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Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Taking pride in household chores really can ease depression

There are many books about what it’s like to live with mental illness and the aftermath of child sexual abuse. Most of them, though, fall into that deeply off-putting category of ‘misery memoir’: greyscale covers and cloying titles such as ‘The Child Who Everyone Hurt’ and ‘When the Darkness Never Lifts’. You’re unlikely to want to read 300-odd pages of pain porn when healthy, let alone find yourself looking forward to the next page if, like me, you end up reading the book when you’re depressed too. I Never Said I Loved You isn’t like that. It’s funny.

Thursday

Mia Levitin

A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same historical events, and the same Pepsi ads. Writers and readers, nervously sharing this all too fluid world, circle each other to find out what the hell is going on.’ Figuring out what the hell is going on within the fluid worlds of Levy’s fiction is not always straightforward. While other authors are increasingly drawn to autofiction, for Levy, uncertain times, it seems, call for uncertain realities. The characters in The Man Who Saw Everything shape-shift, and time bends back and then twists upon itself again.

Derek Turner

The treasures to be found mudlarking by the Thames

The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore. He finds a coin bearing the head of Queen Victoria, and creeps into Windsor Castle to see the sequestered sovereign for himself. Through sheer goodhearted pluck, he succeeds where sophisticated politicians have failed, appealing to the Queen’s feelings and reawakening her sense of public duty. Modern mudlarking is a hobby rather than a necessity, but chance finds of apparently insignificant items can convey powerful emotions. Over 23 squelchy years, Lara Maiklem has amassed a battered and stained collection of everyday things turned talismanic by time and immersion.

Carolyne Larrington

Spicing up local history —with a giant, a dragon and an ancient yew

How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with a well-researched exhibition and booklet on events in the Sibfords in the first world war — fascinates me, but I am not sure that people from other parts of Oxfordshire, let alone further afield, would agree.  This is the perennial problem of the local: unless it offers, in microcosm, insight into larger themes and topics, an element of ‘so-whatness’ colours the reader’s response. Christopher Hadley’s Hollow Places takes its inspiration from a mysterious stone let into the wall in his Hertfordshire village.

David Eimer

We should all share the blame for the Rohingya tragedy

My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome coal-black dog. When I asked the name of the hound the man smiled and said ‘Kalar’, before enquiring if I knew the meaning of the word. I did. Kalar is a racial slur, employed originally by the Burmese to describe the darker-skinned immigrants from India brought to Burma by the British as cheap labour in the colonial era. More recently, the word has come to be used as a derogatory reference to Burma’s Muslims, and especially the reviled Rohingya minority in the far western state of Rakhine.

Hugh Thomson

Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?

There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie Lee walking out one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down the lane. To travel was an expression of freedom and exploration; to step out of the front door the beginning of a grand  adventure. Not any more. Travel writers now come troubled and weary before they’ve even begun. A journey can no longer be a jeu d’esprit. It has to be undertaken to expiate some trauma. It is almost as if, in today’s new puritanism, it has to be painful. One thinks of the old nursery rhyme: ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go.

Richard Francis

A single man of no fortune must be in want of a job: younger sons in Jane Austen’s England

Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure a husband who can enable them to keep or even improve their social and economic status. But what about their opposite numbers? How did the younger sons of gentlemen face up to the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood? Primogeniture meant that even those from a wealthy background often had to earn their living. While for girls marriage and career tended to be synonymous, for many of their brothers a profession came first, and then with luck a marriage would follow, since ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’. How young single men went about achieving such good fortune is the question that Rory Muir sets out to answer.

Prue Leith

From bitter loss to sweet relief: baking as therapy

This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and baker, and should be read by anyone grieving for the loss of someone they loved. It is a memoir — each chapter ending with a recipe — covering a few years, from the sudden death of a beloved mother, through the author’s bleak, enveloping sorrow to a change of career, retraining as a pastry chef, and a love affair. At first, I found it unengaging. The stages of grief — denial, anger, resentment of other people’s happiness, manic displacement activity, exhaustion, sudden outbursts of either wracking sobs or unsuitable laughter — are well-written and honest, but too familiar, too predictable. (Though what did I want? Originality in grief?

Thursday

Douglas Murray

A classic Bond villain

North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst regime. Accounts by escapees sit on our shelves alongside the memoirs of anyone (Kim Jong-il’s sushi chef, for example) who has come into contact with the country or its leadership. Some books, such as Barbara Demick’s 2009 Nothing to Envy, break through to a wider audience. But the questions still need to be satisfied. What is the world’s most closed society like? What do its captive population actually believe? And who are the leaders of this communist monarchy?

