More from Books

Saturday

Lynn Barber

A lovable, impossible man: Bryan Robertson, gifted curator and Spectator critic

Andrew Lambirth claims that Bryan Robertson was ‘the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had’; but on the evidence of this book, he would have been a disaster — chaotic, hopeless with money and eternally late. What he actually was was the inspired and inspiring director of the Whitechapel Gallery from 1952 to 1969. He also wrote on art and ballet for The Spectator and was an esteemed contributor to The Critics radio programme. But he did not get the Tate appointment he longed for and was effectively forgotten by l990, so it’s a bit mysterious why he is being written about now.

Ariane Bankes

Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square

The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ provided the rallying cry, whether consciously or not, for five remarkable women, all drawn at some point in their careers to Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square. There they found the freedom and independence they craved to explore new ways of living and loving and writing during the volatile interwar decades. All five were ‘blue-stockings’: the radical modernist American poet Hilda Doolittle, or ‘H.D.’; the crime writer Dorothy L.

Jenny Colgan

Deborah Orr rages against her small-town upbringing

Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did, and the intensity of their love for her burned very bright after her death in October. They spoke of her wild beauty, her fierce passions and smoky laughter; what great company she was; how every room was more exciting with Deborah in it. Her Twitter feed (until it mysteriously vanished) was intensely funny and beautifully written, and it is heartbreaking that she didn’t live to see her first book published. Motherwell: A Girlhood, about growing up in a dying Scottish steel town on the cusp of the women’s movement, is a furious book.  It is filled with a deep and keening sadness: a howl from the depths, spilling with regret and anger, page after page.

Mia Levitin

Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature

‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag survivor. Sentenced to hard labour for Trotskyist activities, Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, primarily in Kolyma, located at the edge of the Arctic Circle, eight time zones east of Moscow and ‘one of the most uninhabitable places on earth’, according to the geopolitical journalist Tim Marshall.‘Instead of yesterday’s minus 40 it was only minus 25,’ Shalamov writes in one of the stories, ‘and the day seemed like summer.

Thursday

Alex Colville

Fear and loathing in Jamaica: Caribbean slaves turn the whip on their masters

In the shadows of the British Enlightenment lurked the Caribbean sugar plantations. Masters routinely raped their slaves, punished minor wrongdoings by forcing one to shit in another’s mouth and even burnt some at the stake while growing the cane destined to sweeten the tea tables of London salons, Oxbridge dons or Hampshire parsons. It’s from this civilised viewpoint, top-down and half the world away, that we still tell the story of the abolition movement, William Wilberforce and the House of Commons, the great breakers of chains. But slaves were perfectly capable of fighting for their own freedoms, as the Harvard historian Vincent Brown shows in Tacky’s Revolt, his careful reconstruction of an understudied footnote in Jamaican history.

Peter Carty

The deadly war game of the Battle of the Atlantic

My father served in the Royal Navy during the second world war. He drank over-proof rum and smoked unfiltered cigarettes, both free of charge, while wearing a uniform that enhanced his natural attractions. What more could any teenager want? Of course, there were hazards in store when he set out from Liverpool. Worst of all was the weather. Atlantic storms could punch out portholes and bend iron stanchions. But a close second came U-boats, which sank ships in minutes. The U-boats were dangerous not only for sailors. Their depredations almost cost Britain victory. By 1941, the losses of merchant vessels in the Battle of the Atlantic meant we faced starvation. The solution came from an unlikely source.

Christopher Bray

David Bowie: the boy who never gave up

A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up as Ziggy Stardust (gold bindi, maroon mullet, jumpsuit run up from old curtains), then as Aladdin Sane (blue and red lightning slash daubed across face), then as the Thin White Duke (black waistcoat, black eyeliner, slicked-back hair). And so on, right through every satin-and-tat get-up of Bowie’s long career. What larks! And yet. I don’t know whether Brooker had his mother in a whirl, but he certainly had some of us wondering what was going on in the groves of academe. Did I mention that these wardrobe antics were part of a research project? That Brooker is professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University?

Ian Sansom

From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book

Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published 2019 by Oxford University Press, ‘a department of the University of Oxford’ which ‘furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide’, according to the copyright page — has at first glance all the appeal and certainly the appearance of an utterly dull academic tome.

John Jolliffe

Robert the Bruce — master of guerrilla warfare

The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own death in 1329, aged 54. His extraordinary achievement was to fend off both rivals at home and formidable English enemies to firmly establish his country’s independence. In 1292, John Balliol had been proclaimed King of Scots, with the full support of Edward I, to whom he formally paid homage. Four years later he was forced to resign his kingdom to Edward, and his own claim to it was doomed, though it survived for a few more years.

Lee Langley

You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park

Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth Rees explored east London’s edgelands in his hallucinatory Marshlands. Now, with Car Park Life, he reveals an urban wilderness hiding in plain sight: ‘It is Morrisons in Hastings that lights the fire of my obsession. Not the supermarket itself but the space outside: the car park.’ Strange, often violent stuff happens here: murder, hauntings, sex, from dogging to adultery. Late-night improvised race tracks spring up, where petrolheads compete in hair-raising skid contests, spurred on by whooping spectators.

Hermione Eyre

Why we’re all in love with Fleabag

Why would you need the scripts for Fleabag? It’s hardly a lost classic. It’s always popping up on BBC iPlayer. So it was with a touch of scepticism that I picked up this volume, subtitled not ‘The Scripts’ but ‘The Scriptures’, in reference to Fleabag’s long, pitiless pursuit of a hot priest in Series 2, and beautifully presented: sombre hardcover without, shocking-pink end-papers within. Clever — there’s already something of the spliced rhythm of the series in the design. But the pink band wrapper made it look too much like a present: was this just a commercial attempt at cramming that scabrous lost soul, transgressive cultural heroine and all round dirtbag into a giftable item? Then I read it. Bliss.

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.