More from Books

Thursday

Nick Cohen

The madness of Charles III

Republicans hate to admit it, but the stability brought by the long reign of that most careful of monarchs Elizabeth II has helped Britain manage the decline from empire to middle-ranking power surprisingly well. As the Treason Act of 1351 is no longer in force, and to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the sovereign no longer carries the death penalty, I can state the obvious. Her Majesty is 92. She is entering her last days as Brexit threatens the peace in Ireland and the union with Scotland, and divides England and Wales into hostile camps. A vigorous PR campaign is underway to persuade us that now is not the worst possible moment for her zealous and under-educated son to succeed. The Prince promised the BBC that he would stop interfering in politics when he became king.

Peter Parker

Messing about on the river

The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and once declared: ‘Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.’ It is Dennison’s contention that for Grahame the clock stopped even earlier.

Thursday

Alex Preston

You couldn’t make it up

Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Memory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ for the writer who calls ‘something wholly autobiographical fiction, something wholly fictional autobiography’. When Nabokov did this, Pamuk said, it changed ‘the secret centre of the story’. The fertile interplay of fact and fiction animates a pair of books by the Korean American author Alexander Chee: one a collection of essays, the other Chee’s debut novel, published in the US in 2001 but appearing in Britain for the first time. There’s something strangely nostalgic about reading Edinburgh (it’s set in Maine; the title is a reference to a book that features in the novel).

Bill Emmott

The reinvention of a nation

When Japan hosts the Rugby Union World Cup next year, and still more so the summer Olympics in 2020, all eyes will be on its omotenashi (hospitality), perhaps its technology, certainly its efficiency, but there will be little thought of symbolism. Not so for the 1964 Tokyo games, when the Olympic flame was carried up its last 160 steps by a 19-year-old named Yoshinori Sakai, who had been born, near Hiroshima, on the day the atomic bomb was dropped. ‘Atom Boy’ bore twin messages: that Japan had been a victim of an unbelievable horror; and that it was now reborn as a modern, democratic state.

Ian Kelly

Riots in the stalls

The age of Garrick, Norman Poser, a law professor, insists, gave us much of what we take for granted today in the theatre: ‘naturalistic’ acting, and, as Dr Johnson remarked, the very idea of the business of acting as a profession. Hence this book’s portentous title. Its curtain raiser trumpets themes of fame, personality, interiority and cultural self-knowledge, but regrettably Poser’s main show offers a trawl through anecdotes in a style and structure more wooden than the monopedal comic actor Sam Foote’s peg leg. Naturalism in acting, it is often said, originated in this era. But it’s a subject as large as it’s slippery.

William Cook

A brief glimpse of utopia

Today Munich is a prosperous and peaceful place — Germany’s most affluent, attractive city. Wandering its leafy avenues, lined with handsome apartments and shiny new BMWs, it’s hard to picture anything remotely revolutionary happening here. However, exactly 100 years ago this cosy bastion of conservatism was overrun by one of Europe’s most unlikely revolutions, led by an idealistic theatre critic called Kurt Eisner. For a British equivalent, imagine a socialist insurgency led by Kenneth Tynan. Of course, like all well-intentioned revolutions, it was doomed to fail.

Ursula Buchan

Gardening books: Other men’s flowers

There are probably no more gifted professional gardeners in England than Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain, husband and wife and joint head gardeners at West Dean in Sussex. On the verge of their retirement, after 27 years of effecting a renaissance in the gardens and grounds of this country house arts centre (bequeathed by Edward James), the couple have described their work and achievements in At West Dean: The Creation of an Exemplary Garden (White Lion, £40).

Robert Carver

Iron in the soul

‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’, said Winston Churchill as prime minister in 1942, to his secretary of state for India, Leo Amery. Like John Nicholson, Churchill had soldiered on the subcontinent as a young man, and both men saw fighting on the North-West Frontier. Nicholson was a career officer in the East India Company army. ‘I dislike India and its inhabitants,’ he said as a young man, and never changed that opinion. Duty, obligation and a career kept both men in a country they loathed; the graves of more than two million Britons in India demonstrate that it was not simply a place to get rich in, but a place, too often, to die in at an early age.

Benjamin Markovits

Conflicted genius

Boxing writers sometimes try to make comparisons across weight groups. They used to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweather was the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Saul Bellow for many years has had the reputation of the best page-for-page writer. Every paragraph has something that arrests you: an image, an insight, a line of dialogue, or a moral dilemma. This is the kind of thing: ‘My brother picked me up by the trustful affections as one would lift up a rabbit by the ears.’ The sentences flow, both natural and vivid. Bellow can capture the moment’s peace of a commercial traveller, sitting in the garden of his lover’s rented apartment: He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning. He heard the long phrases of the birds. No enemy wanted his life.

Thursday

Agnès Poirier

Baron of the boulevards

Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera house, designed by Charles Garnier ‘in a style of unabashed grandeur’, with its gilded and mirrored salons, shimmering candelabra and marbled colonnades, mosaics, statues, frescoes and ‘flaming gas torches enhancing a central stairwell that turned the ascending and descending audience into an impressive spiralling spectacle’. The building had been under construction for almost 15 years at vast cost and symbolised the extravagance of the Second Empire, a period in French history which lasted for 18 years, from Napoleon III’s coup in 1852 to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

Lee Langley

In Pinochet’s shadow

You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays a crippling hand on the generation that follows political catastrophe; shift the focus and you’re plunged into a darkly comic road trip with a hungover trio in an empty hearse chasing a lost coffin across the Andes cordillera. The three protagonists are trapped in the past, obsessively dredging up and re-living the ruined lives of their parents, dissidents under Chile’s dictator, Pinochet. The terrors inflicted on the adults have profoundly scarred their offspring; the novel belongs to a category the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra has called ‘the literature of the children’. In Santiago, grey ash is falling from the sky, cloaking the city with feathery dust.

