More from Books

Thursday

Jay Elwes

Love in a cold climate: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed

In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him the prospect of a job in his father’s meat factory, but he goes to the big city to start a career as a writer. What he finds is Delphine. They fall in love, move into a flat, then a house in the countryside outside Vienna; but when war breaks out the fragility of their happiness is brutally exposed. Snow Country moves from this doomed love to post-war Vienna, and to Lena, the daughter of an alcoholic part-time call girl. Lena eventually goes to Vienna, where she comes close to following her mother’s path, before finding work at a sanatorium near to where she grew up.

Julie Bindel

It’s time female fraudsters received their due

If you’re after jewel thieves, bank robbers and gold smugglers, look no further than Caitlin Davies’s Queens of the Underworld. It opens in 1960 and tells the tale of Zoe Progl, a professional crook who once stole £250,000-worth of furs in a single heist. Eventually sent to Holloway Prison for 20 years, Progl subsequently pulled off the most successful jailbreak in 75 years when she scaled the 25ft wall to freedom. Davies describes how her interest in this case led her to talk to Progl’s daughter after her mother’s death and, realising there was barely any public knowledge about this notorious, successful and imaginative criminal, thought that Progl was one of many women who deserved her attention.

Lee Langley

A wife for King Lear — J.R. Thorp imagines another Lady Macbeth

Shakespeare wastes no time on Lear’s backstory; we meet the brutal old autocrat as he divides his kingdom between two devoted daughters. Learwife begins where the play ends. The mad, broken old man and three daughters are dead; but why has a messenger brought the word to a remote nunnery where a forgotten woman paces the cloisters? She looks the reader in the eye: I am the queen of two crowns, banished 15 years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three… I am 55 years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here. Other writers, such Jean Rhys, Margaret Atwood and Pat Barker, have given a voice to marginalised women. J.R.

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

The revival of the blacksmith’s craft — a new generation goes at it hammer and tongs

At Intelligent Life, the Economist magazine where I worked for some years, it was easy to feel intellectually challenged. Even the interns all seemed to have Oxbridge Firsts. What a breath of fresh air, then, when the deputy editor’s son decided he didn’t want to go to university, and would instead apprentice as a blacksmith. During the industrial revolution, Alex Pole tells us in this eccentric and enchanting book, there were 25,000 smiths working in the UK. Now, there are fewer than 2,000. As Ronald Blythe noted more than 50 years ago in Akenfield, far more villages have a cottage called The Olde Forge than a blacksmith.

Richard Francis

Mass hysteria in Massachusetts: the 17th-century witch crisis in America

One September day in 1649, in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Anthony Dorchester returned from church to the house he and his wife shared with a couple called Hugh and Mary Parsons. He went to check on a cow’s tongue he was boiling for dinner but to his surprise it wasn’t in the pot. He searched high and low but couldn’t find it. Mary told him that her husband had sneaked off mysteriously on the way to the meeting house and was now nowhere to be seen. Given that the two men had argued about possession of the tongue, the obvious conclusion would surely be that Hugh had stolen it. But for Dorchester and his neighbours a more plausible explanation was that Hugh had made it disappear through the ‘juggling’ of witchcraft.

Jonathan Boff

New tactics are needed for the wars of the future

The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies and minds to fight unwinnable wars. The lessons to be learnt from Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed from Libya, Syria and the Sahel, are many; but the original sin was hubris, born of post-Cold War military preponderance and successes in Sierra Leone, Ulster and Kosovo. The consequence of our arrogance, when 9/11 demanded action, was that we failed properly to interrogate, and so to grasp, either the character of the specific conflicts into which we jumped, or the fundamental nature of war itself.

Philip Marsden

It’s the fisherman who’s truly hooked

Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing of a few leisure hours, the diverting indulgence of a hobby. It becomes little short of a reason for existence, an end for which the other bits of life are merely the means. I have never been so afflicted, being a casual sea-angler, but I look upon those who are with profound curiosity. Like deep religious faith, such zeal might sometimes look cranky, but there is much to envy too. ‘Fishing simply sent me out of my mind,’ confessed the Russian writer Sergei Aksakov. In The Lightning Thread, David Profumo traces the course of his own colourful, fish-obsessed years. They begin in Scotland when he’s seven, with a brown trout and a worm.

