More from Books

Tuesday

David Isaacson

What Israel can learn from its long history of sectarianism

According to conventional wisdom, David was a proper hero. He slew Goliath; he wrote beautiful psalms; he built Jerusalem. His celebrity prompted a jealous King Saul to try to kill him. The legend of David is just one of the myths debunked by Amotz Asa-El in this book. David was actually ‘a shrewd and violent usurper’, who behaved like ‘a Sicilian mafioso’ at the head of a Judean militia that consisted of ‘everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was desperate’ (1 Samuel xxii 2). Moreover, his proclamation of Judah’s secession from Israel accelerated a tradition of political folly that would blight the Jews’ entire future.

Alexander Larman

A heady cocktail of coquetry and extortion: The Millionaire Waltz, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed

Anthony Quinn’s deliciously dark, theatrical-set murder mystery Curtain Call announced the former film critic as a popular novelist of the first rank after his earlier books failed to receive the appreciation they deserved. Since then he has published seven books, wildly varying in style and settings, but featuring a core cast of characters. Memorable among them is the James Agate-inspired figure of the portly, bibulous, louche theatre critic Jimmy Erskine – surely one of the great literary creations of modern times. Erskine reappears in The Millionaire Waltz and is given many bon mots, but he is not the protagonist here.

Edward Platt

The tiny island in the wild North Atlantic that ‘feels like the safest place in the world’

Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: ‘I once ran away from England to live in the Seychelles so that I could scuba dive obsessively in the Indian Ocean,’ he writes at the beginning of Eva and the Island. ‘The tropical humidity and seductive blue water drew me into its spell.’ Gradually his love for what he calls ‘the torrid zone’ faded, and he found himself attracted to ‘the higher latitudes’. He decided to spend time on all the inhabited islands in the Faroes, including the smallest, Stora Dimun, ‘a frayed and crumbling chunk of basalt’ covering ‘just over one square mile’, which has ‘the qualities of a secret kingdom’. What better way to spend an evening in good company than eating sheep’s heads and singing?

Dennis Duncan

How a young inventor with no printing experience revolutionised the newspaper world

Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted by Edward Laning in the 1930s. It’s called ‘The Story of the Recorded Word’ and it’s divided into four scenes, each one a pivotal stage in the development of writing. Can you guess what they are? I daresay you managed to picture something resembling the third scene: a bearded Johannes Gutenberg showing off a page of type from his new invention, the printing press. I think you might have got the second one, too: a medieval monk, with quills and inkpot, copying out a manuscript in his scriptorium. Perhaps, if you’re religiously inclined, you even guessed the first: Moses receiving the Ten Commandments carved into stone. But what about the fourth scene?

Peter Parker

A question of identity: Passage, by Colin Thubron, reviewed

Colin Thubron’s compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour. Kathleen has had a successful career as an actor and is married to Robert, a pompous neurologist with whom she is planning to go on holiday to Egypt. The operation stalls and so is postponed until their return from the Valley of the Kings. This passage to Egypt, where Robert, in an ironic echo of E.M. Forster’s Adela Quested, hopes to see the ‘real’ country, is complicated by the inclusion of Robert’s younger brother, Alan.

Richard Walker

Do we really want to live in a world where we’re perpetually spied on?

Some people think that the United Kingdom ranks as an unusually surveillance-heavy society, what with all the CCTV installations, doorbell cameras and automatic number plate recognition systems that have proliferated in the public sphere – but they would be wrong. In fact, according to Ruben Andersson’s Age of Security, the whole world is sliding towards a state of perpetual surveillance, where everybody is spied on all the time, by cameras and communications interceptions and data capture, without debate or accountability or even much public reflection on what is happening. Do we actually want to live in this state of heightened supervision, looked over by what we are told are ‘machines of loving grace’ (as the novelist Richard Brautigan once wrote)? Does it matter?

