Books

Stephanie Clifford, better known as ‘Stormy Daniels’, is famous on account of three hours spent in a hotel suite with Donald Trump 12 years ago. She says they did, he says they didn’t, and since everything that Donald Trump does or doesn’t do makes the geographical center of America ecstatic with praise while the edges explode with uncontrollable indignation, Ms Clifford has fairly earned her place as the starlet of series 220, episode 394 in this exhilarating, and never ending sitcom.

At 6 in the morning on December 13, 1981, Poland’s prime minister Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on Polish television and described in sonorous tones a looming Apocalypse. ‘Our homeland is at the edge of an abyss,’ he said. ‘State structures are ceasing to function. Each day delivers new blows to the waning economy… There are more and more examples of terror, threats, mob trials and direct coercion. Crimes, robberies, and break-ins are spreading like a wave through the country.’ Jaruzelski then took a step directly into that abyss. He declared martial law. Soldiers went door-to-door arresting members and suspected sympathisers of the populist labour movement Solidarity, including its leader, Lech Walesa.

Reihan Salam has written a timely and important book, urging centrists of left and right to accept reduced immigration in order to improve social cohesion and integrate the children of immigrants. As a prominent Bangladeshi-Muslim American conservative, he brings a highly distinctive perspective to this vexed question – a second-generation immigrant’s case for immigration reform. Immigration was the defining issue of Donald Trump’s primary bid, and analyses of survey data show that non-voters and Obama voters who wanted lower immigration were decisive for Trump’s election. Yet the rise of the post-1960s New Left, with its focus on disadvantaged cultural groups, has made inroads into the Democratic Party, rendering it allergic to immigration control.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate — that the reality of what had taken place exceeded fictional representation. These three all recovered from their shock reasonably quickly, contributing to the flood of 9/11 fiction that poured into bookshops during the 2000s. In recent years this torrent of novels and stories has slowed, but as Christopher Priest’s eerily powerful An American Story demonstrates, it most certainly has not stopped.

One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village of Latisana and picked up an Italian girl — 18, jet black wet hair, slender legs — who had been waiting for hours at the crossroads. In the car, on his way to a duck shoot, was Ernest Hemingway — round puffy face, protruding stomach and, at 49, without having published a novel in a decade, somewhat past his sell-by. He apologised for being late, and offered the rain-sodden girl a shot of whisky which, being teetotal, she refused.

When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest is much less cheerful. Like one of those innocents who re-enact the Civil War in embarrassing costume on Bank Holidays, Curl has been time-travelling backwards into a pre-modern world. He returns from the past with a crude message that has been familiar since Reginald (Menin Gate) Blomfield told us in the 1930s that modern architecture is a godless conspiracy of foreigners, Jews and Bolsheviks to eradicate an established culture of building, patiently evolved over three millennia. This is less than a half-truth. Yes, modernist principles, misunderstood by unimaginative planners, often led to atrocious results.

‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the heart of his character as a man and a poet. It projects a powerful mixture of defiance and neediness, which in his personal life produced a series of highly disruptive assertions and reversals, and in his writing life an equally striking set of commitments and walkings-back. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who has previously published fluent biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas, is a reliable guide to all these contortions.