Dennis Duncan

Use it or lose it: has the public library had its day?

I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It is a nice irony that a century and a half ago, on the site where the free-to-join municipal library now stands, was a villa owned by one Charles Edward Mudie. In the mid-19th century, Mudie had amassed a fortune by establishing a hugely successful lending library where subscribers could either pay a guinea a year to borrow as many books as they could read, or take the pay-as-you-go option of a shilling a book. For purely commercial reasons, Mudie was a staunch supporter of novels that were long enough (c.200,000 words) that they needed to be broken up into three separate volumes, and his influence was such that publishers would insist that writers bulk out their narratives accordingly.

Chris Mullin

Andrew Mitchell relives the agony of Plebgate

Andrew Mitchell, as he readily admits, was born into the British Establishment. Almost from birth, his path was marked out: prep school, public school, Cambridge, the City, parliament, the Cabinet. At every step along the way he acquired the connections that would propel him to the stratosphere. But for one extraordinary event, who knows where he might have ended up? Certainly in one of the top jobs. In other circumstances this might have been a conventional story. Posh boy goes into the City, makes loads of money and then takes time out to come and govern us. In fact this is an unusual memoir — honest, self-deprecating and rich in anecdote. A fundamental streak of decency runs throughout.

Scott Bradfield

Life’s dark side: the catastrophic world of Stephen Crane

Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer wasted an entire career playing Hemingway, Stephen Crane was the most world-striding combative male intelligence in literature. And while he created the template for every ‘manly’ novelist who came after, from Jack London to Robert Ruark, he never sought attention as a man but only as a writer; and he certainly never issued many advertisements for himself. Instead, he almost surreptitiously explored the world’s most violent places with inexhaustible intrepidity.

Thursday

Andrew Rosenheim

A master of spy fiction to the end — John Le Carré’s Silverview reviewed

Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by John le Carré less than a year after his death seems almost suspiciously opportune, but whatever the publishing expediency involved, it is a very fine finale. Julian Lawndsley is the 33-year-old owner of a bookshop in an East Anglian seaside town, having fled the City, where he has made both his fortune and his name asa canny trader. Any echoes of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald soon fade as we discover that Lawndsley knows virtually nothing about books and even less about the customers he sells them to — until Edward Avon, an exotic foreigner, enters his shop one evening.

Katja Hoyer

The horror of tank warfare brought vividly to life

If Joseph Stalin was right about one thing it was his assertion that ‘the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic’. Numbers don’t inspire empathy. They don’t tell stories. Nothing exemplifies this principle better than the second world war. The deadliest armed conflict in human history killed an estimated 70 million people or 3 per cent of the world’s population, and yet these numbers will make few people weep. They are difficult to fathom without faces. James Holland’s greatest strength as a military historian is that he brings humanity to his work — a rare trait in a field of research that can sometimes feel dominated by those obsessed with numbers.

Alexandra Coghlan

Bach’s Cello Suites represent a spiritual meditation — from the Nativity to the Resurrection

‘One player on four strings, with a bow.’ That’s what Bach’s six Cello Suites boil down to, says Steven Isserlis. It sounds simple enough, until you add more than 100 editions and 200 recordings into the equation, not to mention countless books, chapters and articles all wrestling with a work Isserlis calls ‘a Bible’ for cellists. And this tussle isn’t just a lofty question of meaning or interpretation either: we’re still arguing about the actual notes. Suddenly the numbers no longer add up. The cellist Isserlis released his award-winning account of the Cello Suites in 2007.

Adam Begley

God is everywhere, sometimes in strange guises, in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads

Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and aggressively clever, the novel did more than display its author’s spiky brilliance. A stubborn moral core, in the person of the ailing patriarch of the Lambert family, and a tangled web of fierce emotion binding him and his wife and three children, gave it powerful resonance. Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, presents us with another patriarch and another set of dysfunctional family dynamics. What has changed in the past two decades? Now less inclined to show off, Franzen is more assiduous in his excavation of character. We get less dazzle and a deeper dive.

