More from Books

Tuesday

Ian Thomson

How Ulysses horrified the stuffed shirts of New York’s literary establishment

The word ‘obscene’, according to the dictionary, refers to anything ‘offensively or grossly indecent, lewd’. By the standards of the day, the Little Review was a borderline obscene, certainly at times salacious, literary journal. For the crime of serialising Ulysses – James Joyce’s then unpublished steamy masterwork – it was made to face obscenity charges. Operating out of Chicago and New York from 1914 to 1929, the journal introduced American readers to such modernist heavyweights as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein. It was not just a platform for bookish shock effects; it altered the course of American literary culture. James Joyce, who relished litigation, dreamed of a trial of Ulysses as clamorous as that of Madame Bovary Margaret C.

Jude Cook

Ghastly middle-class materialism: The Quantity Theory of Morality, by Will Self, reviewed

In ‘Ward 9’, the central story of Will Self’s lauded debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), it is posited that a society can only contain a finite supply of sanity, and that when it comes to marbles we’re all playing a zero-sum game. His latest novel suggests a limited amount of morality must exist in a world where the avaricious prosper and the meek inherit the debts of those who live unscrupulous lives. In the milieu of the book, these debts are mainly school fees, coke bills and the cost of renting an Italian villa for two weeks every summer.

Amanda Craig

A nasty little tale about a marriage: Look What You Made Me Do, by John Lanchester, reviewed

Adultery and betrayal have always been richly rewarding subjects in fiction, as John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do confirms. Set in contemporary London and featuring architect-designed homes, book groups and the Oxbridge-educated middle-class, it comes perilously close to being that dread thing, a Hampstead novel – only to subvert it. For after one chapter, Kate’s husband Jack is dead. Her long marriage and comfortable life are cast into turmoil, first by bereavement and then by a hit TV series which suggests that Jack had been having an affair with its scriptwriter, Phoebe. Interleaved with Kate’s account of agonised grieving is the TV script of Cheating.

Chris Mullin

‘Evil visited that day and we don’t know why’ – Dunblane 30 years on

Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 13 March 1996, a man walked into the gymnasium at Dunblane Primary School, near Stirling, Scotland. He was armed with two 9mm Browning self-loading pistols, two .357 Smith & Wesson revolvers and 743 rounds of ammunition. Within three or four minutes, he’d fired 105 rounds, resulting in the deaths of a teacher, Gwen Mayor, and 16 children. A further three teaching staff and 14 children were injured. He then took his own life. It could have been a great deal worse.  There was a suspicion that he intended to kill most of the school’s 600 pupils but that he’d arrived a few minutes late for assembly, by which time most of the children had dispersed to their classrooms.

Tuesday

Patrick Marnham

Nights at the Lutetia – the dark history of a luxury hotel

The saga of the rise and fall of the Third Reich could be traced by following events in any one of the countries occupied by the Nazis. Jane Rogoyska has refined this approach by focusing on what happened in a single building, a fashionable ‘grand hotel’ in central Paris, between 1933 and 1945.  The Lutetia is the only luxury hotel in Paris on the Left Bank, where it has always looked out of place – its bulbous, domed grandeur dominating less pretentious neighbours in a district that is still better known for its cultural and academic traditions. Rogoyska tells the story of the building’s wartime adventures in three parts – before, during and after the German occupation of France. The lives recounted fall into three groups, only one of which is French.

Edward Skidelsky

The woke wars intensify

Nigel Biggar was not an obvious target for cancellation. A New Labourite, a Remainer and a public supporter of gay marriage and abortion up to 18 weeks, he might have seemed almost right-on – for an Oxford Professor of Divinity, at any rate. Nonetheless, when in 2017 he had the temerity to suggest that the British Empire had done some good as well as bad, 170-plus academics signed a letter urging Oxford University to withdraw support for his work. This was one of the first stirrings of ‘cancel culture’, the tactic of quashing wrongthink not by argument or persuasion but by sheer force of numbers.   Unfortunately for themselves, Biggar’s detractors had picked on the proverbial ‘wrong guy’.

