More from Books

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

Too clever by half

This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker who has settled in the West, leaves his rich American wife of two decades when he falls hard for a Russian prostitute he meets in London (‘the first and last love of my life’). Andrei Navrozov has worked as an editor and journalist (he has written for this magazine) and published several books, including a poetry collection with the same title as his new volume. As the subtitle indicates, he and his narrator are keen on self-deprecation — a sure sign that one thinks oneself frightfully clever.

Melanie McDonagh

Family favourites | 6 December 2018

There’s no shortage of magical rings in the children’s canon, the sort of things that usefully make you invisible or beautiful. But rings that can turn objects into a pile of excrement are something else. So one warms to Bianca Pitzorno’s Lavinia and the Magic Ring, translated from the Italian by Laura Watkinson (Catnip, £5.99) whose heroine, an orphaned match girl, is given one. Her subsequent adventures have more than a touch of Roald Dahl, being illustrated by Dahl’s co-creator, the ever fabulous Quentin Blake. The sublime Judith Kerr is 95 and razor-sharp with it. Her latest, Mummy Time (HarperCollins, £12.99), is about the wonderful adventures, real and imagined, of a little boy in a park while his mother is on her mobile phone to a friend.

Jeff Noon

Bodies pile up

A young girl finds the body of her nanny, brutally murdered, and the barely moving form of her mother, a second victim of the attack. The perpetrator of these deeds is the child’s father, who manages to flee the country and has never been seen since. This is the wound at the heart of Flynn Berry’s A Double Life (Weidenfeld, £14.99). Adulthood has given Claire Spenser no respite from her pain. Haunted by the horror she witnessed as a child, she now obsesses over every scrap of information about her father. She investigates his close friends and family, suspecting them of helping him to escape trial. But this isn’t a quest for revenge, more a personal search for justice, and above all, understanding.

William Shawcross

Our greatest ambassador

In her 66 years on the throne the Queen has represented Britain on official visits to at least 126 countries or territories, some of them many times. Robert Hardman has had the idea to write about her reign, and about Britain, through these myriad voyages. He is right to call his book Queen of the World. There is no other. He quotes Neil MacGregor, now the director of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, pointing out that the Queen has officially entered the German language. The correct word for ‘queen’ used to be ‘die Konigin’; but now German grammar lists a new entry ‘die Queen’ and states: ‘There is no plural.

Thursday

Susannah Clapp

Offstage dramas

It is, proclaimed Charles Wyndham in 1908, ‘an institution alien to the spirit of our nation’. The alien having long since landed, it’s easy to snicker. After all, what would English (British? — that’s another question) theatrical life be without the National? It has become crucial to the way audiences think about themselves — and imagine what they might become. Wyndham was partisan: he was an actor-manager. But as Daniel Rosenthal’s absorbing collection of letters to and from people at the theatre makes apparent, he was not alone. He still isn’t.

Alan Murrin

Singular narrative voices

The large number of novels written in the first person would suggest it’s an easy voice to pull off: that the closeness of ‘I’ to ‘me’ means it can be accessed by the novelist without much difficulty. But in fact, the writer must come up with a legitimate reason for why a character is giving a first-hand account of their experience. For fiction to thoroughly convince the illusion needs to be seamless — and if for a second the reader is jolted out of the narrative by wondering why this person suddenly decided to tell me this story, then the author has failed. It is a voice that must justify its own existence. Why else are so many first-person narrators writers themselves?

James Crabtree

The great Chinese power grab

Five years ago President Xi Jinping gave a speech in Kazakhstan, launching the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’, a wildly ambitious set of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects stretching through the steppes of central Asia to the Baltic Sea. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, this project more than any other has come to define China’s radical ambitions to upend a world order long dominated by Americans and Europeans. In 2015, Peter Frankopan, a dashing Oxford academic, wrote The Silk Roads, a weighty and widely acclaimed history of the ancient trading routes that once linked China to the world. It became a bestseller, partly because Frankopan, unusually for an academic, knows how to tell a yarn.

