More from Books

Thursday

Lynn Barber

A new blossoming: David Hockney paints Normandy

In 2018 David Hockney went to Normandy to look at the Bayeux Tapestry, which he had not seen for more than 40 years. He liked its great panoramic length and the absence of shadows. But while there he found himself seduced by the scenery of Normandy, its winding lanes and orchards of blossom trees. He decided he would like to paint the arrival of spring there, as he had in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, a decade earlier. He asked his long-standing assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, known as J-P, to look into the possibility of renting a house. He was so delighted with the first one J-P showed him, La Grande Cour, that he exclaimed: ‘Let’s buy it!

Graham Robb

Journey to ‘the grimmest place in the world’

Suffering from post-traumatic stress and the effects of government austerity measures, Paul Jones resigned as the head of an inner-city secondary school and, ‘an idiot without a job’, decided to cycle from Land’s End to John o’Groats in four stages spread over ten months. He had raced occasionally with professional cyclists but had never ridden more than 127 miles in a day. His aim was to ‘dissect a brain slice of the country’, to find some relief from the ‘formless terror’ of his mental landscape, and to subject himself to the torture of a long-haul literary endeavour. It took him three years to produce this companionable and energetic book about the obsessive and strangely affable breed of record-breaking End-to-Enders.

Thursday

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Mommy issues: Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder, reviewed

This is a novel about ‘mommy issues’. Rachel is a Reform Jew, ‘more Chanel bag Jew than Torah Jew’, and her mother has always been preoccupied by her daughter’s weight. ‘Anorexics are much skinnier than you’, she tells Rachel when she develops the condition as a teenager. ‘They look like concentration camp victims.’ Rachel’s therapist, Dr Mahjoub (who, we are told, fills her consultation room with elephants in trinket form) recommends a total break in contact between mother and daughter for 40 days. Before this begins, Mahjoub makes Rachel perform an art therapy exercise: to create a sculpture of how she sees herself out of modelling clay. ‘I made massive thighs, weighty calves, a voluminous ass.

Chris Mullin

One of the lucky ones: Hella Pick escapes Nazi Germany

Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the second world war, courtesy of the Kindertransport. An only child of separated parents, born and brought up in Vienna, she was luckier than most: her mother got out soon afterwards. Her grandmother, who remained, died in Theresienstadt. Early life in the UK was not easy for refugees from Nazism. Visas were only granted to those who had an offer of work, and just about the only work permitted to them was domestic service, which must have been particularly galling for people like Hella’s mother who had once been prosperous. Young Hella was relatively fortunate.

Stuart Kelly

Escape from reality: How to Survive Everything, by Ewan Morrison, reviewed

Ewan Morrison is an intellectually nimble writer with a penchant for provocation. His work has included the novels, Distance, Ménage and Swung, which looked at the conditions of desire, normality and love under capitalism, and a hybrid collection of essays, reportage and fiction, Tales From the Mall. This new novel forms the final part of a loose trilogy, which is concerned with various forms of eccentric utopias. Close Your Eyes involved a spiritual commune with strict rules; Nina X was an uplifting book about a young woman freed from a Maoist cult and bemused by modernity.

Tom Hodgkinson

The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols

This is such a great idea: a book with one short essay per punctuation mark or typographical symbol. Of course, our commas, ampersands and exclamation marks all come from somewhere; all were invented at some point or another and their stories are ever-changing. Computer coders, for example, have recently moved previously unsung but elegant marks such as the hashtag and the ‘at’ sign back to centre stage. Claire Cock-Starkey is a confident and likeable host and makes a witty crack about her own surname in her essay on the hyphen. She somehow elevates what could have been a nerdy primer into something grander, and at various moments the book becomes meditative, poetic, philosophical and funny, as well as scholarly.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Learning to listen: Sarah Sands goes in search of spirituality

It was the 13th-century wall of a ruined Cistercian nunnery at the far end of her garden in Norfolk that turned Sarah Sands’s thoughts to exploring monasticism in her final year as the editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She already had a soft spot for the ‘Thought for the Day’ slot — ‘an oasis of reflection’. But she was finding it increasingly hard to set aside any time for reflection in her busy, noisy, anxiety-filled ‘5G life’ — office meetings from pre-dawn to dusk and evenings of emailing with the phone beeping every few seconds.

