More from Books

Thursday

John Self

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a long, hard slog

The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who sounds like a sneeze and reads like a fever, is on a mission to build our collective stamina. His novels have always resisted easy interpretation, with their page-long sentences and catastrophic air, and in his ‘most popular’ book, Satantango, the clanging language and doomy setting worked to great effect. Now Krasznahorkai, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, has declared that that book was the first in a quartet, which is now completed with Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, his longest novel yet, translated by Ottilie Mulzet. ‘With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life.

Charlotte Hobson

The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love

Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC documentary aired in 2017 and now for this book. I think it’s fair to say that if you saw the documentary, the book won’t have much more to offer you. If not it’s an intriguing tale that tracks the gorgeous and omnipresent Venus of western civilisation back 6,000 years to a series of strange little knobbly figures with penis-heads and emphasised vulvas found on Cyprus, presumably connected with a fertility cult. In the fourth millennium BC, a fearsome trio of goddesses swept into Bronze Age Cyprus from Mesopotamia. Innanna, described in a poem written c.

Anna Aslanyan

Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort

A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the reader engaged. The Bosnian–American author Aleksandar Hemon, now in his mid-fifties,  takes the risk the better to recollect his past. While no two generations can completely avoid the proverbial gap, he ‘never (until fairly recently) felt guilty about that discontinuity’. The first half of his new book, My Parents, comes across as an attempt to address this guilt.

Wednesday

Steve Silberman

For Tom Cutler, being diagnosed autistic was the happiest day of his life

It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a compelling autobiography was dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as highly unlikely. Though the term ‘autism’ was originally derived from the Greek word for self, autos, people with ‘self-ism’ — who were routinely described by non-autistic experts as being ‘trapped in their own world’ — were ironically thought to be incapable of the kind of introspection and self-reflection necessary to produce trustworthy documentation of their own experience.

Alex Diggins

Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed

It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful and finger-pointing: them, not us. But looked at in another way, it is rangy, open and expansive. It suggests horizons, not walls. That first meaning has done much heavy lifting in discussions of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As the first black British woman to be awarded the prize, this was perhaps inevitable. Evaristo cuts an unmistakable dash through the ranks of past winners: they have been, on the whole, more pale and — damningly — a lot more male.

Christian Wolmar

Nothing can beat the romance of luxury train travel between the wars

There may never have been a murder on the real Orient Express, but otherwise Agatha Christie’s depiction of luxury train travel was pretty accurate. Cordon Bleu cooking, accompanied by fine vintage wines and served by immaculately turned out waiters, was offered to the first class passengers, who often included members of the aristocracy and senior diplomats. The Orient Express was inaugurated in 1883, just as the railways, both in the UK and elsewhere, were starting to realise that their more affluent customers were not only a key source of revenue but also deserved special attention. As Martyn Pring puts it: ‘Higher society was on the move, requiring more opulent and spacious modes of transport.

Philippe Sands

A force for good: Samantha Power is driven by a deep sense of idealism

In the spring of 2008 I spent a fine day in the company of Samantha Power. She had come to the Hay Festival to talk about Chasing the Flame, her book about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative to Iraq who was murdered in the August 2003 bombing of UN offices in Baghdad, who was Power’s colleague and friend. The audience was captivated by an exceptional individual, one who spoke with care and clarity, in a gravelly voice of distinct cadence. She was forthright, self-deprecating, intelligent, humorous and thoughtful in response to my questions and those of the audience. She was also a cracking storyteller, one who quickly won her audience over with a recollection of the moment President George W.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The other half of Wham!

Have you heard the story about the time that Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s heart-throb, refused to answer the door to Andy Warhol after John Lennon hissed at him: ‘Do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’? How about Ridgeley’s fondness for orgies, during which he used to watch couples having sex on his snooker table while yelling: ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’? No? Well, that’s probably because these are taken from Elton John’s gloriously filthy memoir Me, in which he describes the many successes and wild excesses of his life in eye-popping, thigh-clenching detail.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Duty, devotion and lack of self-pity — Anne Glenconner is an example to us all

Trained from a young age to be self-effacing, never liking to be the centre of attention, having been traumatised for life by being made to wear a bright green dress sewn from old parachute material at her own coming out dance in 1950, Anne Glenconner must be wincing at being thrust into the limelight by today’s columnists. Suddenly she is being fêted as Lady Stiff Upper Lip, poster girl for the British non-self-pitying spirit and an example to us all — particularly to Prince Andrew and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. She protests she wasn’t stiff-upper-lipped at one of the worst moments of her life, which was on a Concorde flight to Miami in 1986 to see her son Christopher, who lay in a coma in hospital after a motorcycle accident in his gap year.

Sarah Sands

How I’ll remember John Humphrys — by his producer Sarah Sands

There was a dinner in Soho to celebrate the publication of John Humphrys’s book, A Day Like Today. John was asked by his publishers to select guests — an interesting mix from the left and right — and organise the seating, a small piece of administration that made him fretful and therefore resentful. The room grew warm with conversation and affection, so John insisted on throwing open the windows to the cold and the boisterous sound of the street below. Then he interrupted the civil murmuring between the guests to go round the big table with a question: scale of one to ten, was Britain going to be better or worse in three years’ time? In other words, he got everybody started on Brexit. It went downhill impressively.

