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Thursday

Mark Mason

Blessed Brian

Brian Bilston’s life is summed up perfectly by the incident with his neighbour’s dog. The annoying Mrs McNulty comes round to claim that the animal has spontaneously combusted. Brian has his doubts, not least because Mrs McNulty has never owned a dog. But he nevertheless uses the incident as inspiration for a poem, ‘The Day My Dog Spontaneously Combusted’: there he was, chasing sticks, doing tricks, and all that stuff next minute, woof Brian tweets the poem to his 23 followers. This is part of his ‘renewed commitment to social media’, but serves only to reduce his follower count to 17. What’s worse, ‘to add insult to invisibility’ he also gets angry messages from the RSPCA. Bilston is the greatest English anti-hero of our time.

James Walton

One female sleuth after another

Susannah Stapleton’s erudite but hugely entertaining debut is a true-life detective story about the quest for a true-life detective. A longstanding fan of Golden Age crime fiction, Stapleton is reading a 1930s Gladys Mitchell novel featuring the sleuth Mrs Bradley when she has a sudden thought: were there any non-fictional female sleuths around at the time? Reaching for her laptop, she soon finds a reference to Maud West, who billed herself as ‘London’s only lady detective’. And with that, writes Stapleton, in by no means the book’s only use of classic detective-story phrases, ‘The game was afoot’. Her first stop is the Times archive, where she discovers an advert for Maud’s services from 1909 (‘Are you worried? If so, consult me!

Dorian Lynskey

The last days of Sodom

In 2002 I flew to New York to interview the dance music producer whose 1999 release Play remains the bestselling electronica album of all time. A few years earlier, Moby had been known as a teetotal Christian vegan, an ascetic anomaly in a scene built on hedonism, so there was something comic about his new-found reputation as a promiscuous party monster. The photo-shoot paid homage to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, with Moby posing in a cardigan, reading a magazine, oblivious to the 18 naked women surrounding him. (No, this concept wouldn’t fly in 2019.) The headline was ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’.

David Crane

The Elder, the better

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about the poet and verse dramatist Gordon Bottomley. I can’t remember now which of his plays it concerns, but it must have been just after the notorious MP and swindler Horatio Bottomley had been imprisoned for fraud in 1922, because as the curtain fell on the final excruciating scene there was a shout from the audience: ‘My God, they’ve gaoled the wrong Bottomley!’ A reader is not going to get very far with Daisy Dunn’s new biography — the opening four lines, in fact — without a sinking sensation that the author has landed herself with the wrong Pliny.

Justin Marozzi

A legend under siege

As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming the mountain stronghold of Masada, where 967 Jews were making their last stand in around AD 73, the rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair gathered the men together and called for a mass suicide. He told them: We have it in our power to die nobly and in freedom. Our fate at the break of day is certain capture; but there is still the free choice of a noble death with those we hold most dear. That way their wives would not be dishonoured by Roman soldiers, nor their children enslaved: Let us spare nothing but our provisions; for they will testify, when we are dead, that it was not want which subdued us, but that… we preferred death to slavery.

Duncan Fallowell

Where’s Coco?

Anne de Courcy, an escapee from tabloid journalism, has become a polished historian of British high society in the 20th century. Her book The Viceroy’s Daughters, an account of the three daughters of Lord Curzon, marked her transition from debutante-itis to something grittier. It was followed by a biography of Diana Mosley, published a few months after Mosley’s death. When I questioned Diana about it she told me that her previous biographer, Jan Dalley, had been frightened to ask anything too personal, but that De Courcy had been robust and unafraid to probe.

Lynn Barber

A fatal misunderstanding

What is it about Naomi Wolf that inspires such venom? Perhaps that she’s American, brash, media-savvy and not averse to showing off her impressive embonpoint, which might go down badly in academe. But also — she makes mistakes. She made a pretty bad mistake in her very first book, The Beauty Myth, published in l990, by saying that 150,000 women died of anorexia in the US every year — whereas in fact she should have said 150,000 women suffered from anorexia. In this book, she seems to have dropped an even bigger clanger. Matthew Sweet started the ball rolling on his Radio 3 Free Thinking programme, when he told her that she was quite wrong to say that the number of executions for sodomy increased in the latter half of the l9th century.

