More from Books

Thursday

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.

Ian Sansom

What is the relationship between truth and accuracy? The Lifespan of a Fact reviewed

At the time, I’m sure it all seemed absolutely hilarious. It was in 2012 that W.W. Norton first published The Lifespan of a Fact, co-written by the essayist John D’Agata and his one-time fact-checker Jim Fingal. The book consists of an essay by D’Agata, ‘What Happens There’ — which tells the story of the death of a 16-year-old, Levi Presley, who killed himself by jumping from the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas — plus Fingal’s meticulous marginal notes and comments. (The essay was apparently written for Harper’s magazine in 2003, which rejected it because of factual inaccuracies: it was eventually published in the magazine The Believer, fact-checked by Fingal, in 2010.

John Self

The good sex award goes to Sarah Hall: Sudden Traveller reviewed

Sarah Hall should probably stop publishing short stories for a while to give other writers a chance. If she’s not the best short story writer in Britain, then — but why even finish that sentence? Her novels are good, but it’s in the short form that she excels, with strange, unsettling tales that have made her the only author to be shortlisted three times for the BBC National Short Story Award. (She won it once.) Her greatest gift is, through a blend of the carnal and the cerebral, to invoke a physical response, something atavistic, in the reader.

Clare Mulley

Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task

‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943: An insignificant little woman, who has revolutionised her private life — a traditionally female one, with the needle and the broom as her emblems — to transform herself into a bandit… I am not alone. Ada, one of four female partisans whose interconnected stories weave through this history, knew what few Germans or Italian fascists yet suspected. All across Nazi- occupied northern and central Italy, thousands of women had started to resist. Factory workers subtly sabotaged the products of their enforced labour; village women spirited away men into the hills, often feeding and sheltering them as they organised into guerrilla units.

Anthony Cummins

Tame family dramas: Christmas in Austin, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed

My partner’s brother once found himself accidentally locked into his flat on Christmas Day, which meant having to spend it alone with his dog — an outcome he may shortly have cause to recall with no little longing, given that we’ve decided to host this year. At least we haven’t sneakily invited his ex along too. That’s the curveball flung at one of the characters in Benjamin Markovits’s new novel, the latest in his unashamedly old-fashioned and vastly enjoyable quartet-in-progress about a high-flying, Obama-era American family modelled, as you might guess, on his own. In the first part, A Weekend in New York, the parents and siblings of journeyman tennis pro Paul Essinger gathered to watch him compete in the first round of the US Open.

Houman Barekat

Dave Eggers’s satire on Trump is somewhat heavy-handed: The Captain and the Glory reviewed

A feckless moron is appointed to the captaincy of a ship, despite having no nautical experience. The Captain has a propensity to grope women and brag about not paying his taxes, and in his younger days he ‘had hidden in the bowels of the ship looking at pornographic magazines’ while his peers went to war. Once in post he fires the entire navigational staff and has the ship’s manuals jettisoned. A mysterious voice in a vent urges him to take ever more drastic measures against the ship’s population, whereupon a number of ‘swarthy’ passengers are thrown overboard to drown. Utilities and basic freedoms are privatised as the Glory descends into despotism.

Steven Poole

Who will take on the behemoths of Big Tech?

With Britain having gone through its third general election in four years, the halcyon days of Cleggmania in the 2010 campaign seem like an impossibly innocent time. Particularly since Sir Nick Clegg, once the shining, soft-haired hope of sensible centrists, now works as a PR man for Facebook. His job is to explain to the unwashed masses why Facebook’s refusal to do anything about false political adverts is actually good for democracy.

Thursday

Greg Garrett

James Baldwin’s radicalism was part Marxist, part Christian

Great biographies try to answer questions about the complicated relationship between their subjects’ inner life and outer workings. How did Winston Churchill turn the pain of his early life and his years in the political wilderness into the words that galvanised the free world? How did Frida Kahlo’s physical impairment shape her vision as a painter? I am endlessly interested in the inner and outer lives of the African–American writer and activist James Baldwin, for my money not just the most important black writer of the past 100 years, but one of the most important American writers ever.

Jenny Colgan

The people’s Prince: even as a teenager the musician charmed everyone he met

Many pop stars are easy to imagine as children, as it’s a profession that doesn’t really reward growing up. Elton John, for example, looks exactly like his naughty Viz character. Robbie Williams is forever the Year 5 cheeky charmer who the teacher can’t help but forgive. But Prince? What on earth was Prince Rogers Nelson like as a child? You can just about imagine him marching in to the front room of his Minnesota home in purple pyjamas announcing: ‘Darling papa, please summon for me one each of every musical instrument ever invented. And also, nine ladies. No clothes.’ So the news that there was a cache of his own notes for a memoir found at Paisley Park after his heartbreakingly wasteful death aged 57 is exciting.

James Evans

Britain’s obsession with boxing is as deep-rooted as its devotion to cricket

Boxing has long been a British obsession, exported successfully to North America, but never widespread on the Continent. Mainland Europeans struggled to understand that in general there was no quarrel between contestants who assaulted each other so brutally. ‘Anything that looks like fighting,’ explained one bewildered French visitor, ‘is delicious to an Englishman.’ He might have said the same about drinking or gambling, pastimes embedded in the fabric of Georgian society to an ‘astonishing extent’. They were habits, moreover, upon which the popularity of boxing depended. The story of Daniel Mendoza, little known except to sporting historians, is fascinating on both a personal level and more generally.

