More from Books

Thursday

Madeleine Feeny

The view from the Paris bus — an appreciation of everyday life

Many would say the commute was one thing they didn’t miss in lockdown. But when Lauren Elkin was ‘yanked out of the public sphere and resituated, inescapably, in the private’, she felt nostalgic for the bus’s incidental intimacy. The Franco-American writer and translator revisited notes made on her iPhone between September 2014 and November 2015, after she pledged to ‘observe the world through the screen of my phone, rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world’. The diary entries record biweekly journeys between her home in Paris’s fifth arrondissement and the university where she taught in the seventh. These private jottings take shape as No.

Susie Mesure

A race against time: A Calling for Charlie Barnes, by Joshua Ferris, reviewed

What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question propels the eponymous protagonist, still struggling to wring meaning from his existence even as it crashes to an end, in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, the fourth novel from Joshua Ferris. ‘It preoccupied him: everyone had a calling. It depressed him: he had not found his. It gave him hope: he might still do so before he died,’ writes the story’s narrator, Jake Barnes, about his father, whose life clock is ticking with a cancer diagnosis. ‘The big kahuna of cancers: pancreatic.

Sara Wheeler

A mighty river with many names: adventures on the Amur

The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron reckons 2,826 miles the best estimate. In these pages he makes an arc-shaped journey from source to mouth: Mongolia to the Pacific via Russia and China. The author travels on horseback, buses, pontoon rafts, boats, trains and in taxis and the vehicles of strangers. Starting in late August, he breaks off in Khabarovsk, the largest city on the Amur (population 500,000), returning home to London when the river freezes. As book and journey progress, the Amur changes its name and gender.

Thursday

Anne Margaret Daniel

No stone left unturned: The World of Bob Dylan reviewed

In May 2019, the first World of Bob Dylan conference was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why Tulsa? Because Dylan’s archives are there, acquired in 2015 by the George Kaiser Foundation and the University of Tulsa for a reported $15-$20 million. Tulsa was already home to fine museums and important historical and archival collections. In a statement in 2016 Dylan said he was glad that his archives ‘are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie, and especially alongside all the valuable artefacts from the Native American nations’.

Mark McGinness

To the brownstone born: WASPS, by Michael Knox Beran, reviewed

It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White Anglo-Saxon Protestant never satisfactorily defined this all-but-extinct breed of American Brahmin. In his sweeping, teeming study of the WASP, Michael Knox Beran concedes that the acronym fumbles its origins. For one thing, it excludes the Celts and Anglo-Dutch Patroons, several of whom lent gravitas and grit to the term and tribe. For this reason too, ‘Wealthy English Episcopalians’ does not work. It may extract the sting but it is belittling, so why tinkle with it? It is sufficient to say that to be a WASP one should have been descended from the well-to-do classes of colonial and early republican America.

Anne de Courcy

The elusive adventures of Catherine Dior

When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her torturer at his trial in 1952, to receive the suggestion from his lawyer that it was a case of mistaken identity, she burst out furiously to the judge: ‘I know what I’m saying. This affair cost people their lives.’ It is one of the very few vivid glimpses we get of her in Justine Picardie’s book. The respected former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar has tackled what is the most difficult subject for any biographer: a person about whom virtually nothing is known. Claire Tomalin brought it off in The Invisible Woman, the story of Charles Dickens’s shadowy mistress Nelly Ternan.

Alan West

A very British coup: SBS – Silent Warriors reviewed

The vast majority of the British public, and even military historians, have never heard of them. COPPists — a combination of naval navigators and submariners with SBS (Special Boat Service) swimmers — played a key role in the planning and execution of Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion of Europe. Admiral Ramsay, the architect of the naval element, said: ‘On their operations depended to a very great extent the final success of Operation Overlord.’ Who were these people, and what exactly did they do? Saul David provides the answers in a detailed analysis of the development of seaborne special forces formed in Britain’s darkest hour to take the offensive against the seemingly invincible German war machine.

Sara Wheeler

A story of women and weaving – a new retelling of the Greek myths

What are myths for? Do they lend meaning and value to this quintessence of dust? Like religion, perhaps they help us battle through. In weighing this issue, Charlotte Higgins demonstrates again why the Greek variety have never lessened their grip on the western imagination. She structures her material around eight women — Athena, Alcithoë, Philomela, Arachne, Andromache, Helen, Circe and Penelope — and in particular around the scenes they weave. ‘I wanted the form of my chosen stories to be expressive in itself,’ she writes in the introduction. And it is. She draws in particular on the rich visual culture that has survived in ceramics, sculpture and frescoes.

Caroline Crampton

The watery life of the capital

To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in the capital have been documented for public consumption over the past 150 years, from Hilaire Belloc’s lament for the river’s lost monasteries in The Historic Thames to Peter Ackroyd’s doorstop, London: A Biography. More recently, it is previously unremarked everyday stories which have found a home on many publishers’ lists. The practice of mudlarking especially of sifting objects from the river’s mud has held readers in thrall. Sometimes it sounds as though the Thames foreshore at low tide must be as busy as a King’s Cross platform during a pre-pandemic rush hour.

Nicholas Lezard

The boys who never grow up: Sad Little Men, by Richard Beard, reviewed

I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is a cathartic denunciation of the private boarding school system, and his rage is on two fronts. The first is how being sent away at the age of eight damaged and twisted him and just about everyone else who experienced the same; the second is about what these damaged children as adults have done to the country. He pays special attention to the Prime Minister and his predecessor but one. I suspect that The Spectator has quite a few readers who went to boarding school, and who even think the government is doing a good job. So you may either have given up on this review already or will have no intention of reading the book.