Jonathan Boff

Learning from history requires sophistication and skill

If you reckon you have an understanding of international politics today, you probably haven’t been listening properly. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are making history too fast for most of us to keep up. Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm seeks to make sense of the current geopolitical chaos by drawing parallels between now and the years before 1914. If you don’t find those comparisons reassuring, you aren’t supposed to. The point being stressed is that, unless we are careful, we risk sleepwalking into a Great Power conflict as terrible as, or worse than, the first world war. Westad is a leading Cold War historian from Yale and his comparisons are always thought-provoking and often accurate.

Ian Thomson

The Venice Ghetto was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution

The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet. The Ghetto – the first of its kind on the Italian peninsula and anywhere in the world – became a model for segregated Jewish quarters throughout Europe. It was soon blighted by poverty, malnutrition and disease. The Ghetto Nuovo was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution. In this fascinating history of the New Foundry and its inhabitants, Alexander Lee conjures the Adriatic seaport in all its strange glory.

Ariane Bankes

From enfant terrible to dame: Tracey Emin in her own words

On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern comes this portrait of Tracey Emin as a painter, told largely in her own words. It traces a remarkable trajectory, from gobby Margate teenager to one of the UK’s most respected and celebrated artists, and a Dame of the British Empire. At its heart is a series of conversations with Martin Gayford, a critic with a deep engagement with the nature of painting and insights gleaned from close friendships with 20th-century giants, Lucian Freud and David Hockney among them. It is a book full of heart – frank and confessional – and presents Emin at the zenith of her powers, having survived near-fatal cancer and found new purpose and conviction.

Sarah Ditum

Women have never had it so good as now

Unfortunately, Zoe Strimpel has a great point in Good Slut. Why unfortunately? Because as much as I sympathise with her basic argument, I cannot see many people being persuaded by this scattershot polemic with its myriad errors and alarming glibness. Team slut deserves a better advocate. Whether I want to count myself as one of team slut is a sensitive point. I’m 44: it feels embarrassing. I had my ‘reclaiming sexist slurs’ phase in the late 1990s when I was an aspiring Riot Grrrl and I realised pretty soon that wearing fishnets and calling myself names was not having the disruptive effect on misogyny that I’d hoped for. Strimpel is 43 and, like me, she’s noted the recent turn to conservatism in sexual politics with some alarm.

Anne de Courcy

Streamlined chic or lacy froth: royal style wars of the 1930s

The semiotics of clothes, especially royal ones, can be fascinating, sending out powerful messages. Think of the jewel-studded, pearl-strewn portraits of Queen Elizabeth I or Princess Diana’s revenge-chic black dress. As a fashion queen herself (Justine Picardie was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar for more than seven years and has an acclaimed book on Chanel under her belt), no one is better placed to unpick the subtleties of royal public couture. So, judging by this book’s title, I was expecting a shrewd analysis of diplomacy dressing, with perhaps some behind-the-scenes vignettes. What happens if a royal lady unexpectedly gets a ladder in her tights at a crucial moment? Is there a colour code if three of them are out together? How do hats stay on in a gale?

Andrew Rule

Revelling in reading: The Enchanting Lives of Others, by Can Xue, reviewed

Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than nearly any other living Chinese author. The writing can be hard to enjoy. It often takes the form of avant-garde fairy tales populated by nameless characters who genially accept unsettling, inexplicable occurrences around them. When this works, as in last year’s gloriously strange Mother River, you get the disorientating feeling that you are the one who has gone insane, not the characters.

Tuesday

Madeleine Feeny

Double trouble: As If, by Isabel Waidner, reviewed

I think I’d be pretty hostile if I met my doppelganger – living proof of my mediocrity. My fragile ego even balks at being told I’m reminiscent of someone else. But, drawn as they are to the uncanny, authors just love doppelgangers. In As If, Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Waidner is the German-British author of four previous novels, including Sterling Karat Gold, which won the Goldsmiths Prize. They are non-binary, and known for experimental writing. Many recent novels, such as Miranda July’s All Fours, imagine middle-aged women abandoning their lives, but lately the male midlife crisis, while going strong in society, has been somewhat neglected in fiction – until now.

