More from Books

Thursday

Toby Young

Two faces of a single calamity: how the war against inequality backfired dramatically

In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, delivered a commencement address to that year’s graduating class in which he attacked the idea of meritocracy. It was, he said, a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued. For Markovits to make these remarks at one of the cathedrals of the meritocratic church — students at Yale typically score above the 99th percentile in the nationwide Law School Admissions Test — was a kind of heresy and it attracted enough attention for him to secure a book deal. Four years later, The Meritocracy Trap is the result.

Harry Mount

Rod Liddle on Brexit: The Great Betrayal reviewed

Rod Liddle has taken a huge gamble with this book. It could be out of date very soon. The book’s premise is a conversation he had with his wife on the day after the Brexit vote in 2016. She, like Liddle, is a Brexiteer and said to him that morning, ‘They won’t let it happen.’ Liddle agreed. ‘Betcha we don’t leave,’ he said. And that is the book’s principal argument: we’ll never leave the EU. The Great Betrayal was published in July and, so far, Liddle is right. But what about on 1 November: will this book be massively outdated and will Britain be out of the European Union? It’s anyone’s guess. Even now, quite a few of the references in the book are dated. It was published before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.

A.S.H. Smyth

The great American trauma in minute detail

Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about? Well... everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States.

Ruth Scurr

Welcome back to Gilead: Margaret Atwood’s triumphant reclaiming of her work

‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, at a time when young girls, carefully and modestly brought up to become wives to the regime’s male elite, are beginning to rebel; some would rather die than get married and there has been an attempted suicide via secateurs in the flower-arranging class. ‘Perhaps we need to change our educational curriculum,’ Aunt Lydia thinks, ‘less fear-mongering, fewer centaur-like ravishers and male genitalia bursting into flame.

Thursday

Mark Glanville

Tobias Jones finds in Italian football hooliganism a mirror image of Italy itself

Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s and becoming fully fledged in the 1970s. Their ritual, tribal aggression supplied an outlet for youthful male violence in the relatively peaceful second half of Europe’s most savage century. At first, the curve’s semi-circular ends,behind the goals where ultras congregated were, for all their territorial violence, politics-free, but Tobias Jones notes ‘how hard certain ultras were rubbing the lamp [of fascist revivalism]before the genie appeared’.

Jenny Colgan

Edna O’Brien’s heroic tribute to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram: Girl reviewed

This novel is strikingly brave in two ways: first, in the fortitude of its writer, the redoubtable Edna O’Brien, who, aged 88, travelled twice to northern Nigeria, her bra stuffed with thousands of dollars, in order to research this story. With some irony, she ended up staying in a convent with kindly nuns who helped introduce her to its subject: the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. Second, the way, in these days of cultural appropriation, that O’Brien takes on the persona of a very young (she doesn’t know how old she is) kidnapped African girl, Maryam. But this book is at its core a misery memoir about the dreadful things done to women and girls in the name of religion. It’s hardly an area O’Brien can’t lay claim to.

Conrad Black

20th-century assassins – How to be a Dictator reviewed

Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier (Haiti), Ceausescu (Romania) and Mengistu (Ethiopia). As a comparative study of those individuals, it is enlightening and a good read. The title and parts of the foreword indicate that it aspires to be a guidebook of tactics for those aspiring to be dictators and to retain their status as such. There are some weaknesses in this broader ambition. These eight men were not altogether uniform in their methods of obtaining power, retaining it, or losing it, and certainly not in their abilities. Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung and Duvalier died in office to great public lamentations.

Anthony Sattin

William Dalrymple has nailed the East India Company for what it was: ‘a supreme act of corporate violence’

A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has already had to bail out the company, the British economy has taken a hit in the fallout and parliament has now been recalled to discuss the company’s massive debts. In the committee room, the corporate directors face allegations of embezzlement, bribe-taking and corruption. This includes the handing out of £210 million of ‘presents’ over an eight-year period. The scene is depressingly familiar, so is this Lehman’s? Facebook? Some of the stars of subprime? BAE? None of the above.

Tibor Fischer

One insider’s view of the thorny subject of immigration

Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous to be true. I never thought I’d witness government and parliament in this country tearing themselves to tatters and becoming so irrelevant that Westminster might as well be located on the dark side of Jupiter. Perhaps the most incendiary topic lumbering about in the disintegration of our governance is immigration. No other subject manages to beget such nonsense and fury. The claims of anti-migrant, anti-immigrant sentiment are rife, despite the fact that even on the far right it is almost impossible to find anyone who is completely against the notion of immigration; it’s all about how it should be conducted.

Andrew Lycett

A page-turning work of well-researched history: The Mountbattens reviewed

He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he was so crooked that if he swallowed a nail, he’d shit a corkscrew. As reputations go, the turnaround has been extraordinary.

