More from Books

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

We were highly amused: the Queen — and Mrs Thatcher — thought Ken Dodd tattyfilarious

Doddy! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of tickling sticks. So also hath the rest of the UK. At this time of political uncertainty, laughter is the one reliable panacea for all anxiety. Louis Barfe’s industriously thorough, entertaining biography of the late Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd, written with admiration verging on hagiography, portrays the comic genius who was the last performer to uphold this country’s tradition of vaudeville in music hall, on radio and television. Dodd was born in 1927 in Knotty Ash, as the village was developing to become a suburb of Liverpool. He was brought up, with an older brother and a younger sister, by adored, adoring parents, and Ken said his father was the funniest man he ever met.

Alan Judd

The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened

It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when the intelligence is unwelcome or unfashionable. MI6’s first report of prewar Germany’s secret U-boat building programme was withdrawn from circulation at the request of the Foreign Office, reluctant to alarm Whitehall’s appeasers. Action Likely in Pacific exemplifies that tendency in spades.

Andrew Lambirth

Rembrandt remains an enigma

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one of the greatest painters of all time. His work — as painter, draughtsman and etcher — continues to fascinate and move us like none other. He has been the subject of innumerable books, from novels to weighty volumes of art-historical analysis and argument, and even some films (remember Charles Laughton as the heavily moustachioedartist?). Now we are offered a book which deals specifically with his early years, attempting to explain how the young man became an Old Master. It is heavily illustrated, with 100 colour photographs placed throughout the text, in a neat, reader-friendly format.

Saturday

Emma Byrne

Whores of phwoar: women talking dirty

Jonathon Green is a tosher. As a lexicographer he dives into archives and emerges with armfuls of slangy curios, such as ‘bell-polisher’ and ‘bitchin’. In Sounds & Furies he sifts English slang from tosheroons as diverse as the Wife of Bath to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Green’s passion for his subject is infectious. His corpus of 110,000 slang words and phrases, published in 2010 as Green’s Dictionary of Slang, is filled with coinages both common and rare. In his latest volume, he’s set himself the challenge of unlocking women’s love-hate relationship with slang. As he says at the beginning, we know plenty about the status of women in slang, but not much about how women use it. He offers plenty of examples of women coiners.

Max Décharné

The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge

A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving his images of animal and human locomotion a strangely modern appearance, despite their being products of the 1880s. The lines also anticipate those adopted in the 20th century against which US criminals appear in police identification parades — which seems appropriate, given that a decade prior to taking these images, Muybridge himself was convicted of murder. Had the small-town jury not delivered a verdict of justifiable homicide — despite the fact that Muybridge deliberately sought out and gunned down his unarmed victim, and showed no remorse thereafter — then these images would never have existed.

Peter Carty

Zimbabwe’s chaotic history has at least produced some outstanding fiction

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s arresting Nervous Conditions appeared in 1988 and was the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. She is now in mid-career, prominent among those writers who have emerged since independence, who include Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo and Tendai Huchu. The reason for this flowering of talent cannot be nailed down, but it is clear that Zimbabwe’s turmoil provides plenty of dramatic material. It is noteworthy, too, how many of these novelists are female — and they have abundant subject matter all of their own. Regardless of their country’s independence, liberation for most Zimbabwean women remains a distant prospect.

Lee Langley

Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?

‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered literature or travelled to another continent.’ Magic mushrooms in Dublin, opioids in Thailand and San Francisco, hallucinogenic cactus in Bolivia and Peru, ketamine in India… he encounters terror, near-death and ecstasy by every means available, including MDMA — Ecstasy itself. This is no glimpse through the doors of perception; it’s free-fall down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Or hell, depending on how the trip goes. Rob Doyle’s first novel, Here are the Young Men, was a savage picture of a bunch of Dublin losers on their school-leaving summer: a bildungsroman with booze, drugs and murder on the agenda.

Simon Ings

Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars

Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive if you don’t know one zodiacal pattern from another and rely solely on your wits.) In a matter of seconds you will find patterns among the stars. We can pretty much apprehend up to five objects (pennies, points of light, what-have-you) at a single glance. Totting up more than five objects, however, takes work: it means looking for groups, lines, patterns, symmetries, boundaries. The ancients cut up the sky into figures, all those aeons ago, for the same reason we each cut up the sky within moments of gazing at it — because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to comprehend the sky at all. Our pattern-finding ability can get out of hand.

Lynn Barber

A lovable, impossible man: Bryan Robertson, gifted curator and Spectator critic

Andrew Lambirth claims that Bryan Robertson was ‘the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had’; but on the evidence of this book, he would have been a disaster — chaotic, hopeless with money and eternally late. What he actually was was the inspired and inspiring director of the Whitechapel Gallery from 1952 to 1969. He also wrote on art and ballet for The Spectator and was an esteemed contributor to The Critics radio programme. But he did not get the Tate appointment he longed for and was effectively forgotten by l990, so it’s a bit mysterious why he is being written about now.

