More from Books

Tuesday

Andy Miller

The many shades of Pink Floyd

The English rock band Pink Floyd was founded 60 years ago in Cambridge. Reading two new books about them, it struck me how much time and place matter to their story. Now in their eighties, the surviving members remain a product of the milieu in which they were formed: middle class, semi-boho, comfortably numb. First they moved to London; then to the outer reaches of the cosmos. After that they circled the planet for decades, recollecting the emotions of their youth in both tranquillity and anger. You can take the multi-million-selling, emotionally repressed space cadets out of Cambridge… Broadly speaking, five different businesses have traded under the name Pink Floyd.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

After the party: One of Us, by Elizabeth Day, reviewed

This is the sixth novel and tenth book overall by the highly successful journalist and podcaster Elizabeth Day. She hit her stride as an author with her third novel Paradise City (2015), which was leaps and bounds ahead of her first two in terms of narrative propulsion. Her next was what might be considered her breakout book, The Party (2017), after which came Magpie (2021).  One of Us returns to the characters and story of The Party, but it can easily be read as a standalone. Day has said that the earlier novel was partly inspired by reading The Great Gatsby at the age of 12; and while she has conceded that no one can write like F.

Christian Wolmar

The glorious ventilation shafts hiding in plain sight

In the centre of London’s Paternoster Square there is a tall column on a heavy octagonal base that provides a few seats and shelter from the winds whipping around St Paul’s. If you look closely, you see a mishmash of styles, with the Corinthian column topped by a gold-covered flaming urn and various baroque flourishes. Passers- by might be surprised to find such an ode to eclecticism amid the rather modern neoclassicism of what was a highly controversial development in 2008 that attracted the attention of the then Prince of Wales. What few of them will know is that the column is not just a decorative addition to a dull square but has a function. It is a ventilation shaft (vent for short) whose primary use is to extract air and, crucially, fumes from the car park below.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The adventures of an improbable rock journalist

The filmmaker Cameron Crowe had the coolest childhood. Growing up in California, he started writing for Rolling Stone magazine at the age of 15. His big break came in 1973, when he had the chance to interview the Allman Brothers Band, then one of America’s biggest rock groups, for a cover piece.  For days he tagged along with the rockers on tour, winning their trust with his passion for music and open, honest, moon-shaped face, while phoning his mother every evening to assure her that he wasn’t taking drugs. Finally he earned an interview with the troubled Greg Allman himself, who, shirtless on a bed, spoke about the loss of his big brother Duane in a motorcycle accident and strummed some songs on his guitar. The article seemed in the can, but then disaster struck.

Mark Cocker

Global fish stocks have been perilous for decades – so why is still so little being done?

The great American activist Aldo Leopold once argued that to be a modern environmentalist was to suffer a world of wounds as you endured the losses inflicted on one cherished organism after another. No one, then, can suffer more anguish than the campaigner for the world’s fishes. In this wide-ranging, heartfelt, meticulously assembled account of our oceans Rose George shows why. She tells us that there are four million fishing vessels worldwide, the most appallingly efficient belonging to China, the EU, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and the USA. It is primarily these giant industrial regimes that have driven four-fifths of the planet’s fishes to the edge of sustainable limits. Much of this damage was done decades ago. Even in the 1970s the North Atlantic fisheries were declining.

David Honigmann

An entertaining demolition of futurology

Half of the British political world thinks we are insufficiently scared about the present; the other half thinks we are insufficiently excited about the future. The latter is a non-partisan movement, or at least a cross-partisan one. From fully-automated luxury communism, through centrist Abundance, to the more right-coded Looking for Growth, all the way to Anglo-futurism (somehow paradoxically simultaneously futurist and reactionary), policy thinkers are rejecting incrementalism and learned helplessness and articulating provocative future visions that could – with a tweaked planning system and Natural England ritually immolated – lie just a couple of parliaments away. All these movements could usefully learn from Could Should Might Don’t. It is less clear that anyone else will.

Sean Mcglynn

The lionising of Richard I over the centuries

Today, a muscular Richard the Lionheart still sits manfully astride his warhorse, sword held aloft, outside the Houses of Parliament, courtesy of Carlo Marochetti’s 1856 statue of the Plantagenet king. Richard would have approved. As Heather Blurton points out in her livelybook, he was never shy of portraying himself as a valiant monarch – one who actively created his own legend. But first comes a potted history of the man. Incongruously, it is presented as an Introduction, though it accounts for about a fifth of this short book. It is no surprise that Richard achieved heroic status in his lifetime – much to his gratification. His life was packed with glamour, blood and brutality. But therein lies a problem: how to encapsulate this in a mere 30 pages? It’s a struggle.

Monday

Andrew Rule

No passive utopia: Tibetan Sky, by Ning Ken, reviewed

We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning Ken’s novel, the first by this important Chinese writer to be translated into English. Sardonic and erudite, it’s the only major literary treatment of Sino-Tibetan relations to appear in English in decades. The author belongs to the generation of such era-defining Chinese novelists as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, publishing his first fiction in the heady days of reform and opening-up.

Stuart Kelly

A supernatural western: Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielowski, reviewed

Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating. The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’.

Ariane Bankes

The fertile chaos of Albert Camus’s mind

To read Albert Camus’s Notebooks – comprehensive, newly translated and expertly annotated by Ryan Bloom – is to enter the engine room of the writer’s mind and to glimpse its complex workings and components stripped back to their essentials. They comprise an intellectual and spiritual autobiography, not an account of his life. But of course they contain seductive vignettes lifted straight from experience among the aphorisms, observations, drafts and schemas for writings, stitched together in a collage that reflects a remarkably agile mind in constant motion. The Notebooks bring to mind the fertile chaos of an artist’s studio.

