WATCH AT 7PM

Livestream – Masters of War: From Napoleon to Churchill

More from Books

Thursday

James Evans

Britain’s obsession with boxing is as deep-rooted as its devotion to cricket

Boxing has long been a British obsession, exported successfully to North America, but never widespread on the Continent. Mainland Europeans struggled to understand that in general there was no quarrel between contestants who assaulted each other so brutally. ‘Anything that looks like fighting,’ explained one bewildered French visitor, ‘is delicious to an Englishman.’ He might have said the same about drinking or gambling, pastimes embedded in the fabric of Georgian society to an ‘astonishing extent’. They were habits, moreover, upon which the popularity of boxing depended. The story of Daniel Mendoza, little known except to sporting historians, is fascinating on both a personal level and more generally.

Wynn Wheldon

The Great War was enough to make grown men weep

Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo it took a mere six weeks for the diplomats of Europe’s Great Powers to plunge the continent into cataclysmic war. Austria-Hungary wanted Serbia, which was protected by Russia, which was in an entente cordiale with Great Britain and France. Germany was the ally of Austria-Hungary. For good measure, Turkey was the ally of Germany. Simon Heffer straightforwardly follows the messaging and the meeting that resulted in catastrophe. There are no forces or movements here, but rather individuals trying to serve their nations’ best interests, and with generally good intentions all round. The road to hell.

Philip Hensher

Lydia Davis, like an inspirational teacher, tempts her readers into more reading

A good indicator of just how interesting and alluring Lydia Davis’s Essays proved might be my recent credit card statement. It was hard to read very far without being introduced to an unfamiliar author, and the terms of the introduction were frequently so seductive that I found myself breaking off to order several secondhand books. The fee for writing this review had long been swallowed up when I realised that if I read everything that Davis made sound irresistible I would probably never reach the end of this splendid collection — and end up like Achilles chasing the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox.

A.N. Wilson

The first Puritans weren’t so much killjoys as ardent believers in honest living

‘Puritan’ is a term of abuse, and we tend to use it to refer to such figures as the nightmarishly moralistic, sour-faced women who force Hester Prynne to be emblazoned with the Scarlet Letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. But David D. Hall, doyen of 17th-century puritanism, goes deeper than this. His history is not so much one of ranters as of honest men and women trying to get right the most fundamental things of all: the human relationship with God, and hence the right way to be living and the right sort of society to be ordering. It is these basic questions, as he shows over and over again, which determined the pattern of the Puritans’ behaviour in the early stages of the Reformation, in Scotland and in England.

Stuart Kelly

Will Self’s memoir of drug addiction is a masterpiece of black humour

Well, it was always going to be called Will. More than once in this terrifying, terrific book, Will Self refers to ‘nominative determinism’ — the idea that a name somehow foretells a life. That he chooses Will, not Self, is indicative and ambiguous. This memoir — not an autobiography — starts in May and ends in August 1986, but also spirals back to 1979, 1982 and 1984 in the kind of chronological fracturing that has typified his later fictions. It is a chronicle of addiction, and the ‘will’ is everything, from the insistent desire, to a futureless future, to the psychological horror of being called ‘Little Willy’ by his mother. Throughout, he normally refers to himself as Will, but this is not Caesar-style self-aggrandising.

Thursday

Cal Revely-Calder

Nostalgia for old Ceylon: lush foliage and tender feelings from Romesh Gunesekera

Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure. An untenable form of society judders, in technicolor and often loudly, to an inevitable end. Romesh Gunesekera was born in Ceylon in 1954, and much of his fiction has lingered in fascination on its years as a dominion — no longer a colony, not yet a republic. Reef, his first novel, took us to 1962, to the island’s coast and the childhood of Triton, a gifted chef. Suncatcher, his sixth, is back in the capital Colombo two years on. Kairo, who’s narrating what was then his teenage point of view, is a similar boy to Triton: same curiosity, same restlessness, same goodness of heart. He goes to school, when it isn’t closed — though usually it is.

Ian Garrick-Mason

What do we really mean by the ‘language’ of animals?

The reality of animal communication (or, more precisely, our belief in that reality) is a fact underwritten not by science but by direct experience. A dog owner knows that his dog communicates with him because he makes eye contact with it, notices its body movements, listens to its barks and whines and yips, and associates all of these actions with the contexts in which they occur and the actions that take place before and after such ‘signals’ have been sent. The owner unscientifically — but naturally and effortlessly — projects into the dog a sense of awareness and autonomy similar to the one he himself possesses.

Martin Gayford

It’s yellow, not green, that’s the colour of jealousy

Making attributions to Leonardo da Vinci,  the great art historian Adolfo Venturi once remarked, is like ‘picking up a red-hot iron’. Those who wish to avoid injury, he advised, should exercise great caution. Whether or not the scholars who attributed the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to the great man are now suffering from badly burnt fingers — not to mention the buyer who paid $450.3 million for it — is a question of informed opinion. On the whole, Carmen C. Bambach, the author of the monumental Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (Yale, 4 Volumes, £400) votes against. In Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings in Detail (Prestel £65), Alessandro Vezzosi, also a noted authority on the artist, is more guarded.

Frances Wilson

Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?

Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list, and this second collection comes crowned in laurels: ‘She’s an unstoppable force of nature,’ says her American editor. ‘This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best,’ says Eleanor Catton. Stephen King calls her ‘required reading’, and early reviewers on the website Goodreads describe this book as ‘genius’, ‘astounding’, ‘resplendent’ and ‘epiphanic’. Because she is a woman who writes essays, Jamison has been compared with Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag, but she is the antithesis of her predecessors.