Mary Killen

When a footman’s home is his castle

My own love for this memoir may be all to do with snobbery and self-identification. Moreover, I’ve always thought a life downstairs is an underrated career opportunity, offering access to all the aesthetic pleasures of the big house while bypassing the nuisance of admin and the financial burdens of its upkeep. On another level, here is the psychic restfulness of parking your own ego while, like HM the Queen, you focus on serving. And now I’ve found a personal account which, in spare and understated comic style, not only confirms that theory but refreshes my memories of the old days in my Irish homeland. Gillies Macbain totally gets the point of Ireland and its — mainly benign — peculiarities.

Lynn Barber

Burnt out at 27: the tragedy of Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin hated the word ‘star’, but she loved the trappings. As soon as she made serious money she bought a Porsche convertible and had it painted with psychedelic images to make it the most recognisable car in San Francisco. She also rejoiced in her lynx fur coat, courtesy of Southern Comfort. She sent them a file of all the numerous press clippings that said Southern Comfort was her favourite tipple and they responded with a cheque. ‘Oh man, that was the best hustle I ever pulled,’ she crowed to a reporter. ‘Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?’ If only she’d stuck to Southern Comfort she might still be alive (she was born in 1943) instead of dying at 27, like so many rock stars, of a heroin overdose.

Honor Clerk

The genius of Reynolds Stone: a private man in a public world

You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his designs. If you’re familiar with the masthead of the Economist or remember the clock on the top of the front page of the Times; if you’ve seen the colophon on a book published by the Folio Society or Hamish Hamilton or owned a Penguin edition of Shakespeare; if you’ve borrowed something from the London Library; if you had a £5 note in your wallet in the 1960s; if you’ve walked over the memorial to Winston Churchill on the floor of Westminster Abbey or if you own a passport with the royal coat of arms on the front, then you’ve been in close contact with the work of this wood engraver, typographer, letter-cutter and watercolourist.

Mike Jackson

Neither ‘Mad Dog’ nor ‘Warrior Monk’, General Jim Mattis is a thoughtful strategist

General Jim Mattis ended his remarkable career as a four-star US marine general, and finally as US secretary of defense. His book Call Sign Chaos is co-authored with Bing West, also an ex-marine and one-time assistant secretary of defense. It is partly an autobiography and partly a treatise on leadership. The autobiography relates his career from second lieutenant to general by way of three wars: the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of that neighbouring country; the removal of the Taleban from Afghanistan in 2001 following 9/11; and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally come his days — a total of 712 — as defense secretary, from January 2017 to December 2018. Throughout this account Mattis develops his philosophy of leadership.

William Waldegrave

How troll stories blighted the life of Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ, never wanted his life written, and this passionate wish presents the first hurdle to someone as fond of him as was Nikolai Tolstoy, the son of O’Brian’s second wife, Mary, by her first husband. Why pry further? Why deploy papers and diaries which O’Brian expressly instructed should be destroyed? To this objection, Tolstoy can offer two replies, and both are powerful. First, one biography already exists, not only unauthorised but deeply resented by O’Brian in his lifetime; and on the basis of that book, and of partial evidence from one faction within a fairly dysfunctional family, some unpleasant accusations have been made about O’Brian’s behaviour towards his first wife, Elizabeth Jones.

Stanley Wells

Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot

I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot have in common?’ The answer, of course, would be David Suchet, who has impersonated all these characters on stage or television during an acting career spanning half a century. In Behind the Lens, Suchet offers a series of autobiographical sketches, written in an amiably informal style and covering many aspects of his professional and personal life. He writes of his Jewish ancestry, his childhood, his schooldays (during which he was caned for hiding a forbidden Mars Bar in one of his shoes) and his private passions — for canals, music, foreign travel and for his family, the last being ‘the most important thing in the world to me’.

Thursday

Colin Greenwood

The Great Barrier Grief — and countless other marine disasters

In the last, wrenching episode of BBC’s Blue Planet 2, there’s a distressing moment when a young Australian diver, expert in his patch of the Great Barrier Reef, admits ‘I cried in my mask’ as he swam over an ossuary of recently bleached-out coral bones. Professor Callum Roberts’s memoir of a life devoted to the study of our oceans, and in particular their coral reefs, is a ravishing, alarming account of these underwater palaces of wonder, and the existential threat they face from humanity and our warming climate. Reefs take up just 0.1 per cent of our planet’s surface, yet provide home and breeding grounds for more than a quarter of all sea life. They are also the canaries in the carbon dioxide coal mine.

Simon Ings

Who knew that chemistry could be so entertaining?

Here’s how the element antimony got its name. Once upon a time (according to the 17th-century apothecary Pierre Pomet), a German monk (moine in French) noticed its purgative effects in animals. Fancying himself as a physician, he fed it to his own Fraternity… but his Experiment succeeded so ill that every one who took of it died. This therefore was the reason of this Mineral being call’d Antimony, as being destructive of the Monks. If this sounds far-fetched, the Cambridge chemist Peter Wothers has other stories for you to choose from, each more outlandish than the last. Keep up: we have 93 more elements to get through, and they’re just the ones that occur naturally on Earth. They each have a history, a reputation and in some cases a folklore.