More from Books

Saturday

Honor Clerk

How long is long enough to look at a work of art?

There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider life and interests. Toby Ferris will certainly not have seen this as in any way an autobiography, but what it essentially does is use a quest for the 42 surviving paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder as a starting point for an exploration of anything and everything, from the death of a friend to art history, family history, philosophy, anthropology, mathematics, music and paragliding. The result of this — what Ferris calls his Bruegel Project — is an intricately plotted book that is by turns stimulating, moving and sometimes mildly pretentious.

Anne Sebba

Hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight in Berlin

Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is the image of the once dignified Otto Neumann, walking to his death in torrential rain, with black shoe polish running down his face and into his eyes. Thus was his fate sealed as the silver hair revealed beneath ensured he was deemed too old to be selected for work. He was despatched instead to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But if this downpour, in a hideously crazy world, can be considered bad luck — after all, Otto and his wife Ella had by then managed against the odds to survive in the hell that was Terezin for two years — Hans, their young son then in hiding, was to have moments of astonishing good luck, which ensured his survival.

Ruth Scurr

A dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara: Actress, by Anne Enright, reviewed

Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It is a perfect jewel of a book, a dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara, alongside her Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2015). Its brilliance is complex and multifaceted, but completely lucid. Like its predecessors, it is a portrait of a matriarch. Norah, the novelist daughter of an invented Irish theatre legend, Katherine O’Dell, sets out to tell the story of her mother’s life as she approaches her own 59th birthday. She is acutely aware that she is about to have one birthday more than the actress managed: ‘I would spin beyond her, out into unchartered space.

Stephen Bayley

There’s something hot about a hat

When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is a hairdo so precise and sculpted that it trembles, category-wise, between coiffure and armour. Both natural and artificial, it also accurately signals social status. The link between hats, hair and caste was first made by James Laver in his 1937 classic Taste and Fashion, a book not yet bettered in its field. Oddly, it does not appear in the bibliography of Drake Stutesman’s new cultural history of headwear.

Lucy Lethbridge

The stomach for the fight: cooking for Churchill during the war

Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close to the inner workings of the prime ministerial stomach as it was possible to get for a non-family member. At Admiralty House, Chartwell, Chequers, Downing Street and even in the hastily put-up fitted kitchen in the Cabinet War Rooms, she eked out the rations into seven-course meals and accommodated both Churchill’s gluttony and his fussiness. There seem to have been plovers’ eggs in abundance. The food historian Annie Gray’s previous books include an examination of the life of Queen Victoria through that monarch’s enormous, indiscriminate appetite for eating.

Andrew Lycett

Death in the Cape – the lonely fate of Mary Kingsley

What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century conflict in the far-off South African veldt? This question lies at the heart of Sarah Lefanu’s excellent analysis of how Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley found themselves following the flag in Britain’s last great imperial war. Her book starts with concise biographical introductions to these protagonists, up to the start of what is still widely known as the Boer War in 1899. We get the familiar Kipling odyssey from Bombay, through fostering in the ‘House of Desolation’ in Southsea to journalism in Lahore. Marriage took him to Vermont, where he started a family and fine-tuned his thinking on Britain and empire.

Saturday

A.S.H. Smyth

Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is certainly no Abyssinian Andy McNab

In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier. Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when ‘war’ eventually did break out it was so one-sided that Ethiopian women were gathering spent bullet casings for reuse while Italian planes (the older Ethiopians believing these were dragons) dropped poison gas on them. Selassie, meanwhile, fled to England.

Nicola Barker

The downside of mindfulness

Way back in 1996 Norman E. Sjoman published a book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which he contested that much of what we now (in the West) consider to be yoga — a practice apparently steeped in millennia of ancient Indian tradition — is actually a veritable hotchpotch of disparate influences, some of which are surprisingly modern. In 2010 Mark Singleton’s controversial Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice consolidated Sjoman’s argument, and Yoga International (through somewhat gritted teeth, no doubt) claimed it represented ‘a watershed moment in the history of global asana culture’.

Paul Kildea

A grand romance: Sophy Roberts goes in search of lost Bechsteins in Siberia

In the world of classic cars, barn-finds sometimes do occur. An old Mercedes Gullwing might be discovered under tarps and hay on a farm somewhere in Florida, say, or an E-type Jag exhumed from out-buildings in Norfolk. Such discoveries are relatively rare, yet news of them reaches far beyond specialist magazines and websites for one simple reason: people love classic cars. We all invent stories about their history and fate based on the model, where it was found and who found it. Musical instruments have nowhere near the same traction in our imagination. For a barn-find fiddle to garner international attention it would have to be a valuable violin, or its provenance would need to be mired in the murk and criminality of Nazi Germany.

Mika Ross-Southall

An unsentimental Hungarian education: Abigail, by Magda Szabó, reviewed

Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the mid-1990s with the translations of her novels The Door and Katalin Street. Abigail, which was originally published in 1970 and is her best-known book, now appears in English for the first time in a superb translation by Len Rix. Set over six months, from September 1943 to March 1944 when Germany occupies Hungary, Abigail follows the 14-year-old Gina Vitay, who is ‘plucked away as if by a bird’ from her privileged life in Budapest and sent to a remote fortress-like Protestant boarding school for girls by her father, a general in the Hungarian army.

Max Décharné

Chinatown – that late masterpiece of film noir – could never be made now

In one of the most frequently quoted lines of post-war European cinema, a character in the 1976 Wim Wenders film Kings of the Road remarks that ‘the Yanks have colonised our subconscious’ (‘Die Amis haben unser Unterbewusstsein kolonialisiert’). The Hollywood film, a powerful weapon broadcasting this almost mythological vision of American culture around the world, had already begun its long retreat from complex adult themes, after untold millions were made from the colossal success of pictures by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg such as Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), all of which became franchises.

