More from Books

Thursday

Henry Hitchings

London has a genius for self-renewal — but what do we miss as a result?

In the autumn of 1987, after London had been hit by a fierce storm, Simon Jenkins wandered through Bloomsbury and noticed that workers clearing away the fallen plane trees were finding it hard to cut through the branches. When he looked closely, he saw this was because their chainsaws kept snapping against embedded fragments of wartime shrapnel. It’s a nice detail, and there are many in Jenkins’s new book, though he spoils this one by adding that ‘London never lets us forget its history’. On any other day, surely, this legacy of conflict would have eluded his attention rather than imposing itself upon it. One of London’s features is its genius for self-renewal — after the Great Fire, for instance, as well as after the Blitz.

Thursday

Philip Mansel

A prince among men: could Albert have changed the course of history?

Double identities have never been rare: Norman French conquered England. Anglo Irish led its armies to victory. German Jews helped create the modern world. Perhaps thinking of the many Germans living in London, and British in Hamburg, Munich and Dresden, Prince Albert’s eldest daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, invented another hybrid: ‘Anglo-Germans’. This new biography of her adored father, Albert: The Man who Saved the Monarchy is, appropriately, an Anglo-German book, written from both English and German sources and perspectives, by an English author who knows Germany well.

John Jolliffe

The grand old man of nature writing continues his noble crusade

Richard Mabey is the grand old man of nature writing. He has produced 40 books in his noble crusade against the enemies of natural life, so a certain amount of repetition can be forgiven in Turning the Boat for Home, since in the opinion of many (not only Prince Charles) the dangers in some places are still increasing. What Mabey doesn’t explain about his subject is how the scourge of pesticides and excessive fertilisers originally began. During the second world war the danger of starvation was second only to that posed by the Germans, as food imports were threatened by the U-boats. Fortunately for Britain, farmers became increasingly efficient, buying up land for which there had been no demand in the 1930s.

Francesca Steele

Two wide-ranging collections of short stories by and about women

Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories shows that she can pack all the astute social commentary of her novels just as deftly into the short form. A case in point is ‘Sentimental Education’, a comic homage to Flaubert featuring a decidedly unsentimental protagonist, Monica. Middle-aged (‘Next stop menopause and no more denim’) and feeling hypocritical as she chides her children for bad behaviour, Monica remembers the way she once objectified men as if it were her degree subject. Of her university boyfriend, Darryl, she recalls: ‘Adorable cock, nothing too dramatic, suitable for many situations.’ They worked hard on writing their theses, even harder on finding her G-spot. Later she callously dumped and betrayed him.

Philip Hensher

The concluding volume of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher is – as its predecessors are – a triumph

This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair, and avoids the truth that she was partnered in this last phase with figures who conspired to frustrate policies arising from some accurate and perceptive insights.

Thursday

Sarah Ditum

Patti Smith had a bad year in 2016

In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the unexpected for Patti Smith. It starts badly at New Year: ‘Some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots.’ Then it gets worse, private tragedies and political shocks drawing Smith into a restive, twilight state: ‘The mischievous monkey, toying with the climate, toying with the coming election, toying with the mind, producing sour sleep or nothing at all.’ She tells us how she ‘skated along the fringe of a dream’ in this — well what exactly is it?

Jane Ogrady

Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality is hard to get your head around

Vibrations, chemicals and light-waves exist in the world; sounds, tastes, smells and colours only seem to. ‘Many sensations which are supposed to be qualities residing in external objects have no real existence save in us,’ said Galileo in the 17th century. ‘They reside only in the consciousness.’ But is consciousness itself, then, other than, and outside, physical things? We have known for millennia that it is in some way linked to the brain, yet, for all the advances of science, no scientific world view is able to accommodate it. How conscious states are generated by movements of brain tissue remains, in Thomas Huxley’s analogy, just as ‘unaccountable’ as that the genie should appear when Aladdin rubs his lamp.

Alan Judd

Betrayal in Berlin – a small but important part of the Cold War story

The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56.  It was a technical and engineering triumph which yielded a vast hoard of intelligence and, crucially, guaranteed early warning of any surprise Russian attack (as was mooted by the Russian military). Yet it was betrayed to the Russians by the British spy George Blake before a single sod was dug. This well-researched and readable account tells both stories, showing how they fed into each other. High-grade information on Russian military capabilities and intentions were scarce.  One of few successful sources was an MI6 tunnel in Vienna, tapping into Russian underground communications cables.

Ian Thomson

A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’

No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, for example, the Confederates had managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims, exalted by the myth of a noble lost cause. The South had lost 20 per cent of its white male population to the Union armies, but that only confirmed its moral superiority over the money-grubbing Yankee. According to Susan Neiman, postwar Germans approximated the vanquished Confederacy in their inability to imagine their own defeat. Attempts were made to recompense the Jewish community, but most Germans, East and West, refused to accept responsibility for the war at all.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Gilgamesh, Michael Schmidt’s ‘life’ of a poem

In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British Museum reading room poring over piles of books about Mesopotamia. His name was George Smith, and this was his secret passion. Then, one day, a museum attendant remarked that it was a shame no one had bothered to decipher ‘them bird tracks’ — by which he meant the weird-looking scratches in clay tablets from the newly rediscovered ancient city of Nineveh. It was at that moment that something clicked in Smith’s head. He set to it, decoding the cuneiform script to make a series of breakthroughs, culminating in one that excited him so much that, when he recognised it, he had to take his clothes off.