Jesse Norman

Wrong but revered

Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of the magisterial The English Constitution (1867). Since the 2008 crash he has enjoyed a vogue among central bankers for Lombard Street (1873), his brilliant anatomisation of the City of London. He remains the most revered, though not the first, editor of the Economist. The historian G.M. Young wrote in 1937 of him: We are looking for a man who was in and of his age… with sympathy to share and genius to judge… whose influence… can still impart, the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity. In short, ‘the greatest Victorian’.

Sarah Ditum

Grit and grace

The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and the Angry Young Men, with women relegated to bit parts. Celia Brayfield’s book is a corrective to that. She gathers seven young female writers who made their debuts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and proposes them as a parallel clique to the Angries. Shelagh Delaney, Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster never thought of themselves as a movement, but they ‘shared an inner place, the territory of girlhood,’ writes Brayfield.

Francesca Steele

Way out west | 15 August 2019

Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We have the outlaw, the detached hero, the fainting woman. Yet our outlaw is a camel-rider, our desperado a mother defending her homestead. Everything save the relentlessly harsh Arizona desert — a ‘godforsaken place’ of ‘baking summer hillsides’ — is unreliable: memory, relationships, even the finality of death. Both our narrators are preoccupied with the dead. Lurie, ‘a small, hirsute Levantine’ and former grave-robber wanted for murder, is haunted by the ‘wants’ of dead orphans. Alive, they set him on the road to banditry, but once deceased they urge him to seek out comradeship.

Julie Burchill

An over-flogged horse

On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a fortune from persuading a generation of women that brunch with a bunch of broads was something to aspire to. The second scrapped his way through Spain, eventually establishing an independent principality. But the thing film fans recall about the latter is that immediately after his death he was propped up on his noble mount one more time to inspire his weary troops into battle. The story may be apocryphal, but while reading Is There Still Sex in the City? I couldn’t get the image out of my head. It isn’t salubrious to see a fine writer strapped to the same old over-flogged horse and sent out once again as the standard-bearer for sexy sexagenarians.

Kate Womersley

All skin and bones

Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade of recruitment pitches follow: have you thought about becoming a haematologist? Leave the ward for the drama of theatre! If you don’t like patients, try radiology. A recent flush of popular medical non-fiction lets the public sample this professional pressure. From the heart to the gut, each author claims his or her chosen organ has been unfairly overlooked. The genre’s most recent additions are about skin and bone. Dermatologists and orthopods are often sidelined as medicine’s aestheticians and carpenters, responsible for the paintwork and scaffolding that encase and buttress the vital organs.

Thursday

David Crystal

Dot your commas

Now, how shall I start this review? I loved this book. I really did. (Too abrupt.) I loved this book, I really did. (Too rushed.) I loved this book: I really did. (Too planned.) I loved this book — I really did. (Too afterthoughty.) I loved this book... I really did. (Too uncertain.) I loved this book; I really did. Ah, that’s more like it. The semicolon gives me the best of both worlds. It helps me pause, and have a think, and yet pushes me forward to what I want to say next. It separates and unites simultaneously. It does a job that no other punctuation mark does. And the way to see this is to develop a sense of the contrast. What happens if we punctuate a sentence differently?

Niall Griffiths

Eternal truths

It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around me converse. Some would express themselves in a personal language of grunts and clicks; others would be monosyllabically gnomic; and others would make of English new and magical shapes. They’d enrapture the language (especially in oath and insult) and draw out its transformative potential. I relive that thrill whenever I come across a new book by Kevin Barry. His words address the reward centre in the brain, the neural pathways that are enlivened by nicotine, alcohol or opioids. Reading him, I am given the feeling that I’ve achieved something, done something good and am being justly remunerated. The brain lights up and grins.

Mia Levitin

Sex and the married woman

The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane.’ Inspired by Gay Talese’s 1980 reportage on the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Lisa Taddeo, a journalist and Pushcart prize-winning short story writer, peered into the windows of three ‘ordinary’ American women to illustrate their ‘erotic lives and longings’.

Anna Aslanyan

Out of sight, out of mind | 8 August 2019

Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People, too, are at the mercy of the Memory Police, an efficient lot hunting for those who can’t shake off their memories. Each disappearance involves not just getting rid of the physical object, but also of every trace of it in everyone’s mind. The unnamed narrator’s mother is among the disappeared, but things she collected remain in the house where the daughter still lives, writing novels about people losing something. ‘Everyone likes that sort of thing,’ she says of her books, as if to imply that every island has the writers it deserves.

Richard Davenporthines

Bohemian bonhomie

Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her first book in 1966. Since then she has written several dozen studies, many of them about surrealism or modernism; others with such varied subjects as the women of Bloomsbury, Robert Motherwell, Blaise Pascal, Provençal cooking, Dora Maar and the wonderfully titled The Art of Interference. Now, after a career of urbane, discreet academic distinction, Caws has decided that it is time for her to put her personality into her books as well as her name on the title page.