Christopher Hawtree

How could enlightened 18th-century Britain have believed that a woman could give birth to rabbits?

Does a practical joke differ from a hoax? It could be a matter of scale. Anyone can deploy a whoopee cushion, but it takes rather more — as Virginia Woolf and others did, long before Ali G — to kit oneself out as Abyssinian royalty for a 1910 state visit by train to the deck of a dreadnought in Weymouth harbour. There was nothing in it for them, but that hoax brought questions in the Commons. Monetary gain, as with the Hitler Diaries, certainly sours claims for hoaxes as a pure art form. Where does this leave the humble,twentysomething mother-of-three Mary Toft, and those around her? The question is raised by Karen Harvey’s brief but amply detailed study of a woman who, in 1726, brought the Surrey market town of Godalming publicity it had not known before.

Jeff Noon

Hitler’s affair with his niece — and a failed attempt on his life — make for a sizzling thriller

The journalist Deepa Anappara turns to crime with her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Chatto & Windus, £14.99). First off: great title. I really wanted to love this book, expecting, well, djinns on the purple line. The results are somewhat different. The purple line refers to a train line that runs through an area of an Indian city filled with slums and rubbish tips. Nine-year-old Jai is obsessed with TV cop shows. When young children start to go missing, Jai sets out to track down the people responsible. The hours he’s spent watching programmes such as Police Patrol will now come to good use, as he works a case the real police have little interest in. As many as 180 children go missing in India every day. This fact prompted Anappara to write the novel.

David Patrikarakos

Dirty money and political manipulation: Independence Square, by A.D. Miller, reviewed

A.D. Miller’s gripping new book is set largely during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Miller covered as a journalist. Ten years later, I reported on the aftermath of the country’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. Independence Square details the first event and prefigures the second. It is several things: a thriller, a political novel and a statement on our times. It tells the story of Simon, a disgraced British diplomat who, one day on the Tube, sees the cause (so he believes) of his downfall. She is a woman called Olesya whom he met years earlier during the Orange Revolution. From this beginning the novel unfurls, switching between 2004 and the present day. Back in 2004 the protestors are angry and the government is getting desperate. Violence looms.

Saturday

Ian Sansom

His own worst critic? Clive James the poet

Clive James (1939-2019), in the much-quoted words of a New Yorker profile, was a brilliant bunch of guys. One of those guys was a poet. Alongside the celebrated columns in the Observer, and Saturday Night Clive, and the Postcard From… documentaries, and Clive James on Television, and so on and so forth, there was a lifetime’s outpouring of verse. Ian Shircore’s So Brightly at the Last is the first book-length study of James’s poetry. One sincerely hopes that it is not the last. Shircore has written books about JFK, on conspiracy theories, and a book about The Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Boyd Tonkin

Albanian literary icon Ismail Kadare revisits ‘home’

Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native Albania. Born, like his frenemy the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, amid the blank-faced mansions and feuding clans of the ‘stone city’ of Gjirokaster, the novelist has always framed the terror, secrecy and confusion of the regime as a family affair. The usual comparisons with Kafka and Orwell underplay the sheer, gut-twisting intimacy of politics and power in his work. It baffles outsiders who want to label Kadare either a brave dissident or a complicit stooge. Ideology be damned: this is, and always was, strictly personal. The Doll even wonders whether ‘tyranny is a real thing or something one projects oneself. The same goes for enslavement.

Nicholas Lezard

There are more negatively-loaded words than positive ones — so what?

Negativity has a power over us. You know how it is. One bad thing can ruin your whole day, even if the day has been otherwise full of good or non-bad things. Infants react more quickly to an image of a snake than a frog, or unhappy or angry faces than happy ones. Then again, I reacted more strongly to Roy E. Baumeister’s face on the back flap of the book than I did to John Tierney’s, because Baumeister has a beard and a broad grin that suggests high self-esteem. And why not? He’s written or co-written more than a dozen books (first title, Meanings of Life) while Tierney has written only three. The aim of the book is to get us to compensate for the brain’s natural reaction to see the worst in everything.

Ian Thomson

Animation lends itself readily to propaganda

Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by Saudi troops in a computer-animated film of the ‘liberation’ of Iran from Ayatollah rule. Saudi Deterrent Force was a six-minute fantasy released online by anonymous video-makers in Saudi Arabia in 2017. It was viewed over 750,000 times before Iranian animators struck back with Battle of the Persian Gulf II, in which the Great Satan and perceived Saudi lackey Donald Trump is humiliated in an imagined Gulf battle led by Soleimani. Now that Soleimani is, in Pentagon-speak, a ‘vaporised non-person’, Saudi Deterrent Force acquires added interest for us as propaganda.

Amanda Craig

A novel of terror and hope on the Mexican-American border

Lydia and Luca are hiding in the shower room of their home while 16 members of her family are murdered. Lydia’s husband, a journalist, wrote about the latest drugs cartel in Acapulco and now, to stay alive, the mother and small son must disappear to America. Instead of the middle-class life Lydia has enjoyed as a bookshop owner, she and Luca must become one of those nameless, desperate migrants against whom President Trump vows to build his wall. This portrait of the deepening societal breakdown in Mexico gives a human face to an acute contemporary crisis So begins Jeanine Cummins’s third novel, and if you think this is another Roma-style examination of the lives of poor Mexicans, think again.