Sarah Ditum

A New York state of mind – Doxology reviewed

Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a baggy monster realist novel. It moves from the subculture of straight edge punk to the backrooms of political powerbroking, and surveys ground from East Harlem to rural Ethiopia. There are at least half a dozen characters who take command of the narration for a substantial chunk of the story, and many more whose consciousnesses we breeze through as cameos. Yet the overall feeling isn’t of plenty, but of precarity. From the opening sentence, it seems that time is always about to run out.

Ariane Bankes

The Lost Girls of World War II – a tribute

It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s ‘Lost Girls’: ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. They were courageous, living ‘without any thought for past or future’ in that bomb-blasted city, but what most touched Quennell’s heart was ‘their air of waywardness and loneliness’. He should know: he was married to one Lost Girl (Glur) while madly, frustratedly in love with another (the high-octane Barbara Skelton) who he introduced to Cyril Connolly alongside a third, Lys Lubbock, with ultimately cataclysmic results.

Simon Heffer

There’s no place quite like Excellent Essex

Those who think Essex is boring, or a human waste bin into which only the most meretricious people find themselves tipped, would require only one or two chapters of Gillian Darley’s widely researched book to tell them how wrong they are. Essex has experienced various types and degrees of civilisation since before the Romans arrived and did unspeakable things to Boadicea and her daughters, as the Queen of the Iceni chased them in her chariot up and down what is now the A12.

Minoo Dinshaw

A thoroughly modern medieval romance

The novelist and essayist James Meek’s confident new medieval romance is conducted in brief passages separated out by three icons, a rose, a sickle and a quill, emblematic of the three estates of the realm. The nobility play at courtly love; the commons can only evade their bondage by war service; and the clergy are in charge of chronicling and calendars. It’s 1348 and, as the Black Death mutates from fake news to imminent apocalypse, the novel’s liturgical title gets more and more ironical. The commons strand recalls in its stubborn Saxonicity of vocabulary (‘Some gnof had got her with child’) the ‘shadow-tongue’ employed by Paul Kingsnorth in The Wake, a Booker-longlisted saga of guerrilla resistance to William the Conqueror.

Thursday

Oliver Balch

It takes a former drug dealer to explain the global narcotics scene

In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’, the solution was simple: first, send in goons to beat up the smack dealers; second, round up the city’s addicts, chain them to radiators, and force them to go cold turkey. The policy, unsurprisingly, failed. For one, Russia’s fourth largest city has swapped its preferred kick: today, it’s spice that is mostly getting Yekaterinburg’s residents smashed. At the same time, the city still counts enough heroine users for their needle-sharing habits to have sparked an official HIV emergency.Still, none of this stopped Roizman — an art collector, champion rally driver and ex-convict — from being elected city mayor.

Emily Hill

Carry on up the Zambezi

I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who can’t write, isn’t Alexandra Fuller heaped up in perilous piles so near the till it’s impossible to evade her? This is like one of the most alluring Svetlana Alexievich testimonies, as if it had wandered out of the USSR and got lost in central Africa by way of a hospital in Budapest. It’s packed with exquisite jokes, quotes and details — such as when a doctor appears and ‘his gauzy green scrubs puffed out in great billows, the surgical-garb equivalent of Princess Di’s wedding dress’. Fuller started out trying to write novels before putting her own parents down on paper.

Daniel Swift

The Dambusters raid was great theatre — but almost entirely pointless

The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved the dog, and its name was used as a codeword during the bombing raid which made Gibson famous, upon the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany in May 1943. The 1955 movie The Dam Busters retells the story of the raid in thrilling melodrama, and inevitably includes repeated mentions of the troubling name. Nowadays, when the film is broadcast, it either features a warning about offensive language or is shown in an edited version, with the dog’s name changed to ‘Trigger’. The raid on the German dams is an old and much loved military episode.

Allan Mallinson

In praise of Thomas Graham, unsung hero of the Peninsular War

Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but in 1793 Thomas Graham was 45. The son of a Perthshire laird and of a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, and having inherited a good fortune, in 1774, he had married the beautiful Mary Cathcart, daughter of Baron Cathcart and of Jane Hamilton, herself the daughter of Lord Archibald Hamilton, all scions of Scots whiggery. It was evidently a love match. On the same day, Mary’s elder sister, Jane, had wed too. Their father wrote: ‘Jane has married, to please herself, John, Duke of Atholl, a peer of the realm; Mary has married Thomas Graham of Balgowan, the man of her heart, and a peer among princes.’ And so he proved.

Marcus Berkmann

The elegance and humour of Neville Cardus

As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can that be? He was, in his lifetime, the doyen of cricket writers, mainly because he effectively invented the form. Before he started writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1919, cricket journalists reported the score and little else. And what little else, you could probably have done without. As Duncan Hamilton says in his biography: Before Cardus, there were cricket writers who still called the ball ‘the crimson rambler’, referred to the wicketkeeper as ‘the custodian of the gauntlets’ and saw the ball speed ‘across the greensward’, as though the vocabulary of Merrie Olde England had never gone away. Cardus swept all that aside.