost might have done — are the latest to fall foul of that new scourge of writers the world over, the “sensitivity reader.” New editions of Wodehouse’s masterly works Right Ho, Jeeves and Thank You, Jeeves have been reissued with the craven disclaimer “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s, and contains language, themes and characterizations which you may find outdated. In the present edition, we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.

It is one of those cosmic ironies that the author Martin Amis, who has died at the age of seventy-three of esophageal cancer, might have appreciated that his death was announced the day after Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of his novel The Zone of Interest premiered to a rapturous reception at this year’s Cannes film festival.

Until a few weeks ago, Judy Blume’s reputation as one of the world’s most admired and respected novelists seemed assured. She has sold over 82 million copies of her twenty-five books, has won countless awards and was named one of TIME’s most influential people earlier this year. But those whom the gods wish to destroy are asked for their views on J.K. Rowling — and so when Blume was asked as much in an interview, she replied, “I love her... I am behind her 100 percent as I watch from afar... I haven’t been in touch with her during this tough time. Probably I should.” This went badly, as might be imagined — “Fuck Judy Blume!

Donald Trump is set to publish a letter from then-Prince Charles, without the British monarch's permission. The letter from the now-King will form part of a book coming out Tuesday called Letters to Trump, which features celebrities and other people who have written to the former president during his life. The correspondence is said to range from President Richard Nixon to Alec Baldwin. Perhaps they bonded over lawsuits? Charles purportedly wrote to Trump in 1995 to thank him for offering an honorary membership to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A nice gesture, but King Charles isn’t a golfer. Maybe it’s something to do with those hands.

Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life (KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed — I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” — nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.

Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis ended with the former Edward VIII, "now exiled to Europe, traveling away in the night." In his engrossing The Windsors at War, Larman relates what happened next. In some respects, the tale he tells can be read as a pitch-black comedy, something signaled by the dramatis personae that begins it. A "disgraced Yugoslavian prince" makes it into "Society — high" joining, among other grandees, a millionaire murder victim, and no fewer than three "playboys," one of whom was the millionaire’s suspected murderer. A "would-be royal assassin" fares less well, banished to "Society— low," along with the likes of a journalist (naturally) and an American engineer "unimpressed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The heroic age of polar exploration gave birth to epics as grand and as harsh as the landscapes in which they unfolded. And, as in all the best epics, their protagonists are often of interest not only for what they do, but also for who they are, or, in the case of the Arctic adventurer — “explorer” is too confining a word — Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), who they pretend to be. Stefansson is the “villain” of Buddy Levy’s Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, a tale that reads like an unusually grim, remarkably gripping Edwardian imperial yarn.

No Australian woman has ever won the Booker Prize — and yet in the stylish genre called Outback Noir, women reign supreme. Of these, the queen is Jane Harper. Her 2016 debut, The Dry (successfully filmed with Eric Bana), marked the start of a new kind of detective fiction that has gained an international following. Some of this may be due to the way we love this version of Down Under. Forget about Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Portraits of small societies where embattled individuals get swallowed up by the big bad bush, parched or flooded, give an apocalyptic, Mad Max edge to a distinctly Australian setting. Arthur W.

Haven’t heard enough about how terrible life is with unimaginable wealth and privilege? Fear not, proles: Prince Andrew is reportedly in talks with American authors to write his memoir, because a world-class education can buy him some things, but words are hard.  The book is described by the Daily Mail’s sources as "Spare 2.0," after the controversial Prince Harry autobiography that came out in January. Cockburn wonders if the disgraced duke will spend as much time writing about his “todger” as his dear nephew did.  The Duke of York is hoping that the memoir will clear his name in light of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — the last time he attempted that feat, it famously went well.

Upon first read, it would be easy to conclude that Ron DeSantis’s new book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Survival, isn’t very revealing. After all, the list of topics Florida’s governor gave little or no attention to in his book is long. He says little about his parents, nothing at all about his early schooling, his church, his teachers, or others who influenced his thinking, nothing about his Italian heritage, his year as a teacher, or the 2015 death of his sister at age thirty, and many other personal issues.   Obama admitted using coke and other drugs in his memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Some of the most tantalizing pieces of George Orwell’s journalism are the reviews written on the hoof, filed against deadlines, sent straight to the typewriter while World War Two raged above his head. One of them is a round-up of four reprinted dystopian novels supplied to the weekly magazine Time and Tide in July 1940, shortly after the fall of France. (Today, it’s rarely reissued and barely available outside the stout bindings of volume XII of Orwell: The Complete Works.) The four books are Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1910), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Ernest Bramah’s The Secret of the League (1907).

Pamela Anderson cites Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the template for her memoir, Love, Pamela. The pop literary critic’s analysis of mythical heroes famously inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars. As Lucas deconstructs the heroes of western literature, Anderson dismantles the banal Madonna/whore template that has dominated tabloid coverage of her life. Unfortunately, Anderson supplants one boring motif with an even more tedious one: the archetype of the celebutante victim.

James Bond may have battled the nefarious forces of SMERSH, SPECTRE and other international terror organizations, but surely he has never faced quite so implacable a foe as the sensitivity reader. Following in the footsteps of Roald Dahl, the wholesale revision of whose books led to international outrage, Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, which have been re-released to mark the seventieth anniversary of the first publication of Casino Royale, have undergone their own exercise in alteration. But is it an egregious travesty à la Dahl, or — whisper it — might someone have had an idea arising from nobler motives?

I was dozing, a little hungover, on the morning flight from Prague to London, when I saw them for the first time. Ten men on a beach, dragging a landing craft up the sands. Where? Can’t tell yet. When? The fourteenth century. Who? Don’t know, but they look like trouble. I woke up. Through my AirPods I heard the Blur singer Damon Albarn growling the final song from their 1997 album Blur. “In these towns, the English army grinds their teeth into glass / You know you’ll get a kicking tonight...” I opened my laptop and started making notes. The men came surprisingly well-formed. They were soldiers of fortune in the Hundred Years’ War. They already had names. Faces. Talents. Foibles. Yearnings. Secrets. I wrote down as much as they could tell me before the plane landed.