Wynn Wheldon

The Great War was enough to make grown men weep

Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo it took a mere six weeks for the diplomats of Europe’s Great Powers to plunge the continent into cataclysmic war. Austria-Hungary wanted Serbia, which was protected by Russia, which was in an entente cordiale with Great Britain and France. Germany was the ally of Austria-Hungary. For good measure, Turkey was the ally of Germany. Simon Heffer straightforwardly follows the messaging and the meeting that resulted in catastrophe. There are no forces or movements here, but rather individuals trying to serve their nations’ best interests, and with generally good intentions all round. The road to hell.

Philip Hensher

Lydia Davis, like an inspirational teacher, tempts her readers into more reading

A good indicator of just how interesting and alluring Lydia Davis’s Essays proved might be my recent credit card statement. It was hard to read very far without being introduced to an unfamiliar author, and the terms of the introduction were frequently so seductive that I found myself breaking off to order several secondhand books. The fee for writing this review had long been swallowed up when I realised that if I read everything that Davis made sound irresistible I would probably never reach the end of this splendid collection — and end up like Achilles chasing the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox.

A.N. Wilson

The first Puritans weren’t so much killjoys as ardent believers in honest living

‘Puritan’ is a term of abuse, and we tend to use it to refer to such figures as the nightmarishly moralistic, sour-faced women who force Hester Prynne to be emblazoned with the Scarlet Letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. But David D. Hall, doyen of 17th-century puritanism, goes deeper than this. His history is not so much one of ranters as of honest men and women trying to get right the most fundamental things of all: the human relationship with God, and hence the right way to be living and the right sort of society to be ordering. It is these basic questions, as he shows over and over again, which determined the pattern of the Puritans’ behaviour in the early stages of the Reformation, in Scotland and in England.

Stuart Kelly

Will Self’s memoir of drug addiction is a masterpiece of black humour

Well, it was always going to be called Will. More than once in this terrifying, terrific book, Will Self refers to ‘nominative determinism’ — the idea that a name somehow foretells a life. That he chooses Will, not Self, is indicative and ambiguous. This memoir — not an autobiography — starts in May and ends in August 1986, but also spirals back to 1979, 1982 and 1984 in the kind of chronological fracturing that has typified his later fictions. It is a chronicle of addiction, and the ‘will’ is everything, from the insistent desire, to a futureless future, to the psychological horror of being called ‘Little Willy’ by his mother. Throughout, he normally refers to himself as Will, but this is not Caesar-style self-aggrandising.

Thursday

Cal Revely-Calder

Nostalgia for old Ceylon: lush foliage and tender feelings from Romesh Gunesekera

Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure. An untenable form of society judders, in technicolor and often loudly, to an inevitable end. Romesh Gunesekera was born in Ceylon in 1954, and much of his fiction has lingered in fascination on its years as a dominion — no longer a colony, not yet a republic. Reef, his first novel, took us to 1962, to the island’s coast and the childhood of Triton, a gifted chef. Suncatcher, his sixth, is back in the capital Colombo two years on. Kairo, who’s narrating what was then his teenage point of view, is a similar boy to Triton: same curiosity, same restlessness, same goodness of heart. He goes to school, when it isn’t closed — though usually it is.

Ian Garrick-Mason

What do we really mean by the ‘language’ of animals?

The reality of animal communication (or, more precisely, our belief in that reality) is a fact underwritten not by science but by direct experience. A dog owner knows that his dog communicates with him because he makes eye contact with it, notices its body movements, listens to its barks and whines and yips, and associates all of these actions with the contexts in which they occur and the actions that take place before and after such ‘signals’ have been sent. The owner unscientifically — but naturally and effortlessly — projects into the dog a sense of awareness and autonomy similar to the one he himself possesses.

Martin Gayford

It’s yellow, not green, that’s the colour of jealousy

Making attributions to Leonardo da Vinci,  the great art historian Adolfo Venturi once remarked, is like ‘picking up a red-hot iron’. Those who wish to avoid injury, he advised, should exercise great caution. Whether or not the scholars who attributed the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to the great man are now suffering from badly burnt fingers — not to mention the buyer who paid $450.3 million for it — is a question of informed opinion. On the whole, Carmen C. Bambach, the author of the monumental Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (Yale, 4 Volumes, £400) votes against. In Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings in Detail (Prestel £65), Alessandro Vezzosi, also a noted authority on the artist, is more guarded.

Frances Wilson

Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?

Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list, and this second collection comes crowned in laurels: ‘She’s an unstoppable force of nature,’ says her American editor. ‘This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best,’ says Eleanor Catton. Stephen King calls her ‘required reading’, and early reviewers on the website Goodreads describe this book as ‘genius’, ‘astounding’, ‘resplendent’ and ‘epiphanic’. Because she is a woman who writes essays, Jamison has been compared with Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag, but she is the antithesis of her predecessors.

Adam Zamoyski

Poland was no walkover for the Reich

‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances against tanks. In this timely and authoritative book, Roger Moorhouse dispels this and other myths concocted by German and Soviet propaganda. He has trawled through an impressive quantity of unpublished Polish and German sources, as well as a wealth of eyewitness testimonies from both sides, to produce a balanced account of this much neglected yet important episode of the second world war which is both harrowing and inspiring.