Stephen Bayley

Stylish and useful: why the Anglepoise remains a design classic

The tide of survival bias has retreated and left the Anglepoise a design classic. Its contemporaries from the mid-1930s, a BSA Scout and de Havilland Dragonfly, for example, have become quaint antiquities. Almost unmodified since 1934, it is that rarest of things: a design beyond fashion. And it has totemic qualities. For my generation, the possession of an Anglepoise as much as a set of David Mellor cutlery or even a chicken brick was a ticket to the modern world where perfect products made you happy. Or so the theory went. To understand that modern world, now deceased, you need to appreciate basic analogue systems such as the rivet and the spring. The rivet is a bonding technique that made petrol tankers and submarines possible.

Thursday

Michael Arditti

From ‘little Cockney’ to playing Queen Mary: the remarkable career of Eileen Atkins

Eileen Atkins belongs to a singular generation of British actresses, among them Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips and Vanessa Redgrave, who not only continue to perform on stage and screen in their late eighties but all of whom, apart from Smith, have written their memoirs. Atkins already has a proven literary track record. Having wisely abandoned her first effort, a three-act, 17-minute play, containing ‘murder, incest and sodomy’, written during an early period of unemployment, she went on to co-create the hugely successful TV series Upstairs, Downstairs and The House of Eliott, write the play Vita and Virginia and put together a selection of Ellen Terry’s lectures. Will She Do?

Lindsay Johns

Colson Whitehead celebrates old Harlem in a hardboiled thriller that’s also a morality tale

For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place both in the psychogeography of New York and the soul of the nation. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin and Chester Himes are just a few of the writers whose names are associated with the 50-odd blocks heading uptown from 110th Street at the northern end of Manhattan. Their echoes, traces and spirits can all be discerned in Colson Whitehead’s outstanding new novel Harlem Shuffle — a genre-defying blast from a bygone era, set between 1959 and 1964, yet one which urgently speaks to the present.

Susie Mesure

Reassess every relationship you’ve ever had before it’s too late

‘Reading is a celebration of the mystery of ourselves,’ according to Elizabeth Strout, who writes to help readers understand themselves and other people. In Oh William!, Strout resurrects Lucy Barton, the enigmatic heroine of a previous novel, setting her on a mission to get to know William, her first husband. This is Strout’s third outing for Lucy, who also reappeared in Anything is Possible, a collection of interlinked stories about the residents of Amgash, Illinois, Lucy’s hometown. Now in her early sixties and newly widowed, Lucy is good friends with William, who is on wife number three — Estelle, a woman 22 years younger than him. ‘And that was no easy thing,’ Lucy, a successful novelist, writes.

Andrew Lycett

Under deep suspicion in Beirut, Kim Philby still carried on regardless

The story of the Cambridge spies has been served up so often that it has become stale — too detailed, too predictable, too firmly etched in Cold War monochrome. So it’s a good idea to seek another angle, through the warmer lens of a love affair involving its main protagonist Kim Philby and his wife Eleanor. It humanises the tale, particularly as it draws on a vivid and neglected personal source — The Spy I Loved— Eleanor’s own book centred on their romance in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. That was where Philby was despatched in 1956 to play out the penultimate act in a drama stretching back to the 1930s, when he and his fellow Cambridge students were recruited to spy for the Soviet Union.

Nigel Jones

Any beggar woman was a potential scapegoat during the European witch craze

In the three centuries between 1450 and 1750 in Europe it is estimated that up to 100,000 women were burned, hanged, drowned or put to death in other ingenious ways on suspicion of being witches. John Callow’s thoroughly researched book tells the story of three such women, the last judicial victims in England of what has been dubbed ‘the great European witch craze’. Craze is an appropriate word for a phenomenon which spanned a period when the Continent was supposedly emerging from the dark ages of superstition into the sunlight of the Enlightenment. But in the dawning Europe of Kant, Voltaire and Newton a cloud of unreason persisted, of which the Bideford witch trial was a small but significant example.