More from Books

Wednesday

Sean Mcglynn

Did the Bayeux Tapestry succeed as a tool of Norman propaganda?

It makes for a good pub quiz question: what has 632 people, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 41 ships and only six women? Along with the UK’s heatwaves came Bayeux Tapestry fever as the Canterbury Embroidery returned to England for ten months after something approaching a millennial sojourn in France. The British Museum was barely able to cope with the demands on its website for the first tranche of tickets to visit the exhibition. It is easy to see why. The Tapestry depicts, in an abundance of endlessly fascinating detail, that most famous date in English history: 1066. In popular perception,  the doughty Anglo-Saxons narrowly lost to that bastard Duke William and his land-grabbing Normans at the Battle of Hastings, consequently being forced to submit to the Norman yoke.

Leyla Sanai

A passion for music: Partita, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed

Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling novels tackle political and social issues and win prizes, among them the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize for Fiction (twice). Subjects she has covered include colonialism; environmental issues (preserving ecosystems and flora and fauna, and punishing polluting companies); the validity of extended family approaches to child-rearing in Cherokee Nation communities; the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and their friendship with Trotsky; and the McCarthy era and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Adam Begley

The triumph of virtue over fear and malice: The Bridge, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed

A small, beautiful book about betrayal, the cost of isolation and the persistence of human decency, Colm Tóibín’s The Bridge is set in the 1950s, in a remote Catalan village high in the Pyrenees, among people cut off from the modern world. Cut off for now. A bridge across the river threatens to speed the advent of paved roads, telephones and electricity. Miquel and his father live in an old stone dwelling on a hardscrabble farm, attended by an orphaned houseboy, Manolo, and haunted by the reverberating absence of Miquel’s mother, who was caught in a sudden snowstorm and died. Her corpse, buried under ice, lay undiscovered until a spring thaw. Since her death, Miquel and his father have taken to smuggling goods out of nearby Andorra.

Stephen Bayley

Abstract ideas made concrete

The Iron Curtain, or at least its most visible symbol, was not metal. Berlin’s Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Wall) was concrete. Its ugliness of form and function seemed to many proof of the evils inherent in this ancient building material. But for every hideous Berliner Mauer, you have a glorious Roman Pantheon. The dome of Hadrian’s incomparable temple is, after nearly two millennia, the largest unreinforced concrete structure in the world.  In our own era, concrete has allowed the best architects to do their best work. Witness  Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel. And who would argue against Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre as the best late-20th-century British building?

Chris Mullin

‘I shall always want to say thank you to this country’: the gratitude of a former kindertransport refugee

For all that it is an anachronism, the House of Lords contains some remarkable specimens, not least Alf Dubs. The child of a mixed marriage – his father was Jewish, his mother not – he arrived in this country from Prague on one of the kindertransports organised by Sir Nicholas Winton, with his possessions in a knapsack and a luggage label on his coat identifying him. Many of his Jewish compatriots were not so lucky and perished in the death camps. He was fortunate in another respect, too. Unlike with many of his companions, his father had already made it out and was there to greet him. His mother eventually managed to join them, arriving in the UK just four days before the outbreak of war.

Alan Judd

Terrorism nearly always fails – so where does that leave the ‘freedom fighter’?

This book begins with rueful comments on the absence of philosophy from terrorism literature. The phenomenon is frequently analysed through psychological, religious, political, economic, sociological and military perspectives, but rarely from the philosophical. Yet questions such as how and why terrorists opt for violence, how they justify it to themselves and others, how they regulate it and why they stop, all have philosophical ramifications. As do questions about counter-terrorism, particularly with reference to retributive terror, running agents in terrorist organisations, interrogation and torture. Quassim Cassam and Richard English, philosopher and historian respectively, avoid the easy route of exploring such questions via abstract thought experiments.

Ariane Bankes

Battling the elements – Claude Monet’s litany of anguish

For a painter we acknowledge as a master of atmospheric effects and ever-changing light, whose early work ‘Impression, Sunrise’ sparked the artistic revolution that became Impressionism, Claude Monet (1840-1926) spent an awful lot of time complaining about the weather. He was obsessed by it, cowed and crushed by it, inspired by it to flights of genius, and its vagaries would become the intrinsic focus of his art: ‘I have just returned, covered in mud and soaking wet, the weather is so awful it is impossible to do any work’ is a constant grizzle. He seethes with frustration as he is forced to make constant changes as everything keeps growing and getting greener... In brief, because of these changes, I am following Nature without being able to capture her...