Ariane Bankes

Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square

The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ provided the rallying cry, whether consciously or not, for five remarkable women, all drawn at some point in their careers to Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square. There they found the freedom and independence they craved to explore new ways of living and loving and writing during the volatile interwar decades. All five were ‘blue-stockings’: the radical modernist American poet Hilda Doolittle, or ‘H.D.’; the crime writer Dorothy L.

Jenny Colgan

Deborah Orr rages against her small-town upbringing

Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did, and the intensity of their love for her burned very bright after her death in October. They spoke of her wild beauty, her fierce passions and smoky laughter; what great company she was; how every room was more exciting with Deborah in it. Her Twitter feed (until it mysteriously vanished) was intensely funny and beautifully written, and it is heartbreaking that she didn’t live to see her first book published. Motherwell: A Girlhood, about growing up in a dying Scottish steel town on the cusp of the women’s movement, is a furious book.  It is filled with a deep and keening sadness: a howl from the depths, spilling with regret and anger, page after page.

Mia Levitin

Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature

‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag survivor. Sentenced to hard labour for Trotskyist activities, Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, primarily in Kolyma, located at the edge of the Arctic Circle, eight time zones east of Moscow and ‘one of the most uninhabitable places on earth’, according to the geopolitical journalist Tim Marshall.‘Instead of yesterday’s minus 40 it was only minus 25,’ Shalamov writes in one of the stories, ‘and the day seemed like summer.

Thursday

Alex Colville

Fear and loathing in Jamaica: Caribbean slaves turn the whip on their masters

In the shadows of the British Enlightenment lurked the Caribbean sugar plantations. Masters routinely raped their slaves, punished minor wrongdoings by forcing one to shit in another’s mouth and even burnt some at the stake while growing the cane destined to sweeten the tea tables of London salons, Oxbridge dons or Hampshire parsons. It’s from this civilised viewpoint, top-down and half the world away, that we still tell the story of the abolition movement, William Wilberforce and the House of Commons, the great breakers of chains. But slaves were perfectly capable of fighting for their own freedoms, as the Harvard historian Vincent Brown shows in Tacky’s Revolt, his careful reconstruction of an understudied footnote in Jamaican history.

Peter Carty

The deadly war game of the Battle of the Atlantic

My father served in the Royal Navy during the second world war. He drank over-proof rum and smoked unfiltered cigarettes, both free of charge, while wearing a uniform that enhanced his natural attractions. What more could any teenager want? Of course, there were hazards in store when he set out from Liverpool. Worst of all was the weather. Atlantic storms could punch out portholes and bend iron stanchions. But a close second came U-boats, which sank ships in minutes. The U-boats were dangerous not only for sailors. Their depredations almost cost Britain victory. By 1941, the losses of merchant vessels in the Battle of the Atlantic meant we faced starvation. The solution came from an unlikely source.

Christopher Bray

David Bowie: the boy who never gave up

A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up as Ziggy Stardust (gold bindi, maroon mullet, jumpsuit run up from old curtains), then as Aladdin Sane (blue and red lightning slash daubed across face), then as the Thin White Duke (black waistcoat, black eyeliner, slicked-back hair). And so on, right through every satin-and-tat get-up of Bowie’s long career. What larks! And yet. I don’t know whether Brooker had his mother in a whirl, but he certainly had some of us wondering what was going on in the groves of academe. Did I mention that these wardrobe antics were part of a research project? That Brooker is professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University?

Ian Sansom

From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book

Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published 2019 by Oxford University Press, ‘a department of the University of Oxford’ which ‘furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide’, according to the copyright page — has at first glance all the appeal and certainly the appearance of an utterly dull academic tome.

John Jolliffe

Robert the Bruce — master of guerrilla warfare

The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own death in 1329, aged 54. His extraordinary achievement was to fend off both rivals at home and formidable English enemies to firmly establish his country’s independence. In 1292, John Balliol had been proclaimed King of Scots, with the full support of Edward I, to whom he formally paid homage. Four years later he was forced to resign his kingdom to Edward, and his own claim to it was doomed, though it survived for a few more years.

Lee Langley

You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park

Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth Rees explored east London’s edgelands in his hallucinatory Marshlands. Now, with Car Park Life, he reveals an urban wilderness hiding in plain sight: ‘It is Morrisons in Hastings that lights the fire of my obsession. Not the supermarket itself but the space outside: the car park.’ Strange, often violent stuff happens here: murder, hauntings, sex, from dogging to adultery. Late-night improvised race tracks spring up, where petrolheads compete in hair-raising skid contests, spurred on by whooping spectators.

Hermione Eyre

Why we’re all in love with Fleabag

Why would you need the scripts for Fleabag? It’s hardly a lost classic. It’s always popping up on BBC iPlayer. So it was with a touch of scepticism that I picked up this volume, subtitled not ‘The Scripts’ but ‘The Scriptures’, in reference to Fleabag’s long, pitiless pursuit of a hot priest in Series 2, and beautifully presented: sombre hardcover without, shocking-pink end-papers within. Clever — there’s already something of the spliced rhythm of the series in the design. But the pink band wrapper made it look too much like a present: was this just a commercial attempt at cramming that scabrous lost soul, transgressive cultural heroine and all round dirtbag into a giftable item? Then I read it. Bliss.