Colin Freeman

Courage and conviction

When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed that they were leaving it to ‘self-rule’ rather than all-out anarchy. Despite the militiamen in the streets and the mortars in the skies, this was what success looked like in Iraq they told the invited press pack. Nobody really believed them, of course; but only Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times could actually prove them wrong. Ignoring the ceremony invites, she donned an abaya and went into Basra to report unembedded, the first western correspondent to dare to do so in nearly two years.

Daniel Swift

In a vale of tears

Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece is a puzzling and often terrible poem. Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, is raped by Tarquin, the son of the king of Rome. Her suffering inspires a revolution led by Brutus, and this is the beginning of the first Roman republic. It’s a rich myth of sex and politics, and Lucrece’s (or Lucretia’s) story was told by Ovid and painted by Rembrandt. Shakespeare returns to the episode in several plays, notably Cymbeline. But in the poem, written in early 1594, he apparently struggles to find the emotion and drama. Perhaps he was simply young; this was early in his career, and he is still learning. Perhaps it was too pragmatic; the poem is an attempt to secure aristocratic patronage from the Earl of Southampton.

Martin Gayford

Clouds, storms and swirling stars

The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is an artist about whom we know nothing; now let’s look at his works.’Actually, there are many important figures about whom we know nothing, or at least very little. Giovanni Bellini is a case in point. Information we don’t have about him includes when he was born, and even whether he was the younger sibling of Gentile Bellini — as is usually assumed — or in fact his uncle. The discovery a while ago of a Latin poem suggesting that in old age this artist of tranquilly thoughtful saints and Madonnas was in the habit of sleeping with a handsome young man has only complicated matters, though it does enliven his image.

Christopher Howse

A chain, but no barrier

On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married to the Vignemale, the highest French peak in the Pyrenees, and, wishing to spend the night with his beloved, he climbed to the 10,820ft summit and got his servants to dig a trench, bury him under earth and stones, wrapped in his sheepskin sleeping-bag, and leave him to the darkness. He survived and wrote of this night: ‘It seemed as though I had left the earth.’ Russell is one of the oddballs with whom Matthew Carr’s book teems. Another is Sabine Baring-Gould, the author of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, who in 1848 visited the Algerian emir Abd-el-Kader, imprisoned by the French in the château at Pau.

Lewis Jones

The threat of the Black Shorts

In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a scintillating squib, published in these pages, about Trump meeting Bertie Wooster. As he later noted in a diary column, it gave him the idea of writing a new Jeeves and Wooster novel. Predictably, reassuringly, soothingly, Jeeves and the King of Clubs returns us to such idyllic haunts as Bertie’s flat in Berkeley Mansions, the Drones Club and Brinkley Court, Aunt Dahlia’s pile in Worcestershire, and to the company of the furious Sir Watkyn Bassett and his whimsical daughter Madeline, who is yet again engaged to Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup. It would appear to be the summer of 1939.

Rose Prince

Pure and mostly simple

A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a crab, for example, or eating raw young broad beans straight from the pod. He applies the same phrase to cooking. That too is messy, but not all the recipes in his new book take ages to make. Long, I thought as I gratefully lapped up Leigh’s wisdom, applies more to the time needed to become not just a fount of knowledge but also a man of very good tastes. You could include grumpy in the title of A Long and Messy Business (Unbound, £25); but I trust the advice and judgment of grumpy (not angry, mind) cooks. It is a great cookbook, as much for what irritates Rowley as what doesn’t.

Thursday

Suzannah Lipscomb

Tudor England’s other Bess

Bess of Hardwick — who died Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury — was a remarkable and fascinating woman. The wife of four men, builder of four houses, and by her death the second richest woman in the country, the exceptional Bess has attracted many biographers. Kate Hubbard’s new book differs from these by examining Bess’s life as a ‘builder within the context of the Elizabethan building world’. It is, consequently, part biography and part building history, considering along the way the erection of Elizabethan prodigy houses, such as Longleat, Theobalds, Wollaton (‘a monstrous building, heavy and hectic, overcrowded with ornament, overwhelmed with glass’), and, above all, Bess’s Hardwick New Hall.