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

The myth of authentic English food

There were two butcher’s pork pies in my bag that also contained a copy of Lewis Bassett’s The Full English. As I began reading this investigation into the story of English food, having those pies on my person felt particularly in keeping with the English culinary tradition. By the time I’d finished the book, I was not so sure. Bassett sets out on well-trodden ground to ask: what is English food? He focuses on a clutch of dishes or products which have long been seen as important to, or turning points within, English food culture: bread, haute cuisine, curry, fish and chips, roast beef, sausage rolls, olive oil. So far so conventional – but that’s rather the point. His contention is that much of our received wisdom about English food is reductive or simply wrong.

Genevieve Gaunt

An overpromised land: Farewell to Eden, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed

Farewell to Eden, Sebastian Faulks’s 18th novel, is a timely masterpiece; a riveting story of war and lost love across two scarred terrains: postwar Britain and Palestine in 1946. It’s a profound meditation on morality, faith and music. And a murder mystery to boot. It’s 1951 and we meet the solitary Philip Deval, an ex-army man with a degree in philosophy. London’s ‘shrapnel scars’ and paucity of work push him to take a job at a school called Witchelm. On his first night, smoking in bed, he murmurs a peculiar thought aloud: ‘Christ, how long can I get away with this?’ Clues snake through the novel to reveal an ingenious denouement. Faulks flashes back to Palestine in 1946.

Robin Evans

The Cavalry in the Clouds: tales of the airborne Great War

The first aeroplane flight in Britain was made in 1909 by John Moore-Brabazon, holder of the first British pilot’s licence. The same year, he strapped a basket containing a piglet to his craft in order to disprove the old adage. Pigs might now fly, but an industry didn’t – yet. In Flying Pianos, Charles Spicer introduces a three-part cast of mavericks, Great War heroes and predominantly military champions of the earliest aeroplanes between 1906 and 1936. His evocative title is a poetic term for their elementary construction, also reflecting his breezy tone, as, despite the constant risk (plus dark pilot humour), he eschews truthful alternatives such as ‘spinning incinerators’. Colourful flight compendiums are nothing new.

Jim Lawley

Rain never stopped play – cricketing feats of Victorian Britain

Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, this splendid book recreates cricket’s watershed year, 1864. At the time, Kit Harris explains, football was still in its infancy and ‘there was almost no other sport to occupy a man’s time’. So cricket was played in winter, too. The smooth surfaces of frozen ponds and lakes made for prodigious scoring: ‘The ball, once struck, found no obstruction before reaching the banks.’ Boundaries didn’t exist, so batsmen ran until a fielder returned the ball. Later that year, playing for United England against All England, William Mortlock ‘hit one ball past square leg, through the gateway, out of the ground, across the road and into a garden wall opposite’. The stroke brought seven runs.

Mark Piesing

Madness, mutiny and murder in the Canadian Arctic

The elegant, charismatic and narcissistic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wasn’t the average adventurer that Alaska attracted in 1912. When he arrived in Seattle from the Gold Rush port of Nome, he told journalists that he had discovered ‘a lost tribe of whites’ in the uncharted High Arctic. He also sold politicians the vision of an undiscovered land rich in gold, raw metals and oil that, only nine years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, would soon be covered with airfields. The Canadian government quickly offered Stefansson unlimited resources to lead an expedition back to the High Arctic. His objective was to claim what may have been the greatest geopolitical prize for Canada and the British Empire: the mysterious continent at the top of the world.

Susie Mesure

A fatal mistake: Time Being, by Jude Cook, reviewed

Jude Cook’s intriguing third novel, Time Being, opens with a bang. A philosophy lecturer has been shot dead through the door of a toilet stall in the humanities building at the University of London. Laura Cameron was her discipline’s answer to Brian Cox or Mary Beard, a broadcast regular, almost as renowned for her ‘eccentric, bohemian style as for her books on meta ethics and moral responsibility’.  The motive is a mystery, stumping everyone from Jack, Laura’s ‘dependable and handsome barrister husband’ to the Met’s senior investigating officer, DCI Wahid Malik. Cue shock from all concerned; all except Esther Luck, a fellow philosophy lecturer who counted Laura as a ‘dear friend’ and was also using the fifth-floor toilets at the time of Laura’s murder.