Tom Williams

The year of living decisively: The Turning Point, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, reviewed

We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or Bob Dylan performing with an electric guitar. The change is identified as a discrete moment for which there is a distinct before and after. But this is not always the case and, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst argues, a turning point can trace a wider arc and evolve over longer periods. These turning points are clear only in hindsight once the details have softened and the ripples outward have stilled. His latest book examines one such period in the career of Charles Dickens, surveying the artefacts of his life to track his development over the year 1851. This is not the first time Douglas-Fairhurst has applied his macro lens to Dickens.

Ian Thomson

Darkness, desolation and disarray in Germany

In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs for cover. Few Germans were brave or reckless enough to resist the Führer. Once Hitler’s lunacy had become manifest, however, the dilemma for German patriots was painful: to love the Fatherland yet desire the downfall of Nazism. On 20 July 1944 a bomb went off in a briefcase at German GHQ in east Prussia but, extraordinarily, Hitler sustained only damaged eardrums and a pair of scorched trousers. The conspirators were hanged from meat hooks and, as a final gratuitous cruelty, their widows were sent bills for ‘execution costs’.

Thursday

David Horspool

Was Josiah Wedgwood really a radical?

No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles of Self-Help fame, they admired this industrious, inventive, uxorious and religious man as a harbinger of their own age. It surely helped that his story, if not exactly one of rags to riches, was certainly a tale of triumph over adversity. His biggest obstacle was one he did his best to conceal from a carefully constructed public image. Though Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and George Stubbs did a family study showing Josiah, his wife Sarah and their seven children in the grounds of his country house, Etruria Hall, neither likeness hinted that Wedgwood had a wooden leg.

Simon Ings

The great disrupter: how William of Occam overturned medieval thought

Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being taught at kindergarten: fathers are fathers, not because they are filled with some ‘essence of fatherhood’, but because they have children. Fast-forward a few years, and the Pope is trying to have you killed. Not only have you run roughshod over his beloved eucharist (justified, till then, by some very dodgy Aristotelian logic-chopping); you’re also saying there’s no ‘essence of kinghood’, either. If kings are only kings because they have subjects, then, said William of Occam, ‘power should not be entrusted to anyone without the consent of all’. Heady stuff for 1334.

Ruth Scurr

The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France

Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who believed that only by getting ‘up close’ to the ‘infinitely small’ details would it be possible to understand the truth about a Revolution that was stranger than fiction. Mercier (1740-1815) was an early science fiction novelist, a journalist, politician and Parisian. He was not an eyewitness to the fall of Robespierre because he was in prison in 1794, one of 73 moderate members of the governing Convention who had been arrested and held as ‘Robespierre’s hostages’.

Andrew Lycett

The cosmopolitan spirit of the Middle East vanished with the Ottomans

One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near East is when he, a former journalist with a sharp eye for detail, visits El Wedy, close to the Nile south of Cairo, where just over a century ago his great-uncle Samuele Sornaga built a hugely successful ceramics works employing 200 people. The factory no longer exists. It was nationalised, privatised, closed, and is now a vast construction site. After being harassed and prevented from taking photographs, Vatikiotis discovers it’s being developed as a resort — not for general tourists, mind, but for the army, whose presence looms menacingly everywhere.

Alex Diggins

War between Heaven and Hell: The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox, reviewed

Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes’. By this definition, Elizabeth Knox’s genre-hopping fantasy The Absolute Book must count as oversized baggage; but it trundles along winningly, even if it’s a trifle stout at 640 pages. Taryn Cornick is our girl. She is a scholar whose debut book, a study of libraries, is the toast of the literary circuit. But she is also the recipient of an unlucky inheritance: an elusive manuscript, nicknamed the Firestarter, last spotted in the library of her grandfather’s ancestral pile. From these Borgesian beginnings, the story orbits into wider and wilder expanses.

Sarah Ditum

First love: The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir, reviewed

‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects — Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, say. Other books, though, would have done as well to stay lost. Did the world really need to set eyes on Harper Lee’s first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird in the form of Go Set a Watchman? Probably not, although you can see why a publisher wouldn’t quibble with one more title from such a famous name. Unpublished in Simone de Beauvoir’s lifetime, The Inseparables was written in 1954.

Andrew Lambirth

Like burst balloons after a party: the last paintings of John Hoyland

When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of light, laughter and danger went out of the British art world. Hoyland, who was born in Sheffield and trained at the local art college before coming to London and the Royal Academy Schools, was a force to be reckoned with. Reaching maturity in the 1960s, his career was established by a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, after which he divided his time for several years between London and New York. In the 1970s he settled back in London and Wiltshire, but travelled widely, often to the tropics. He lived hard and channelled his experiences back into his paintings.

Max Décharné

A glimpse of lost London – before the yuppie invasion

In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim, elegant volume the atmosphere and especially the conversation of an afternoon a quarter century earlier that he had spent in the company of the exiled Oscar Wilde. It was a conscious act of imaginative recreation, seeking to place the reader at the same boulevard table alongside the participants. As the author explained in his introduction: The scene, as regards its setting — the outside of a Paris restaurant — is true to history; and if, toward the end, a touch of drama has been introduced, the reader will understand that it is more symbolic than actual.