Matthew Adams

Anything but a quiet life

Meet Deen Datta, a nervous, practical and cautious man, born and brought up in Calcutta, who now lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a dealer in rare books. Recently and unceremoniously ditched by a woman with whom he had been in a once promising relationship, and with his sixties ‘looming in the not-too-distant-future’, he spends his days in a state of relentless desolation: humiliated, lovelorn and ‘more alone than ever’. Emotional turbulence must be dispensed with. What’s called for, Deen resolves, is ‘a quiet, understated, uneventful life’. His resolve is not signally robust. When we encounter him in the early pages of Gun Island (Amitav Ghosh’s tenth novel), he is already casting about for another romantic entanglement.

Thursday

Tom Lathan

Poisoned paradise

For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be… we begin to realise that we have more past than future’. With the approach of her 50th birthday and the onset of the menopause, she is struck powerfully by this notion. Her response is to leave London and to relocate, with her husband and their six-year-old daughter, to the American West, a place where she hopes ‘the fabric of our lives and rhythm of our days would be different’. It is an idyllic, optimistic premise that ties into the mythos of the American West as being a place where people can reinvent themselves.

Carolyne Larrington

Myths ancient and modern

Six remarkable stories shape this book. Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo Cycle of heroic poems, the French Chanson de Roland, the German Nibelunglied and our own home-grown epic Beowulf, Nicholas Jubber’s new work is at once a travel journal, a meditation on the idea — and ideal — of Europe, and an exploration of a pivotal moment in the author’s own past. Following the 2016 referendum, Jubber sets off to the Greek island of Chios, perhaps Homer’s birthplace, and now at the front line of the Mediterranean migrant crisis. After a month volunteering in a refugee camp he works his way west and northwards until he comes to rest on the turf roof of a farmhouse in southern Iceland.

John Burnside

Evil under the sun

When James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential appeared in 1990, it introduced us to a world of blatant corruption, casual racism and routine police brutality that, a year before anybody ever heard of Rodney King, might have seemed fanciful to some. Set in the early 1950s, the novel was a landmark in neo-noir writing, in which historical detail mingled with pacy fiction to conjure up a city that was both highly glamorous and rotten to the core. At the same time, Ellroy’s staccato, near-telegraphic prose drove the action relentlessly onwards, with an urgency that seemed designed to swamp not just the reader but also the protagonists themselves with noise, movement and a lowering, inescapable sense of doom.

Diana Hendry

The lust of kings

The novel is a wonderfully commodious creature. One might wish they made trousers like it, for it can stretch or shrink to accommodate almost anything, from Ali Smith’s Spring (part story, part polemic) to Max Porter’s prose-poem/fable, Lanny. Then there’s the current vogue for re-tellings: Margaret Atwood’s version of The Tempest and Pat Barker’s feminist look at the Iliad. Penguin even has a ‘Modern Retellings Book List’, which includes Alexander McCall Smith’s reworking of Emma. (Why would you?) Elizabeth Cook was ahead of the game with her Achilles in 2001.

Amanda Craig

An agonising vigil

Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once shrouded in mystery, have become so popular that another may seem otiose. We are all produced in variations of anxiety, pain and delight: what is the point of labouring labour? Two years ago, the novelist Francesca Segal gave birth to twins ten weeks prematurely. Her account of their struggle to survive in the neo-natal units of two London hospitals could be mawkish, banal and of no interest to anyone save those who have experienced a similar ordeal. That it is, in fact, as gripping as a thriller and as moving as a love story is testament to her exquisite writing and deep humanity.