Bryan Appleyard

What’s in a kiss? A millennium of mixed messages

Kissing is a tricky subject. It has a complex, baffling history. The kiss of a baby is one thing; the kiss of lust something quite else. Kings, generals and prelates used to kiss, as did mafiosi – often before killing. The kiss has many meanings, all of which are explored in this informative, if sometimes wearing, book. Finally, a warning: if you’re queasy about arse-kissing, don’t read it. But then you would be missing a lot. Katie Barclay, a diligent Australian academic, has written an ‘overview of the world of the kiss in Europe from medieval times to the present’. Her opening words begin listing the startling variety of the kissing involved: ‘Smooch, snog, pash, smack, peck, canoodle...

Lee Langley

Together and apart: How to Make a Woman, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed

Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good one, studious and kind, with a sweetheart she plans to marry. Solange is the wild child: rebellious, dishonest and pregnant at 15. How to Make a Woman might sound like a Gallic take on Elena Ferrante territory, but it’s much more than that. Visceral and cerebral, with echoes of Simone de Beauvoir, it describes what it means to live in a world apparently created by and for men. The novel unfolds as a triptych: Part One ‘According to Rose’; Part Two ‘As told by Solange’; and, finally, ‘Together’. Typically, while Rose goes on a school trip to Madrid, Solange survives a horrific birth, described in unflinching detail.

Andrey Kurkov

The intrepid volunteers who risk all to preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage

‘The nonsense was over at last,’ wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of the second world war. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of ‘local’ warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.

Tuesday

Travis Elborough

Forty years on, the furore over Paul Simon’s Graceland seems almost quaint

‘The story of Graceland’s origins,’ writes Ashley Kahn in his deep dive into Paul Simon’s multi-million-selling album, ‘is the story of a cassette: a bootleg tape.’ Entitled Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, and containing a collection of decade-old Mbaqanga songs from the townships of black South Africa, it had been lent to Simon in 1984 by the Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Heidi Berg. She had come to know the musician through his friend and neighbour, Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, and Simon had offered to produce her. She explained she needed the tape back, as it belonged to someone else, but that this was essentially what she had in mind for her next record – though there were many obstacles to working with musicians in apartheid-era South Africa.

Adam Begley

Finding happiness in simple tactile pleasures

When I confess that this is the first self-help book I’ve read, I’m also confessing to a minor but pointed snobbism. Sadly, I’m self-satisfied (as many snobs are), which perhaps explains my conviction that self-help books don’t help. Worse, I believe Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff is well-meaning, reasonable and fundamentally right about how to live one’s life. The author is laudably passionate about gratification – or ‘itty-bitty fulfilment’, to borrow his phrase. Unknowingly, I was already following his self-help prescriptions – so to me they’re of no use.

Michael Arditti

A house of secrets: Where Are the Kings, by Donal Ryan, reviewed

A typical adolescent, Jack Fristensky is consumed by uncertainty about who he is, his place in the world and, of course, his burgeoning sexuality. Less typically, he must also contend with his mother’s suicide and his father’s subsequent admission to a mental hospital. Effectively orphaned, he is sent to live with his mother’s ‘mad, mysterious family’ – his grandparents, Aunt Rose and three uncles, Theo, Haulie and JJ, the last of whom is only two years his senior. All the characters are richly and idiosyncratically drawn.

David Edmonds

Why we must forgive Immanuel Kant his misogyny and racism

If the only story you’ve heard about Immanuel Kant’s life is that it was so regular that the citizens of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) would set their watch by his daily walk, then this book has much to teach you. In fact the provenance of this oft repeated anecdote is an essay by the German poet Heinrich Heine, who, far from being an eyewitness, had never even met Kant: ‘Everything had its set time, and the neighbours knew that it was exactly half past three when Immanuel Kant, in his grey frock coat, rattan cane in hand, emerged from his front door.’ The Kant that emerges from these pages is less dull and more recognisably human than his metronomic image. He played billiards, gambled and socialised with the great and good of Königsberg.