Alex Burghart

Oswald of Northumbria – an Anglo-Saxon saint-king of the north for our time

In Hamlet a gravedigger asks the riddle: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ Answer: ‘A grave-maker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday.’And yet they do not; this character has disturbed the bones of Yorick. ‘Doomsday’ is, of course, the archaic word for ‘judgment day’ and Hamlet is soon asking questions of the dead jester’s skull. So it is in modern times with those odd folk, archaeologists — always scrabbling around in the dirt, asking questions of the dead with their grubby fingers. Medievalists are lucky that they do, because without their digging and scraping we would have to rely on a finite number of heavily thumbed sources.

William Leith

Living on a nuclear submarine does your head in

Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear submarine, which he describes variously as ‘sleek, black and athletic looking’, and ‘this fierce black messenger of death’, and ‘this huge, black leviathan’, and ‘a killing machine’, and ‘silent as death’. The first time he sets foot on it, he tells us, ‘I was shitting it.’ This is not the last we will hear of his negative emotions, or the state of his bowels. We are in the latter part of the Cold War. Humphreys is a sailor. The submarine is HMS Resolution, part of the Polaris fleet. It is 425ft long, 33ft wide and 30ft from top to bottom. Humphreys describes it as ‘cigar-shaped’.

Violet Hudson

A work of art in more ways than one

Neil Hegarty’s new novel, The Jewel, is a mass of contradictions. It’s about an art heist, but it’s not fun. It’s a love story,  but it’s not romantic. And it features a woman’s wasted life, but it’s not without salvation. The overarching plot follows three characters. John, a ‘seedy’ artist-cum-art-forger-cum-art-thief, has been commissioned to steal an important work (‘The Jewel’ of the title) from a newly re-opened gallery in Dublin. As he prepares for the job, he reflects on his life, from his lonely, suburban childhood by the Thames, scouting for washed-up dogs on the foreshore, to his early twenties at art school, living in a bedsit smelling of gas and in love with a worldly blonde.

Jo Johnson

David Cameron’s For the Record ends where the sorriest three years in modern British history begin

It’s fun to look for what’s missing in a memoir; the forgotten egos, the policy howlers buried for posterity. Some omissions are accidental. When Tony Blair published his autobiography in 2010, he raised eyebrows by neglecting to mention his celebrated blue-skies thinker, John Birt. Over more than 700 pages, For the Record is punctilious and dutiful in name-checking the many fallen Cameroonian foot-soldiers who sacrificed themselves in the cause of Conservative modernisation. It is a testament to David Cameron’s great qualities — his quick wit, habitual cheeriness and calmness under pressure — just how many of them there are. No one working in No.

Thursday

Kajsa Norman

Why have the Swedes been incapable of finding Olof Palme’s murderer?

Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28 February 1986, Palme was walking home from the cinema with his wife when an unknown assailant stepped out from the shadows and shot him. We mourned not just the man, but the death of the nation that Palme personified — a safe place where nobody, not even the prime minister, needed protection. As though to emphasise the inconceivability of the event, the murder investigation became a textbook study of police incompetence. Frustrated by the lack of progress, countless ordinary citizens began to conduct their own inquiries, fuelled by various conspiracy theories. One of the people who caught the ‘Palme bug’ was the late crime writer Stieg Larsson.

James Evans

A ménage à trois that worked: Ivan Turgenev and the Viardots

If we still bemoan a world of mass tourism, the mid 19th century, Orlando Figes reminds us, is where it began. Aristocrats were accustomed in youth to prolonged, libidinous grand tours through the Continent (the gap years of their day). For the masses, though, this was the start. ‘During the autumn months,’ grumbled one British newspaper, ‘the whole of Europe seems to be in a state of perpetual motion.’ Not only rich people were involved; so, heaven forfend, were the ‘lower classes’. The English were particularly at fault. Lonely on their island, enjoying surplus income and time, they ‘swarmed’ everywhere.

Nicci Gerrard

A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read

In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir of France since the war: each year of the author’s life is evoked in a collage of memories, images and historical fragments. Apart from a handful of photographs, in which Ernaux is the dispassionately observed ‘she’, the self is erased and in its place an ambiguous ‘we’ narrates the flow of years and the slippage of time. In I Remain in Darkness, the ‘I’ is everywhere, yet it is still a treacherous word. In this work of shocking honesty and intimacy, Ernaux bears witness to her mother’s final years of living and dying with dementia.

Michael Blastland

Is the judiciary really so bad at judging character?

When I had a cough last week, my son Joe,  who has autism, shouted at me and covered his ears. I didn’t mean to cough but, to Joe, so what? His autism means he doesn’t get other people’s intentions. People like him are sometimes said to lack a ‘theory of mind’ — lacking the idea that Dad or anyone else even has a mind, possessed of its own thoughts and intentions. This complicates his life infinitely. And that alerts us to a commonplace miracle: the contrast with the rest of us. Often we can see inside other people’s heads. We’re prolific theorisers about what they’re thinking.