More from Books

Thursday

Julie Burchill

The old monster Elton John appears charmingly self-deprecating

I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary, whether asking fans on to the stage to dance and then screaming at them not to get so close, or demanding that an employee do something about the blustery weather keeping him awake. They say you get the face you deserve after 50, and he looks every inch the bitter old busybody who divides his time between twitching the curtains and gossiping over the fence about the behaviour of those younger and prettier than himself. He has now become drearily bound into the liberal establishment — see his recent puffed-up pronouncement about Brexit: ‘I’m ashamed of my country… I am sick to death of Brexit. I am a European.

Thursday

Rose Prince

Make it an applefest this Christmas — the best of the year’s cookbooks

If it were not for a banker with a hangover, we would not have Eggs Benedict. Or so one of the creation stories goes. One morning in 1894 Lemuel Benedict walked in to the Waldorf Hotel, New York, feeling a bit rough. He asked the Maître D’, Oscar Tschirky, for hot buttered toast, bacon, two poached eggs and — crucially — a ‘pitcher’ of hollandaise sauce. This story is recounted in Signature Dishes that Matter (Phaidon, £35), a chronology of 200 or so inventions, from gelato (ice cream) in 1686 to Claude Bosi’s ‘duck jelly’ in 2017. Put together by seven food critics with global knowledge, this is a truly gorgeous book to own and to give to that friend or relative who dines out like a collector.

Peter Parker

Capturing the mood of the English landscape: the genius of John Nash

‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton wrote in April 1939, ‘I would first show him a good Constable and then one or two of John Nash’s best watercolours.’ This is about as good an endorsement any painter could ask for, but Nash is more usually bracketed with, and overshadowed by, his older brother. There have been major exhibitions of Paul Nash’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010 and at Tate Britain three years ago, whereas the last truly substantial retrospective of John’s work was at the Royal Academy in 1967.

Melanie McDonagh

Angels and daemons: Children’s books for Christmas

Sometimes I have to admit the reason I read children’s books with pleasure is that I’m essentially puerile —and look, that’s not a bad thing if it means getting to read The Steves by Morag Hood (Pan Macmillan, £6.99), aimed at three year olds. It’s about two puffins called Steve who keenly resent the claims of the other to be Number One Steve. It is the kind of infantile playground name-calling which makes me laugh, and I reckon young children will like it too, especially Steves. Judith Kerr, the peerless, razor-sharp author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea as well as the tear-jerker My Henry has, alas, gone to her reward in heaven, but we still, thank God, have Shirley Hughes, whose picture books for small children are as engaging as ever.

Thursday

Jenny Colgan

Friends forever: the inside story of the American sitcom classic

Here is a test to tell you whether you will like this book or not: when I write ‘So, no one told you life was going to be this way…’, do you secretly clap your hands four times? If so, could you be any more excited to get your hands on it? The excellent news is that, just like the show, Still Friends, which rabid fans would almost certainly buy whatever old rubbish was in it, is much, much better than it needed to be. It will appeal to anyone interested, not just in the six stars (seven if you include Marcel the monkey, which I most certainly do) but in how the extraordinary 24-episode-a-year studio system managed to churn out such quality at such a pace (answer: with extreme difficulty). This is the ultimate deep dive, told in a breezy journalistic style.

Frank Lawton

Ben Lerner’s much hyped latest novel reads like an audit of contemporary grievances

Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in The Topeka School, while things keep returning, something has also been lost. Lerner’s third novel reunites us with Adam Gordon, the protagonist — and Lerner surrogate — of his much acclaimed debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam is a senior at Topeka High School in the late 1990s, an aspiring poet and champion debater (as was Lerner), whose parents are psychologists at the Foundation, ‘a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital’ which treats just about everyone in the book.

Rodric Braithwaite

Yalta was a carve-up — and the Poles are understandably still bitter about it

‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ principle expresses an uncomfortable truth. The eight-day meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 settled the fate of Eastern Europe and beyond. Its effects are still with us. President George W. Bush compared it with the way Britain, France and the Soviet Union sold out to Hitler before the war began: he called it ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’. ‘Yalta’, like ‘Munich’, has become a synonym for the cynical betrayal of the weak by the strong. It is an oft-told, well-documented and controversial story. Diana Preston retells it fluently, perceptively and with meticulous scholarship.

Louis Amis

The surrealism of war against Isis

The campaign against Isis was pretty big news for most of 2016. But by the time the final showdown got under way in Mosul, it was late October. Western journalism was already departing on a bold new chapter, with great new villains much closer to home. For news consumers, one tableau of confusion and anxiety cross-dissolved into the next. Fortunately, James Verini, a reporter for the New York Times magazine, was on the ground in Mosul, still working to bring closure to the previous nightmare. But that’s no easy task when ‘you’re usually sitting in some house or truck, or squatting behind some berm, listening to the destruction’, as he confides early on in They Will Have to Die Now. ‘Experientially, war is mainly sound.

