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Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

Russian royalty

It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been merchants from 19th-century Moscow. If Russia managed to contrive a semblance of western civilisation in St Petersburg, it was by virtue of being directly under the steely Tsarist eye. Moscow on the other hand, half lost in the shadows of barbarism, was more wacky and roguish. It liked to think it was home to the true Russian spirit, which artistically meant gaudy folk art, icons, sad music and weird architecture. However the tiny rich class were desperate for the oxygen of enlightened humanist society which they found, like their St Petersburg compatriots, in Paris (it must always be remembered that Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes could never perform in Russia).

Jane Ridley

A cracking royal read

Never judge a book by its cover. To look at, this is a coffee-table book with shiny pages which make it too heavy to take on Ryanair, but that does it a disservice. In reality it is a shrewdly observed and engagingly written account of a neglected subject — the royal household. Tinniswood takes a long view, beginning with Elizabeth I, and one of the points he makes concerns the unchanging nature of monarchy. Both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II needed to put on a display of magnificence, for example, but both were also aware that out-of-control costs spelt trouble with Parliament. The chief cause of ballooning costs for the Tudors and Stuarts was that too many people were living at Court at the monarch’s expense.

Thursday

Bella Bathurst

For those in peril on the sea

The story — or rather, stories — of how the British lighthouses were built has already withstood heavy and repeated telling. There’s Henry Winstanley’s first Eddystone light (brick, hexagonal, candles on the outside, en-suite state room) and his Icarus boast to the gods that it would withstand ‘the greatest storm that ever was’, which it didn’t. There’s Henry Hill, the keeper who swallowed a mouthful of molten lead while the second Eddystone burned. There’s John Smeaton’s tree of stone, flawless, tiny, eroded from below, now landbound on Plymouth Hoe. And there are the old tales.

Oliver Burkeman

Literary therapy

Is there anyone left who’d still be mortified to have it known that they’d purchased, or maybe even benefited from, a self-help book? In recent years, the genre’s gone mainstream: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life bestrides the bestseller lists, alongside titles on the Danish, Finnish and Japanese secrets to health and happiness, and the life-changing magic of tidying up; Alain de Botton embraces the label, while most ‘big ideas’ books, from Malcolm Gladwell to Yuval Noah Harari, are at least partly self-help in disguise. This is all to the good: we shouldn’t mourn the era when the key signifier of a book’s merit was that it should be impossible to extract anything useful from it.

Alex Preston

Pay back time

‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured to win.’ So says Seema, the 29-year-old wife of hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen in Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, Lake Success. The relationship between fiction and the world of high finance has a complicated history. Having largely ignored Wall Street — Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis and F. Scott Fitzgerald aside — novelists found in the crash of 2008 a galvanic moment. Suddenly bankers were everywhere, from Sebastian Faulks to John Lanchester to Anne Enright, while younger writers such as Adam Haslett and Zia Haider Rahman wrote memorable novels that made (flawed) heroes of the money-men.

Colin Greenwood

Frozen in time

In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen again. Erebus, named after a Greek god of darkness, was herself cast into oblivion for the next 170 years, until she was found in 2014, by sonar, submerged off the Arctic coast of Canada. Immediately after her disappearance, ten years and £28 million (in today’s money) were spent looking for her. It was during a golden period for British exploring, between the end of the Napoleonic Wars of 1815 and the Crimean War of 1854, with a Royal Navy that had shrunk from 145,000 men to 19,000. Instead of fighting battles, it was now battling the elements, in the cause of scientific discovery and imperial expansion.

Emma Park

Ovid’s last laugh

‘My spirit moves me to speak of forms changed into new bodies,’ proclaimed Ovid at the beginning of the Metamorphoses: a glorious compendium of classical mythology stretching from the creation of the universe to the Emperor Augustus. Metamorphica is a collection of 53 versions of classical myths as told by Ovid, Homer and the Greek tragedians (Mason’s first novel was The Lost Books of the Odyssey). They are inspired less by Ovid’s content than by his technique of ‘moving lightly through the ancient sources, taking up what he liked and reinventing it’. Metamorphica takes the bare premise of an ancient myth as the starting point from which to create a modern one with a wholly different focus.

Nigel Jones

Europe ‘resurgent’

When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To Hell and Back, in these pages exactly three years ago, I compared our continent in 1945 to a punch-drunk boxer rising from the canvas with both eyes blacked. How, I wondered, would Kershaw handle the battered old bruiser coping with a not-so-brave new world in which he was no longer the undisputed champ? The image of the wounded fighter, I think, was apt, for the red thread running through Europe in the first half of the century, as Kershaw rightly saw, was violence. States waged catastrophic war on each other and on their own citizens. Belonging to the ‘wrong’ race, religion, or political persuasion could mean imprisonment, torture and violent death.

Susan Hill

A woman in black

‘What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river.’ The first reason to read Sarah Perry is right there. She was born and bred a writer and without that, a novelist is worth little. Sometimes she falls in love with her own writing, and adds too many curlicues and decorative elaborations, but there is a stern backbone to Perry and she always pulls herself up from such self-indulgences. She also knows how to chill, a handy talent when you are writing a Gothic — or hybrid-Gothic, novel. ‘... a woman in dark clothes seen just at the very corner of your eye, slipping from view...

Tim Wigmore

Football focus | 27 September 2018

‘Football holds a mirror to ourselves,’ Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more unequal and simply more relentless than ever before. The sense of a football club being rooted to its locality has been shattered. Globalisation, and hyper-commercialisation, means that local owners have been replaced by ‘speculators and savants’ from abroad. Locally reared players, victims of football’s global free market in talent, have become rare.