Scott Bradfield

Bugsy Siegel — the gangster straight out of a Hollywood movie

Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1906, he was still a teenager when he teamed up with Meyer Lansky to become a successful bootlegger and mob enforcer. But when Mayor La Guardia came along in the early 1930s to clean up New York’s underworld, Siegel moved to California, and began dressing the way film adaptations of gangsters were supposed to. He befriended actors who played characters like him, and even filmed a couple of test scenes of himself playing a gangster who was based on a gangster like him. (The studios feared him too much to hire him. After all, who was going to shout ‘Cut!’ at Bugsy Siegel?

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Slanging match: rein GOLD, by Elfriede Jelinek, reviewed

I’ve tried hard to think of someone I dislike enough to recommend this novel* to, but have failed. Elfriede Jelinek is Austria’s leading contemporary literary figure, and to open rein GOLD at random is to get the impression that she is the successor to Thomas Bernhard — page after page without a single paragraph indentation, a general ranting tone, maddening repetitiveness, and cult status. Just in case Jelinek’s is an unfamiliar name: she is an extremely neurotic person, a sufferer from many phobias — unable to travel to collect her Nobel Prize; a copious writer, many of her books having been translated into English among other languages; and, most significantly, one of those authors whose favourite idiom is humourless parody.

Stephen Bayley

Is it farewell to the handshake?

Ella Al-Shamahi is a Brummie, born to a Yemeni Arab family. From a strict Muslim upbringing she transitioned (evidently con brio, as ‘dick’ appears in her new book) to the secular life. She is now an author, explorer, academic paleoanthropologist, stand-up comedian and television presenter. This is an impressive c.v., deserving many congratulatory handshakes. But wait. Alas, the handshake has become taboo. Your hand, says the Mayo Clinic, is a lethal bio-weapon crawling with pathogens as yearning to contaminate as those scary airborne droplets. Your hand is a horror story. According to one calculation, a square centimetre of manual skin contains ten to the power of seven bacteria. Even the common cold virus survives on unwashed hands for up to three hours.

Venetia Welby

The sufferings of Okinawa continue today unheard

Okinawa is having a moment. Recently a Telegraph travel destination, to many in the west it’s still unfamiliar except as a location of the Pacific theatre. To Elizabeth Miki Brina, the author of Speak, Okinawa, it was also unfamiliar until she was 34 — though her own mother is Okinawan, and she had spent time there as a child. Not until the break up of a relationship which played out the toxicities of her own family relations did she attempt to unravel her mother’s heritage: Okinawa’s brutal history, not Japanese, yet owned by, and at the mercy, of Japan; its persecution by America; its current state of suffering and her father’s role in that, as part of the US occupying forces that still run it as a garrison island.

Shashank Joshi

The British army in the 21st century under scrutiny

In his history of the Pacific War, Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald Spector described the state of the US army on the eve of the second world war: ‘The main enemies were boredom and debt. The answer to such problems was often liquor.’ When the officer corps was not boozing, it was sufficiently obsessed with athletics to derail training, for ‘success at football and boxing could be as important to a man’s career as success in manoeuvres’. Its weapons were decrepit and its ranks ragged. George Marshall, the future chief of staff, commanded a notional battalion that numbered fewer than 200 men. That portrait of antebellum decay came to mind when reading The Changing of the Guard, a scathing account of the British army in the years after 9/11.

Michael Arditti

Celebrating Jesus’s female followers: Names of the Women, by Jeet Thayil, reviewed

The gnostic Gospel of Mary has long been the subject of controversy, even as to which of the several Marys who feature in Jesus’s life was its author. It is generally assumed to have been Mary Magdalene, not least because it depicts her regular adversary, St Peter, refusing to credit a woman’s testimony. In Names of the Women, Jeet Thayil challenges Peter, along with 2,000 years of church tradition, by placing Mary Magdalene and 14 other women at the very heart of the gospel story. His intention to retell pivotal incidents from a female perspective is evident from the opening words ‘Mary, write,’ which are repeated in various forms throughout the book. The women’s stories are related in short, discrete chapters and clear, almost clinical prose.