Honor Clerk

Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment

I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of her recent exhibition at the Huntington Library in California. The image projected there of a reserved and quietly-spoken woman, hesitant, diffident and patently ill at ease in the spotlight, left me very unprepared for the raw honesty and openness of this memoir. Two early stories give an idea of what lies ahead. The first is of her five-year-old self, the youngest so far in a family of four daughters of a missionary father in India, making herself seriously ill with jealousy on the arrival of a fifth sister.

Claire Lowdon

Less radical, less rich: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is a disappointment

Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) is the novel I recommend to friends who don’t read much. Talk about bang for your buck. Strout packs more character and life into 337 pages than you’d expect to find in a novel twice that length and combines classic storytelling with elegant formal innovation. Each chapter works individually as a short story, yet they are all harnessed together by the deceptively simple title. By announcing that the novel is about Olive Kitteridge, Strout frees herself to depict many other inhabitants of the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. Sometimes, a chapter’s protagonist only interacts briefly with Olive, but this piecemeal portrait is deepened by the variety of angles from which Strout approaches her subject.

Henry Jeffreys

Tips for Christmas tipples

It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like a firm of provincial solicitors). Hugh Johnson wrote the first World Atlas of Wine in 1971. Since the 1998 edition he has been, in his words, ‘progressively passing the baton’ to Jancis Robinson. It’s astonishing how much has changed; early editions were little more than France, Germany, Italy, sherry and port.

Marcus Berkmann

Children’s questions about death are consistently good fun

What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having toiled on that production line myself — is the incurable optimism of everyone concerned. After all, most of these books are terrible. Some are merely appalling. But the simple act of writing and publishing them is to hope beyond hope that this will be the year for you, the year that your not-very-good book will become a bestseller and buy you everything you want and need, and that no one will notice its manifest flaws until it’s far too late. Or maybe not; because every year a few decent titles do somehow manage to peek through the clouds. These are the ones that genuinely deserve to be bought, read and loved.

Claudia Gold

Eleanor of Aquitaine is still as elusive as quicksilver

Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of kings — ‘lionhearted’ Richard and ‘bad’ John — and ancestress to the royal dynasties of Europe. Yet more nonsense has been written about her than almost any other woman. Much of what we think we know is falsehood or half-truth, and many respected historians fall foul of her myth, endlessly repeating misinformation as fact. For someone so renowned, the written record is astonishingly thin. Even her birth date (1122 or 1124) is uncertain, as is her place of birth. We know nothing of her looks, personality, education or early familial attachments.

Thursday

Jay Elwes

Liberty depends on a delicate balance between state and society

Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have been rigid, brutal and despotic. Freedom for the masses is a historical rarity. It arises only as the product of a fine balance between competing interests. That balance is the subject of this book. According to the authors, both of whom are American economists, the first of those countervailing forces is the state, or what Hobbes called the Leviathan. The second is society. For liberty to exist, the state and society must achieve equilibrium. If one dominates the other, the result is a slide away from liberty towards despotism.

Nick Spencer

When atheists stole the moral high ground

In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner entertainment, a formal logical argument for the existence of God. Du Perron, formerly a Protestant, was now well on his way to becoming a cardinal. He was a highly intelligent and rhetorically gifted man and he performed his task well, to the great pleasure of the assembled nobility. Flushed with success, he then turned to his audience and announced that, if they wanted, he could prove the opposite case too. The king was not amused. Most of us like to believe that we believe what we believe because rigorous reasoning and reliable evidence have led us there. Most of us are wrong.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Dieting to death: a black comedy of boarding school life

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Rescuing the great British Cheddar

Gastronomy is one of the deepest forms of culture. If you’ve grown up in France you know this, to the depth of your Camembert-calcium-enriched bones (I have, and do). In my Year 2 classroom near Paris there was a poster with the most famous cheeses of France on it: heart-shaped Neufchâtel, orange Mimolette; Reblochon, Roquefort, Comté and Cantal. You were considered a cretin if you couldn’t tell your Crottin from your Pélardon, or the age of a Tomme at first bite. The poster which hung alongside that one was of Charles de Gaulle broadcasting during the Resistance. In Britain, we are less good at celebrating our native foods, and we’ve long felt that our cheeses pale in comparison to those of the continent.

Leyla Sanai

There’s no end to the wonders of the human body, says Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable, avuncular and amusing as ever, but his subject matter has broadened over the decades to cover nearly everything, from science to Shakespeare. His modus operandi, however, has not changed. He absorbs reams of facts, the most interesting of which he presents liberally sprinkled with mischief, wit and lateral thinking. On seeing this book’s title, I prepared myself for the arid science I ingested when I studied to be first a doctor, then a hospital physician and then a consultant anaesthetist. But I needn’t have worried. Bryson feeds the pith, pulp and bitter pips of a subject into his brain and produces a sweet, zingy quantity of juice.