Adam Zamoyski

Poland was no walkover for the Reich

‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances against tanks. In this timely and authoritative book, Roger Moorhouse dispels this and other myths concocted by German and Soviet propaganda. He has trawled through an impressive quantity of unpublished Polish and German sources, as well as a wealth of eyewitness testimonies from both sides, to produce a balanced account of this much neglected yet important episode of the second world war which is both harrowing and inspiring.

Sara Wheeler

The exotic Silk Road is now a highway to hell

This engaging book describes the Norwegian author’s travels round the five Central Asian Stans — a region where toponyms still make the heart beat faster: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent. Fittingly, given the means by which foreign powers have harmed the Stans, Erika Fatland begins her story with the disastrous methane spill which Soviet geologists caused in Turkmenistan in 1971. But it seems that however malign exterior forces have been, these countries are perfectly capable of — if not experts in — producing ghastly politicians themselves. Saparmurat Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi, emerges top of a hotly contested field of nutters. He declared himself a prophet, and banned dogs from Ashgabat because he didn’t like their smell.

Julie Burchill

The old monster Elton John appears charmingly self-deprecating

I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary, whether asking fans on to the stage to dance and then screaming at them not to get so close, or demanding that an employee do something about the blustery weather keeping him awake. They say you get the face you deserve after 50, and he looks every inch the bitter old busybody who divides his time between twitching the curtains and gossiping over the fence about the behaviour of those younger and prettier than himself. He has now become drearily bound into the liberal establishment — see his recent puffed-up pronouncement about Brexit: ‘I’m ashamed of my country… I am sick to death of Brexit. I am a European.

Thursday

Rose Prince

Make it an applefest this Christmas — the best of the year’s cookbooks

If it were not for a banker with a hangover, we would not have Eggs Benedict. Or so one of the creation stories goes. One morning in 1894 Lemuel Benedict walked in to the Waldorf Hotel, New York, feeling a bit rough. He asked the Maître D’, Oscar Tschirky, for hot buttered toast, bacon, two poached eggs and — crucially — a ‘pitcher’ of hollandaise sauce. This story is recounted in Signature Dishes that Matter (Phaidon, £35), a chronology of 200 or so inventions, from gelato (ice cream) in 1686 to Claude Bosi’s ‘duck jelly’ in 2017. Put together by seven food critics with global knowledge, this is a truly gorgeous book to own and to give to that friend or relative who dines out like a collector.

Peter Parker

Capturing the mood of the English landscape: the genius of John Nash

‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton wrote in April 1939, ‘I would first show him a good Constable and then one or two of John Nash’s best watercolours.’ This is about as good an endorsement any painter could ask for, but Nash is more usually bracketed with, and overshadowed by, his older brother. There have been major exhibitions of Paul Nash’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010 and at Tate Britain three years ago, whereas the last truly substantial retrospective of John’s work was at the Royal Academy in 1967.

Melanie McDonagh

Angels and daemons: Children’s books for Christmas

Sometimes I have to admit the reason I read children’s books with pleasure is that I’m essentially puerile —and look, that’s not a bad thing if it means getting to read The Steves by Morag Hood (Pan Macmillan, £6.99), aimed at three year olds. It’s about two puffins called Steve who keenly resent the claims of the other to be Number One Steve. It is the kind of infantile playground name-calling which makes me laugh, and I reckon young children will like it too, especially Steves. Judith Kerr, the peerless, razor-sharp author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea as well as the tear-jerker My Henry has, alas, gone to her reward in heaven, but we still, thank God, have Shirley Hughes, whose picture books for small children are as engaging as ever.

Thursday

Jenny Colgan

Friends forever: the inside story of the American sitcom classic

Here is a test to tell you whether you will like this book or not: when I write ‘So, no one told you life was going to be this way…’, do you secretly clap your hands four times? If so, could you be any more excited to get your hands on it? The excellent news is that, just like the show, Still Friends, which rabid fans would almost certainly buy whatever old rubbish was in it, is much, much better than it needed to be. It will appeal to anyone interested, not just in the six stars (seven if you include Marcel the monkey, which I most certainly do) but in how the extraordinary 24-episode-a-year studio system managed to churn out such quality at such a pace (answer: with extreme difficulty). This is the ultimate deep dive, told in a breezy journalistic style.

Frank Lawton

Ben Lerner’s much hyped latest novel reads like an audit of contemporary grievances

Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in The Topeka School, while things keep returning, something has also been lost. Lerner’s third novel reunites us with Adam Gordon, the protagonist — and Lerner surrogate — of his much acclaimed debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam is a senior at Topeka High School in the late 1990s, an aspiring poet and champion debater (as was Lerner), whose parents are psychologists at the Foundation, ‘a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital’ which treats just about everyone in the book.

Rodric Braithwaite

Yalta was a carve-up — and the Poles are understandably still bitter about it

‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ principle expresses an uncomfortable truth. The eight-day meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 settled the fate of Eastern Europe and beyond. Its effects are still with us. President George W. Bush compared it with the way Britain, France and the Soviet Union sold out to Hitler before the war began: he called it ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’. ‘Yalta’, like ‘Munich’, has become a synonym for the cynical betrayal of the weak by the strong. It is an oft-told, well-documented and controversial story. Diana Preston retells it fluently, perceptively and with meticulous scholarship.