James Yorke

Home at last

The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 to provide congenial surroundings for those who had ‘travelled outside the British Islands to a distance of 500 miles from London in a direct line’, and opportunities to meet distinguished foreign visitors. As it nears its bicentenary, John Martin Robinson has produced a thorough, scholarly and highly readable biography on an institution that has served among other things as the ‘Foreign Office Canteen’ and a refuge for derring-do adventurers. The Club’s members included royalty, dukes, ambassadors and explorers, not to mention aesthetes, artists and even authors, despite Anthony Powell’s claims to the contrary.

Marcus Nevitt

The man who invented modernity Marcus Nevitt

The final moments of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall see its central protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, trying to banish ghosts. Assailed by memories of his orchestration of the execution of his rival Thomas More, the sight of his head on a block, the ‘sickening sound of the axe on flesh’, Cromwell turns to two sources of solace to improve his mood: the welfare of his household and — oddly, but characteristically —admin.

Harry Mount

Bats in the belfry

As the wordy title of this book and the name of its author suggest, this is a faux-archaic, fogeyish journey around England’s oddest vicars. The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie is, though, the real thing: a young curate in the Church of England. Yes, he’s given to sometimes tiresome jocularity: he describes himself as ‘a Bon Viveur first and foremost, with a soupçon of Roguishness and Prodigality’. But, still, his essential thesis is right: the Church of England has produced some real oddballs in its time, and this is an entertaining gallop through several centuries’ worth of them. For 400 years after the Reformation, the Church of England was the ideal Petri dish for nurturing eccentricity.

Thursday

Ben Myers

Thank goodness for Plug

Such was the perceived low standard of the 62 books recently submitted for the 2018 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, that the organisers withheld the award, saying that not a single title prompted the ‘unanimous, abundant laughter’ required. Like the lottery it rolls over to next year instead. Thank goodness then for the return of Francis Plug, sociopathic stalker of literary celebrities and creation of London-based New Zealander Paul Ewen.

Harry Ritchie

Grandma’s perfect pub

As an emigrant from Scotland, I was taken aback by the weird foreignness of the south of England. Some of the south’s strangeness took a while to register — for example, just how crowded it was down here, and how very much warmer: it was my third summer in the south before it dawned on me that this wasn’t another freak heatwave. Then there were all the very obvious, immediate differences — the banknotes all being issued by the same bank, the way everyone talked and nobody could understand a word I said and, above all, the pubs.

Natalie Haynes

Lost in Troadia

Sing muse, begins The Iliad, of the wrath of Achilles. We are dropped straight into the tenth year of the Trojan war, in the middle of the Greek encampment outside the besieged city. The great warrior Achilles has been awarded a woman, Briseis, in recognition of his victories. The same distribution of booty sees Agamemnon, the leader of all the Greeks, acquire the young Chryseis. Rape, assault and erasure of identity are the ever-present consequences of war for women in the Bronze Age, just as they are now. But Chryseis is different: her father is a priest of Apollo, and he comes to the Greek camp to demand the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refuses at first, but is then forced to relinquish his prize when Apollo hears his priest and attacks the Greek camp with plague.

Anne Margaret Daniel

No end in sight | 20 September 2018

Novels today do not want to be done. Thank Anthony Burgess and John Fowles for this, most immediately, but alternate endings, or the purposeful failure to finish, run long and deep in fiction in English, all the way back to Laurence Sterne and ‘I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s —.’ Modern novels shear off into bleakness or point to awful repeating cycles; Victorian ones twist that prettily tied bow of a marriage plot into question and challenge (none more so than Henry Esmond). Be glad of an autumn of fine first novels that downright relish resisting closure. Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin (Oneworld Publications, £12.

Kate Webb

Whose truths are they anyway?

Transcription, Kate Atkinson’s 11th novel, sees her returning to the detective fiction she honed in her series about Jackson Brodie, the haunted private eye who, after the murder of his young sister, chased the killers of girls. It also pursues some of the themes of her more recent fictions, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, which explored the ambiguities of war, and questions of chance and fate, with lives played out in multiple permutations. There is, however, no professional detective in Transcription. Instead it falls to an ordinary young woman to fathom the meaning of her life and, by extension, what it means to be caught in the net of history.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Homo Erect Us

Ever since enlivenment of the primordial blob, before thoughts were first verbalised, all nature has always been motivated by a dynamic ambition to improve, to grow stronger, more agile, inventive and fertile. The successful continuously grow more successful; the failures disappear. This selective, upward process has been defined as evolution. Dr Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist, half Guyanese, a contributor to The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas and a former editor of Nature, is well able to explicate scientific complexities, including the origin and development of man. He writes with intellectual authority and also, as a popular lecturer and broadcaster, expresses himself in a clear and persuasive manner with natural charm.

Sean Mcglynn

A family at war | 20 September 2018

Poor old Henry II: once fêted as one of England’s greatest kings, he has long been neglected. Accessible books on Henry were few and far between until, like the proverbial buses, three came along in fairly rapid succession. Richard Barber’s 2015 contribution to Penguin’s Monarchs series offers a concise and excellent summary of Henry’s reign; and now we have two more appearing almost simultaneously (though both curiously omit Barber’s work). Henry deserves the attention. As Count of Anjou, he wrested the throne of England from Stephen in 1154 after the exhausting civil war known as ‘the Anarchy’ when, a chronicle attests, ‘Christ and His angels slept’.