Peter Stothard

Mythic automata

Among the myths of Ancient Greece the Cyclops has become forever famous, the Talos not so much. While both were monsters who hurled giant boulders at Mediterranean shipping, the Cyclops, who attacked Odysseus on his way home from Troy was a monster like us, the son of a god, an eater, a drinker, a sub-human with feelings. The Talos was more alien, by some accounts a mere machine, manufactured in metal by a god and pre-programmed only to sink ships and roast invaders alive, a cross between a Cruise missile launcher and an automatic oven. Talos began its existence just as early as the Cyclops. But it was only described with drama in the epic poem the Argonautica, by Apollonius of Rhodes some 500 years later. Homer’s readers have always been the more numerous.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

In the bedroom, with a carving-knife

Early on the morning of 6 May 1840, a young housemaid in a respectable Mayfair street discovered that her master, the elderly and mildly eccentric peer Lord William Russell, had been murdered in his bed. His throat had been hacked at like a joint of meat, slicing through the windpipe and almost severing his head. It turned out not to be much of a whodunit. Within a few days, a young Swiss-born valet in the house named François Courvoisier was taken away for questioning, and faced by a pile of circumstantial evidence eventually he confessed to the crime. The real question is why he did it.

Stephen Bayley

An ambivalent icon

Immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century discovered in Upper New York Bay, after a long, uncomfortable trans-Atlantic journey, a real portal and a symbolic one. There was Ellis Island: designer, William A. Boring. Then there was the Statue of Liberty on neighbouring Bedloe’s Island: designer, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. The first was a practical introduction to America, where you got processed; the second a more mystical one, where you got inspired. It’s a good moment to publish an account of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps the world’s most famous sculpture. One reason: in London there’s an evolving debate about what a monument should be, stimulated by the clumsy Holocaust Memorial proposed near Parliament.

Peter Oborne

Not always cricket

At the beginning of August this year, the England test team played what is supposed to have been the 1,000th test match since the 1877 Ashes test against Australia in Melbourne, a match which was won by Australia by 45 runs. But was it really a test match? The players in that 1877 game had no idea they were test cricketers. England’s finest player, W.G. Grace, wasn’t there. Nor was Australia’s great bowler, Fred Spofforth. England played as James Lillywhite’s XI and only later was the match awarded test status. Nevertheless, the show was on the road. Simon Wilde, cricket correspondent of the Sunday Times, has had the engaging idea of telling the story of the England national team.

Ariane Bankes

Mysteries unfold

The striking yet subtle jacket image from Donatello’s ‘Madonna of the Clouds’ announces this book’s quality from the outset. Its focus is drapery, and the way that artists of the Italian Renaissance clothed their subjects, and furnished their narratives, to articulate veils of meaning that were infinitely suggestive. Marshalling a lifetime’s inquiry into the art of that era, Paul Hills — emeritus professor at the Courtauld, and author of the classic Venetian Colour — deploys an X-ray vision to drill beneath the skin, to find the pulse, the heartbeat of a painting or sculptural relief. He offers a key, a new entry point into works we thought we were familiar with; in doing so, he tweaks back a veil between us and them.

Justin Marozzi

Hair-raising stuff

Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need your head seen to. With civil war raging in Syria, Iraq mired in internecine conflict while mopping up the remnants of Daesh, al-Qa’eda running amok in southern Yemen and simmering strife between Israelis and Palestinians, walking across 13 countries might not seem like an obvious itinerary. But Levison Wood, it is fair to say, is not your average traveller. A committed biped, he is the author of a trio of books on walking the Nile, Himalayas and Americas respectively. Ostensibly unlike the other television-led journeys which preceded it, this expedition was meant to be a lower key affair, though online publicity for an accompanying documentary suggests otherwise.

Mark Bostridge

A brief period of rejoicing

Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice Day, Winston Churchill wrote that their memory was all too fleeting, and that the spirit of wild rejoicing that had erupted at the end of the first world war was in a sense irrecoverable. Throughout Britain it had been a magical day, repeatedly described as ‘wonderful beyond words’. Yet the spontaneous outpouring of joy, intensified by sadness, the feelings of relief and brotherhood, together with the conviction of a better future, left no permanent legacy.

Thursday

Natalie Haynes

A perversion of the Classics

Who could possibly take exception to the Stoics? One of the more passive arms of Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism required its followers to believe in a world where virtue was all, worldly goods were trivial and everything was predetermined. Perhaps you might take exception to this last pillar of faith, since it leaves us dangerously close to being organic robots, with no real autonomy. ‘I was destined to steal,’ a slave once told his Stoic master, Zeno of Citium. ‘Yes, and to be flogged,’ Zeno replied, carrying out the punishment. Your destiny does not excuse you of responsibility, in the Stoic mindset: it just robs you of choice.

Juliet Nicolson

Beyond SAD

As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant and observer of what is lovely, less lovely and sometimes, thankfully, absurd in the world. But Clare has come to fear winter. Recently the season has sapped his emotional and creative energy, masking his joy in living things, rarely in mankind but in everything that might alert him to the vibrancy and beauty of a wintry countryside.