Ian Sansom

The strange afterlife of This is Spinal Tap

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever – credited to the late Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as to their Tap alter-egos Marty Dibergi, Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls – serves as a fitting companion to This is Spinal Tap (1984), the mother of all mockumentaries, much beloved by middle-aged men and their poor put-upon children. (My wife and my daughter, I should say, absolutely hate it: but then they prefer Pitch Perfect – and Pitch Perfect 2. So there’s no accounting for taste.) Part oral history, part behind-the-scenes memoir and part self-aware parody of rock memoir, the book’s a bit of a mess – much like the fictional band.

James Cahill

A prolonged love affair: The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, reviewed

For a time, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were at the heart of the in-crowd. Stories of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their wartime circle often make reference to the two young painters from Scotland. Feted in the 1940s for their modernist styles – Colquhoun typically portraying figures, MacBryde preferring still life scenes – they later lapsed into painful, drink-sodden obscurity. Damian Barr’s novel, The Two Roberts, is a tender and evocative act of resurrection. It portrays the men’s lives from the time of their first meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art to the moment in the mid-1950s when, penniless and out of fashion, they retreated to an ancient cottage in Suffolk.

Sarah Moorhouse

Glamour and intrigue: The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing, reviewed

Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months. Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, it is suffused with the glamour and intrigue of these filmmakers’ worlds. It offers a fictional retelling of the events that led up to Pasolini’s murder – a crime that remains unsolved – on 2 November.

Francis Beckett

The history of modern Ireland, seen through the lives of its leaders

My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which the person was a player. My strongest memory of Disraeli, from a 1951 book by Hesketh Pearson, is his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1837, when, after being heckled and jeered at for his flamboyant dress and delivery, he said: ‘Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.’ These days I not only read biography but write it.

Christian House

The surreal drama of Helsinki’s history

In 1920, the young Finnish architect Alvar Alto flew over Helsinki for the first time. He was aghast. ‘An aviator can see where the monkeys have been and destroyed so very much,’ he recalled. Alto’s aerial view reflected a story of fragmentation and occupation spanning some five centuries, now surveyed by the historian Henrik Meinander. The capital, explains the author, was bashed about by a series of bad actors – Swedes, Russians and Germans – until Finland stood its ground and became an independent nation in the early 20th century. Helsinki is ‘a city shaped by the sea, a city best seen from the sea’, writes Meinander. ‘Wherever you are in Helsinki’s inner city, you will always be close to the water.

Jim Lawley

The diminutive dictator who ruled Spain with an iron fist

General Franco died on 20 November 1975, and with the 50th anniversary just passed, this biography – the first in years – of the man who ruled Spain with an iron fist for nearly four decades is timely, incisive and authoritative. Written by a former Madrid correspondent of the Economist, it’s also an up to date and highly accessible introduction to 20th-century Spanish history. Born in 1892 into a middle-class family, Francisco Franco shared a bedroom with his younger brother Ramon, who later won international fame as Europe’s ‘equivalent of Charles Lindbergh’. There were few signs, however, that eminence also awaited Francisco. A weedy child, who dutifully got by at school, he had a difficult relationship with his domineering Freemason father.

Frances Wilson

Margaret Atwood settles old scores

In the introduction to Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood recalls her initial response to the suggestion that she write a memoir: ‘Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?’ Her autobiography was hardly the stuff of high adventure: ‘I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book.’  This is not what they meant, her publishers replied: ‘We meant a memoir in, you know, a literary style.’ While Book of Lives is about a great deal more than Atwood churning out prize-winning novels, it is not written in a ‘literary style’. The style, if anything, is anti-literary. Atwood’s voice is casual, chatty, often catty.

Thursday

David Kynaston

The ups and downs of high-rise living

‘On BBC 2 last Monday,’ noted the Sunday Telegraph’s TV critic Trevor Grove in February 1979, ‘the return of Fawlty Towers was immediately followed by a programme about faulty towers.’ He went on: This was odd, but on close examination turned out to be without significance. After all, what connection could there possibly be between a comedy series based on the exploits of a domineering, havoc-wreaking megalomaniac called Basil Fawlty and a serious study of what has been done to Britain’s urban environment by a bunch of domineering, havoc-wreaking megalomaniacs who call themselves architects? The programme was Christopher Booker’s still remembered City of Towers, a ferocious attack on Le Corbusier-inspired concrete high-rise, especially when used for public housing.

Stephen Bayley

How London became the best place in the world to eat out

London has become the best place in the world to eat out. Of course, there are a thousand other cities with marvellous food, but for organic vitality, ethnic variety and nose-to-tail creativity, London is unmatched. New York and Paris are parochial by comparison. Two new books locate the source of this revolution of taste and aspiration in the 1980s and 1990s. But, like the Zen paradox, this is both true and untrue. Waves of immigrants immediately raised postwar expectations. It is estimated that 80 per cent of the ‘Indian’ restaurants which dominate high streets are in fact Bangladeshi and that most of the owners arrived from Sylhet immediately after Partition. The Empire struck back.

Friday

Maggie Fergusson

Songs of murder, rape and desertion

A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal grind, but English lessons brought moments of magic. He was especially intrigued by poems – ballads, mostly – signed simply ‘Anon’. The name of the poet was lost – and perhaps there hadn’t been just one but a host of craftsmen in the making of each of these wonders. They were the creation of a tribe, the inheritance of a community, songs ‘seraphically free/ Of taint of personality’. Today, as publishers bust themselves to promote the cult of individual authors, it’s a thrilling, liberating notion.