Derek Turner

Everybody needs ‘good neighbours’: fairy folklore from time immemorial

To our jaded century, ‘fairy’ carries connotations ranging from the sentimental to the sickly. It conjures childishness, foolishness, insipidity and softness – Tinker Bell, the Tooth Fairy, the Cottingley photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, cakes, twinkling lights and a certain brand of soap. Francis Young feels that the word should also be applied to countless other traditions of supernatural entities from earliest times on – that fairy stories help us fathom being human. Young has written or worked on many books about religion and folklore, and this is his third specifically on fairies.

Simon Heffer

The Labour party should finally grow up about Ramsay MacDonald and his conduct

The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson (to give just two examples) from within it – reached the top or very near the top of British politics. But did MacDonald have a tragic fall? He was prime minister for six of the last eight years of his life; a cabinet minister to within six months of his death; and only left then because he was in his 71st year and in poor health. He turned down a peerage and the Thistle.

Michael Hofmann

Things still seem oddly disorientating without Seamus Heaney

Whether you went with the two big rugby goalposts, those opposing H’s of Heaney and Hughes, or with Blake Morrison’s quondam super league of world English (or sometimes airport) poets, Brodsky, Walcott, Murray and Heaney, Heaney loomed amiably in the poetry landscape of the late 20th century. I knew him a little and liked him a lot. Enough now to appreciate that there was something endlessly consoling about being alive at the same time as an incontestably – or only rarely, foolishly contested – great, canonical poet, someone you might occasionally meet or, more regularly, see new poems or new books by; and something correspondingly harrowing and disorientating about this same poet no longer being alive. A geographical feature has been taken away, a hill, a forest, a river.

Suzi Feay

Adventures in the City of Light: Rousseau’s Lost Children, by Gavin McCrea, reviewed

What biographer would pass up a time-travelling opportunity to meet their subject face to face? This novel’s protagonist, Gavin Mulvany, an academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is somehow able to slip back in time to 1777, a year before the fractious French writer died. He turns from irritating fan to close companion, accompanying Jean-Jacques on long philosophical rambles and coach journeys around Paris. They attend the premiere of Voltaire’s last play (as does Marie Antoinette), call on Benjamin Franklin and visit the Marquis de Sade in a lunatic asylum. Gavin’s long-delayed book about Rousseau is concerned to solve the puzzle of why a passionate theorist on children’s education could dispatch his own five newborns to a foundling hospital, never to see them again.

Peter Craven

The sweeping drama of Australia’s political history

Tony Abbott’s history of Australia comes as a surprise. It has a spellbinding verve which will beguile friend and foe alike. We don’t expect such narrative command from a former prime minister of Australia. In office, Abbott was a believer in the ‘lean and lift’ principle of civic life, with a marked preference for the lifting side, which led to policies like work for the dole and budgets which were generally perceived as rough on the poor. His great ideological influence was the radical conservatism of Bob Santamaria and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party, the anti-communist ‘Groupers’ who caused the Split (in 1956) which stopped Labor from achieving government again until Gough Whitlam won the 1972 election.

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

Searching for the one and only is futile, say the sexologists

In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow hair and a Minnie Mouse voice, what the White Whale was. She explained: ‘Oh, that’s the full Girlfriend Experience… sex isn’t necessarily part of it, but you’ll get a hell of a cuddle.

Stuart Jeffries

The lost world of the pinball machine

‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted to glorified beer coasters and ashtrays, usually in dank corners next to the toilets of some German bar, Italian resort arcade or glum rest stop on California’s Pacific highway. The subtitle is misleading: the book is Bernard’s biography, not the pinball machine’s. He begins his tale as a pre-pubescent, sneaking into Munich bars with his chum Stefan to play these captivating games.