Alex Colville

Lost cities in the sands

The main attraction in the Kenyan port of Mombasa is Fort Jesus, a vast, ochre-coloured bastion overlooking the Indian Ocean. Dominating a dusty skyline of palm trees, minarets and tower blocks, it was erected during the opening cannonade of European empire. In 1505 a Portuguese armada sacked and torched Mombasa, shortly after its ‘discovery’ by Vasco da Gama. The fort stamped the city as theirs. The coming of the Portuguese is sometimes considered the beginning of African history — a story not about Africa itself, but about bemused Europeans exploring and taming a ‘dark’ continent. And if we look at Africa before 1505, we find a world as blank as one of da Gama’s maps. This has led many to believe, as G.W.F.

Jane Ridley

The best-kept secret

In the winter of 1820–1 a 29-year old woman named Anne Lister went to stay with some female friends who lived nearby. This was a visit between gentry families of the sort that Jane Austen describes in her novels. But there the resemblance ends. By the end of her stay Anne had flirted with four women and gone to bed with three of them. She then wrote a letter to another woman, swearing undying love. We know about Lister’s sex life from the lengthy daily diaries that she kept. She devised a clever code in which she described her sexual encounters in remorseless detail. The German writer Angela Steidele has used the diaries to construct a life of Anne Lister, and a fascinating story it is too.

Ian Garrick-Mason

Ruling the waves | 22 November 2018

The sea — that wine-dark whale road, to mix Homeric and Anglo-Saxon evocations of it — has always held a special place in the human psyche. A site of both great peril and great opportunity, it has influenced our languages and our cultures, just as it has our economic systems and the contours of our many histories. A presence experienced almost as universally as the sun and the soil, the sea is one of human civilisation’s shared foundations. Andrew Lambert, an eminent naval historian, is a strong believer in the power of the sea to shape the destiny of nations.

Ian Sansom

A world in a grain of sand

You will doubtless recall the model villages of your childhood holidays: the cold rain beating down upon you as you wander, confused, from the 1:15 scale Stonehenge to the 1:18 Houses of Parliament to the 1:32 scale model railway, before sneaking your foil-wrapped sandwiches into the tea shop to share a pot of tea. Or maybe that was just me and the Queen, who famously visited Bekonscot model village in Beaconsfield as a child back in the 1930s, clearly the perfect day out for any monarch-to-be, to be able to survey a ticky-tacky kingdom made entirely of resin, foamboard and nostalgia for a past that even then had never really existed.

Marcus Berkmann

Top of the Christmas lists

The ‘gift books’ are out again, piled high in Waterstones, books that have only one reason to exist: to be given to people who don’t want them on Christmas Day. Having written one or two myself, I have seen the look on the faces of potential purchasers as they pick one up and leaf idly through its well-crafted pages. The look that says: whose Yuletide can we ruin with this? As ever, happily, there are a few genuinely decent books in among all the drivel and nonsense and tired jokes about Brexit and Donald Trump. The Spectator’s own Mark Mason is a long-serving truffler of trivial facts, which he often frames within some sort of weird travelogue: in one book he walked between every London underground station, just because he could.

Jonathan Steinberg

Life, death and everything in between

The most striking and difficult aspect of this novel is its incredible scale. How can a reviewer best discuss an enterprise containing a vast survey of life in Germany, Britain and the United States and the transformations of these societies from the end of the 19th century to the 1980s? Two volumes cover the experience of age and youth, the rise of the Nazis in Mecklenburg, the second world war, life and death in a small German town, the evolution of East German communities and the emergence of a Soviet state after the war. The New York Times appears in more or less every chapter, as the conveyer of the story of the Vietnam war and events in the city of New York itself. There are accounts of Mafia dealings and other street crimes.