Annie Walton Doyle

An exhilarating chase: The Runner, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed

Billed as a literary thriller from one of the masters of the genre, Scarlett Thomas’s The Runner is a far denser philosophical novel than readers might expect – albeit one built around a propulsive chase. The author transforms ultramarathons into a metaphor for modern capitalism, using the story of a fugitive runner to question what gives life value in a world dominated by money, surveillance and relentless growth. Capitalism is presented as a race without a finishing line, with running symbolising an economic system that demands endless progression: ‘The whole world is just relentlessly upupup. Why is everything just another hill?

Helen Barrett

What will the successful cities of the future look like?

Can architecture solve urban crises? Or should architects and planners concentrate on mitigating the consequences of wider events (climate change, war, demographic and economic shifts), then hope for the best? What happens when we have no choice but to build or rebuild cities? In her new book, Gabriella Bennett, a journalist interested in architecture and urban landscapes, spends two years flying around the world looking for answers to these and other questions. Woven through her adventures are two personal quests: to reckon with her unhappy adolescence in the Scottish postwar new town of Glenrothes; and to reset her life after a pandemic-era health crisis that led her to quit her job.

David Crane

The monumental failure that was Henry VIII

There can be virtually no aspect of Henry VIII’s life and reign, as Steven Veerapen puts it, that has not been ‘scrutinised under every available lens’. There have, of course, been any number of histories and biographies of Henry himself, and as many again of his wives and ministers to go alongside the films, plays and novels that, from Shakespeare to Hilary Mantel and (best of the lot) C.J. Sansom, show no signs of drying up. So ‘why bother writing about Henry VIII?’ Veerapen asks – and he’ll not be the only one wondering that. He is happy to concede that this is probably an exhausted seam from a narrowly English perspective, but what of other perspectives? What of Henry’s immediate neighbours, targets of the imperial pretensions suggested by this book’s title?

Guy Stagg

Looking for Katrin: Rory MacLean goes in search of his dead wife

One September, Rory MacLean’s wife, Katrin, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seven months later she was dead. The couple had been married for 32 years. In the wake of his wife’s death, MacLean decided to write a book about the afterlife. He had already written books about Russia and Myanmar, Berlin and Crete, but it was not clear where this journey should begin. ‘Unfortunately, few who entered heaven alive returned with a guidebook.’ Over the next five years, he travelled the globe, learning how different faiths understood the afterlife and exploring various sacred sites and religious rites. At the same time he read a wide range of mystical writers and collected insights into death from science, philosophy and the history of religion.

Sarah Moorhouse

Were the French structuralists of the 1960s really as cool as they seemed?

‘Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.’ When Emily Eakin first encountered ‘theory’ as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1980s, it marked the start of an obsession, intense as a love affair. She wasn’t the only one. For the Anglophone world, France has long represented a style of thinking that is just that: stylish. It’s not for nothing that an estimated three million American tourists flock to the boulevards of Paris each year. The place is synonymous with glamour in its most alluringly intelligent form.

Stuart Evers

Journey of discovery: Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli, reviewed

Valeria Luiselli’s previous novel Lost Children Archive (2019) was a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of the American family road trip, a bravura performance that won both the Dublin Literature Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her follow up, Beginning Middle End, is a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of a European family road trip. The framework might be the same – even down to the inclusion of Polaroid pictures – but this is far from a pale retread of earlier themes. It is a visionary portrait of three generations of women, as well as the times in which we find ourselves. Mother and Daughter have escaped New York and are housesitting for the Pianist in Sicily.

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

All aboard for Paisley: a trip round unloved Britain

‘Most people who have been to Crewe station have never been to Crewe.’ In a moment of serendipity, my train pulls into Crewe station at the exact moment I turn the page to begin the chapter ‘Changing Tracks’ in Chris Moss’s new travelogue Where Tourists Seldom Tread. In his Guardian column ‘Postcards from Britain’, Moss visits and reconsiders ‘improbable, bypassed and unloved’ destinations, such as Warrington, Gateshead, Paisley, Clacton-on-Sea – and Crewe, which my train from London has reached after no small delay. Moss is right, of course: I have travelled through Crewe more times than I have eaten disappointing Upper Crust baguettes, but I have never actually been into the town.