Katrina Gulliver

The cruellest sea

‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors know some version of this saying, referring to the dangerous waters more than 40º south of the equator. In Wild Sea, Joy McCann focuses on these waters with a history of the Southern Ocean. The ocean surrounds Antarctica, its northern bound still open to dispute. In the 1928 first edition of Limits of Oceans and Seas, the Southern Ocean was delineated by land-based limits: Antarctica to the south, and South America, Africa, Australia and Broughton Island, New Zealand to the north. More recently, cartographers have tried to limit its scope.

Andrew Taylor

Three’s a crowd | 6 June 2019

‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He and Ellen Terry, who so often played opposite him, were international celebrities. Bram Stoker was their intimate friend and associate. He managed Irving’s Lyceum Theatre for 27 years and spent much of his career in their shadow. More than 100 years after his death, however, Stoker’s name is almost certainly more widely known than theirs, solely because of his most famous creation, Dracula (who is believed to have been partly modelled on his employer). In Shadowplay, Joseph O’Connor focuses on the three-cornered relationship between Stoker and the two actors.

Mark Bostridge

The loveliest girl in Vienna

It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this is the case with Tom Lehrer’s deliciously satirical tribute, ‘Alma’. Reading Alma Mahler’s obituary in 1964 — the ‘juiciest, spiciest, raciest’ he’d ever come across — Lehrer was amazed by her matrimonial CV and proceeded to immortalise it in a catchy lyric. Not only had Alma been married three times, to the composer Gustav Mahler, to Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, and, finally, to Franz Werfel, author of the runaway bestseller The Song of Bernadette, she’d also managed to bag as lovers some of the top creative men in the Europe of her time.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 6 June 2019

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON   This column concludes my brief series about Shakespeare and the Globe, linked to the summer season of history plays — from Richard II to Henry V — sponsored by Merian. It’s been a pleasure to write. And one of the special pleasures it has offered is the chance to explore what Oxford’s Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Emma Smith, identifies in her book This Is Shakespeare as the Stratford man’s outstanding quality: what she calls his ‘gappiness’. That is what academics more usually call indeterminacy. (I can see why she prefers ‘gappiness’.

Clinton Heylin

A combustible combo

Once upon a time there was the arche-typal Manchester band — half of which came from Macclesfield, in leafy Cheshire, and a quarter of which grew up in Salford, a city in its own right, full of fans of a famous football club equally confused about its true home. This combustible combo was Joy Division — or it was after they dropped Warsaw, because of its Nazi connotations, adopting instead a moniker given to the brothels in Nazi concentration camps. Not a mass of contradictions, then. Bathed in such muddy waters, Joy Division remains a band in need of serious re-evaluation 40 years after the release of their debut LP, Unknown Pleasures.

Wynn Wheldon

Shaggy dog stories

What is it that distinguishes humans from other animals? The default answer nowadays is tediously misanthropic, but a more interesting distinction is that humans keep pets. Why this should be is the subject of this book. Jacky Colliss Harvey investigates the men and women who have owned, doted on, and in some cases mistreated their pets, in literature, painting, the movies and history. This begins 26,000 years ago, when a boy and his dog went exploring in bear caves in the south of France. The evidence was discovered in petrified tracks at Chauvet in the Ardèche in 1994.

Thursday

Anne Margaret Daniel

Changed utterly | 30 May 2019

All cities are shapeshifters, but London is special. London is a palimpsest of places gone but not lost. Even as it is taken apart and rebuilt reaching to the skies, London remains rooted in the lay of the land, shore ditches, hills and fields still giving their names to the neighbourhoods upon them, and all bisected by the great snaky tidal river. Born in Burnt Oak, Robert Elms grew up on one of those hills — Notting — and he would be sad but not remotely surprised that a Google search today cites first the film and then offers the question: ‘Is Notting Hill a real place?’ It was, he would say. Or, once upon a time, it was. Today, ‘it is international, aspirational, like a living Patek Philippe advert’.