Graham Robb

Around Britain with a theodolite: a celebration of the Ordnance Survey maps

It took six years, starting in the summer of 1784, for the Board of Ordnance to establish the baseline of its triangulation of Great Britain. First they used wooden poles, then glass tubes. After much clearing of furze bushes and ant hills, the baseline ran for more than five miles from Hounslow Heath to Hampton Poor House. The maps of England and Wales were complete by 1870. Scotland had to wait until 1887. The delay was rumoured to have been caused by the superintendent’s concern that surveyors would get in the way of the late summer deer stalking. As a wing of the military, the Ordnance Survey had extraordinary powers. The Surveyors’ Act of 1841 allowed it to trudge, clamber, squelch, measure and interrogate wherever necessary.

Suzi Feay

The Great Uprising: Doom Painting, by A.K. Blakemore, reviewed

We can never know whether a historical novelist really gets it right, but there are clear missteps. One is ascribing anachronistic progressive attitudes – feminism or gay rights – to eras when they would have been unthinkable. Another is ignoring the vast impact of religion not just in everyday life but in the very psyche of historical figures. It’s not a mistake made by A.K. Blakemore in her weighty account of the torrid fortnight of the 1381 poll tax riots, also known (misleadingly) as the Peasants’ Revolt. The festivities of the church play a significant part in the rioters’ planning, with a culminating march on London at Corpus Christi, traditionally a day off work with exploitable drunkenness.

Ian Thomson

May the way the world works remain forever mysterious

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015), managed to clarify the unsettling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and other physical exotica. It sold more than a million copies in English translation alone. Not since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had there been such a consensual success in the science book market. In later bestsellers such as The Order of Time and White Holes, Rovelli continued a tradition of popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. The French call it haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. Rovelli excels at it.

Tuesday

Charlotte Stroud

Art conquers all: The Disappearers by Marlon James, reviewed

Gothic fiction is full of Jekylls and Hydes. For every castle, there is a dungeon; for every locked door, a hidden chamber; and for every repressed secret, there is a ghost who won’t keep quiet. In his Booker-longlisted novel The Disappearers, Marlon James brings the Gothic to Jamaica. Built on the outcrop of a vast underwater mountain range, at the depths of which are some of the most hostile conditions on earth, it is a place where being gay is also a matter of survival. If countries have basements, then Jamaica’s goes a long way down. In an abandoned house in Kingston at the height of the 1980s Aids crisis, eight queer men meet to rehearse John Herbert’s gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes.

Charlotte Hobson

Pain passed down: a portrait of Russia and the war that dare not speak its name

Long before Asne Seierstad arrived at the bookseller’s house in Kabul, she studied in Moscow. ‘I tried to be one of them,’ she says, gently scathing of her young self. ‘In all earnest, I sought out the Russian soul.’ Decades spent writing about the post-Soviet world have stripped away her early romanticism. Her new book on Russia has an antihero as its central figure: Andrei Medvedev, a thief, alcoholic, hired thug and mercenary who fought in Ukraine then defected, escaping over the border to Norway. As she follows his story across Russia in 2023-24, encountering the full gamut of oligarchs, angels, monks and drunks, it’s Russians’ own self-image that often feels wilfully blind.

Michael Arditti

Rebecca reimagined: The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain, reviewed

Mrs Danvers is one of those rare characters who has transcended her original setting to enter the wider culture. She has been referenced in novels by Stephen King and Sue Townsend, parodied in films by Mel Brooks and even lent her name to an American all-female pop group. She takes on further life in Rose Tremain’s The Housekeeper, a reimagining of Rebecca that speculates on the inspiration behind Daphne du Maurier’s most compelling creation. Unlike du Maurier, Tremain affords her housekeeper a rich backstory. Now known as Danni, she was born Lilianne Danowski, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in a small Polish town.

Adam Roberts

Too much and much too long: The Rouse by China Miéville, reviewed

China Miéville’s new novel is 1,264 pages long. Following his breakthrough ‘New Weird’ masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000), Miéville was a productive writer: eight big novels in a decade. Then after 2011’s Embassytown he seemed to fall quiet: a couple of novellas, a history of the Russian Revolution, little else. There were rumours that he had retired from authorship altogether. But not so. We can now see what he’s been doing over the past decade and a half: writing a very, very long novel. The first 190 pages of The Rouse tells the story of Maur (short for Maureen: though why she doesn’t go by ‘Mo’ like every other Maureen in history isn’t made clear), who gets pregnant as a teenager.