Jonathan Sumption

Sylvie Bermann personifies French fury over Brexit

Sylvie Bermann was the French ambassador in London between 2014 and 2017. Her stint here was a notable success. She is a highly intelligent, articulate woman, excellent company, an astute observer of the British scene and a notable anglophile, who generated much goodwill for herself and her country. She has taken the opportunity of her retirement from the French diplomatic service to write a highly undiplomatic account of her time in London which will lose her a fair amount of that goodwill. Goodbye Britannia is a witty, waspish and angry account of the Brexit referendum and the political crisis which followed it. It is agreeably rude about British politicians, especially the current Prime Minister, whom she describes as a lying mountebank.

Anne de Courcy

Malice and back-stabbing behind Vogue’s glossy exterior

‘What job do you want here?’ asked the editor of Vogue, interviewing a young hopeful. From behind her black sunglasses the 24-year-old replied coolly:‘Yours.’ It took time, but she got it. The girl was, of course, Anna Wintour. Now she is the global Vogue supremo and queen of fashion, before whose lightest frown the whole industry quakes, and the magazine is acknowledged to be the top glossy. Its beginnings were small. It was launched on 17 December 1892, at a cost of ten cents an issue, and its dedicated founder struggled to keep it going. Its first editor was passionate about animals and its second was a female golfer with no previous publishing experience.

Thursday

Anne Margaret Daniel

The odd couple: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

On a shard of paper, some time in the bleak mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporated a favourite line from one of his favourite poets, John Keats, in a short verse of his own: Don’t you worry I surrenderDays are long and life’s a benderStill I know thatTender is the Night Keats was a Romantic, perhaps the Romantic, with his lyric gift and tragically brief life. Fitzgerald loved the Romantic poets, and romance in the lower case, but was at the heart’s core a modernist, far more egoist than romantic, and quite hard-boiled. The little quatrain above is rather like T.S. Eliot’s ‘jug jug’ in The Waste Land — homage of a sort, but also showing ironic distance, and no intention of writing like Keats.

James Ball

Cashing in on Covid: the traders who thrive on a crisis

When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of the world, not just one or two regions, would grind to a halt, for most of us it is anything but a fond memory. But the traders of Glencore probably remember the time differently: they saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to cash in. Anticipating a global slowdown, they bought up all the space they could to store oil, including tankers capable of holding 3.2 million barrels. When the markets caught up with the scale of the pandemic, the price of oil dropped to zero and below, and in they swooped. They took the oil for free, stored it at sea, and sold it a few months later. While we worried about our livelihoods, Glencore’s traders made $1.3 bn trading energy.

Lee Langley

Two for the road: We Are Not in the World, by Conor O’Callaghan, reviewed

A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This is a road trip like no other: Paddy, deracinated, footloose, divorced, taking on a temporary job for reasons that become clear later; and daughter Kitty, spiky, provocative, shaved head, grubby jeans and sweater, wrapped in an old mink coat she’s pinched from her grandmother. Occasionally she rewards her father with an ambiguous affectionate response as their edgy banter veers in and out of dangerous territory: the minefield of parenthood. The narrative is fractured; nothing told chronologically, the surface deliberately throw-away — skewed punctuation, sentences left hanging.

Alex Preston

Bright and beautiful: Double Blind, by Edward St Aubyn, reviewed

Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject matter, they managed to be uplifting through the beauty in which they expressed their melancholy sentiments. After At Last, the final novel of the pentalogy, St Aubyn published Lost for Words, a prickly satire on the literary prize culture that seemed narrowly parochial for such a classy novelist. Now we have Double Blind, his tenth novel, which has what is typically referred to as a rich cast of characters. We open with Francis, a kind of St Aubyn avatar, working at Howarth, a rewilded Sussex estate clearly based on Isabella Tree’s project at Knepp.

Fuchsia Dunlop

One great Chinese puzzle remains its cuisine

A truth that ought to be universally acknowledged is that Chinese food, while much loved, is underappreciated. China certainly has one of the world’s most sophisticated cuisines, yet while there’s a Chinese restaurant in almost every town, there’s little dependable information about it in English aimed at the general reader. Jonathan Clements addresses this in The Emperor’s Feast, a galloping journey through thousands of years of Chinese culinary history, from origin myths through numerous dynasties, the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution, right up to the present day.