More from Books

Wednesday

Philippe Sands

A force for good: Samantha Power is driven by a deep sense of idealism

In the spring of 2008 I spent a fine day in the company of Samantha Power. She had come to the Hay Festival to talk about Chasing the Flame, her book about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative to Iraq who was murdered in the August 2003 bombing of UN offices in Baghdad, who was Power’s colleague and friend. The audience was captivated by an exceptional individual, one who spoke with care and clarity, in a gravelly voice of distinct cadence. She was forthright, self-deprecating, intelligent, humorous and thoughtful in response to my questions and those of the audience. She was also a cracking storyteller, one who quickly won her audience over with a recollection of the moment President George W.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The other half of Wham!

Have you heard the story about the time that Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s heart-throb, refused to answer the door to Andy Warhol after John Lennon hissed at him: ‘Do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’? How about Ridgeley’s fondness for orgies, during which he used to watch couples having sex on his snooker table while yelling: ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’? No? Well, that’s probably because these are taken from Elton John’s gloriously filthy memoir Me, in which he describes the many successes and wild excesses of his life in eye-popping, thigh-clenching detail.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Duty, devotion and lack of self-pity — Anne Glenconner is an example to us all

Trained from a young age to be self-effacing, never liking to be the centre of attention, having been traumatised for life by being made to wear a bright green dress sewn from old parachute material at her own coming out dance in 1950, Anne Glenconner must be wincing at being thrust into the limelight by today’s columnists. Suddenly she is being fêted as Lady Stiff Upper Lip, poster girl for the British non-self-pitying spirit and an example to us all — particularly to Prince Andrew and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. She protests she wasn’t stiff-upper-lipped at one of the worst moments of her life, which was on a Concorde flight to Miami in 1986 to see her son Christopher, who lay in a coma in hospital after a motorcycle accident in his gap year.

Sarah Sands

How I’ll remember John Humphrys — by his producer Sarah Sands

There was a dinner in Soho to celebrate the publication of John Humphrys’s book, A Day Like Today. John was asked by his publishers to select guests — an interesting mix from the left and right — and organise the seating, a small piece of administration that made him fretful and therefore resentful. The room grew warm with conversation and affection, so John insisted on throwing open the windows to the cold and the boisterous sound of the street below. Then he interrupted the civil murmuring between the guests to go round the big table with a question: scale of one to ten, was Britain going to be better or worse in three years’ time? In other words, he got everybody started on Brexit. It went downhill impressively.

Mary Killen

When a footman’s home is his castle

My own love for this memoir may be all to do with snobbery and self-identification. Moreover, I’ve always thought a life downstairs is an underrated career opportunity, offering access to all the aesthetic pleasures of the big house while bypassing the nuisance of admin and the financial burdens of its upkeep. On another level, here is the psychic restfulness of parking your own ego while, like HM the Queen, you focus on serving. And now I’ve found a personal account which, in spare and understated comic style, not only confirms that theory but refreshes my memories of the old days in my Irish homeland. Gillies Macbain totally gets the point of Ireland and its — mainly benign — peculiarities.

Lynn Barber

Burnt out at 27: the tragedy of Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin hated the word ‘star’, but she loved the trappings. As soon as she made serious money she bought a Porsche convertible and had it painted with psychedelic images to make it the most recognisable car in San Francisco. She also rejoiced in her lynx fur coat, courtesy of Southern Comfort. She sent them a file of all the numerous press clippings that said Southern Comfort was her favourite tipple and they responded with a cheque. ‘Oh man, that was the best hustle I ever pulled,’ she crowed to a reporter. ‘Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?’ If only she’d stuck to Southern Comfort she might still be alive (she was born in 1943) instead of dying at 27, like so many rock stars, of a heroin overdose.

Honor Clerk

The genius of Reynolds Stone: a private man in a public world

You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his designs. If you’re familiar with the masthead of the Economist or remember the clock on the top of the front page of the Times; if you’ve seen the colophon on a book published by the Folio Society or Hamish Hamilton or owned a Penguin edition of Shakespeare; if you’ve borrowed something from the London Library; if you had a £5 note in your wallet in the 1960s; if you’ve walked over the memorial to Winston Churchill on the floor of Westminster Abbey or if you own a passport with the royal coat of arms on the front, then you’ve been in close contact with the work of this wood engraver, typographer, letter-cutter and watercolourist.

Mike Jackson

Neither ‘Mad Dog’ nor ‘Warrior Monk’, General Jim Mattis is a thoughtful strategist

General Jim Mattis ended his remarkable career as a four-star US marine general, and finally as US secretary of defense. His book Call Sign Chaos is co-authored with Bing West, also an ex-marine and one-time assistant secretary of defense. It is partly an autobiography and partly a treatise on leadership. The autobiography relates his career from second lieutenant to general by way of three wars: the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of that neighbouring country; the removal of the Taleban from Afghanistan in 2001 following 9/11; and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally come his days — a total of 712 — as defense secretary, from January 2017 to December 2018. Throughout this account Mattis develops his philosophy of leadership.

William Waldegrave

How troll stories blighted the life of Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ, never wanted his life written, and this passionate wish presents the first hurdle to someone as fond of him as was Nikolai Tolstoy, the son of O’Brian’s second wife, Mary, by her first husband. Why pry further? Why deploy papers and diaries which O’Brian expressly instructed should be destroyed? To this objection, Tolstoy can offer two replies, and both are powerful. First, one biography already exists, not only unauthorised but deeply resented by O’Brian in his lifetime; and on the basis of that book, and of partial evidence from one faction within a fairly dysfunctional family, some unpleasant accusations have been made about O’Brian’s behaviour towards his first wife, Elizabeth Jones.

Stanley Wells

Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot

I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot have in common?’ The answer, of course, would be David Suchet, who has impersonated all these characters on stage or television during an acting career spanning half a century. In Behind the Lens, Suchet offers a series of autobiographical sketches, written in an amiably informal style and covering many aspects of his professional and personal life. He writes of his Jewish ancestry, his childhood, his schooldays (during which he was caned for hiding a forbidden Mars Bar in one of his shoes) and his private passions — for canals, music, foreign travel and for his family, the last being ‘the most important thing in the world to me’.

Thursday

Colin Greenwood

The Great Barrier Grief — and countless other marine disasters

In the last, wrenching episode of BBC’s Blue Planet 2, there’s a distressing moment when a young Australian diver, expert in his patch of the Great Barrier Reef, admits ‘I cried in my mask’ as he swam over an ossuary of recently bleached-out coral bones. Professor Callum Roberts’s memoir of a life devoted to the study of our oceans, and in particular their coral reefs, is a ravishing, alarming account of these underwater palaces of wonder, and the existential threat they face from humanity and our warming climate. Reefs take up just 0.1 per cent of our planet’s surface, yet provide home and breeding grounds for more than a quarter of all sea life. They are also the canaries in the carbon dioxide coal mine.

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.