More from Books

Thursday

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.

Nigel Jones

The luck of the devil

Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent biography of Churchill comes this equally well-written life of another superman who bestrode his era and all Europe like a colossus. Although Adam Zamoyski is at pains to insist that his subject was an ordinary mortal like any other, the simple facts of Bonaparte’s career somewhat belie any attempt to cut the little fellow down to size. How could this second surviving son of an impoverished minor nobleman from an obscure island come, within a few years, to dominate the entire continent, dictate terms to emperors, kings and popes, and set his own siblings on the thrones of the countries he had conquered?

Claire Kohda

A lesson in natural selection

In a living room in Vineland, New Jersey, in the 1870s, a botanist and entomologist named Mary Treat studied the activities of carnivorous plants and reported her findings to her colleague, Charles Darwin (Treat is extensively referenced in Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants). Treat also corresponded with others — Charles Riley, Asa Gray — about these plants, the tower-building tarantulas she kept in her house, about ant colonies and swamp ferns, and wrote articles and books on her observations.

Christopher Bray

Getting it in the neck

‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t his Enlightenment rationalism seen off such sub-religious voodoo? Well no, mon frère, it hadn’t. In fact, here we are, a quarter of a millennium on, and those vampires are still with us. Films, rock concerts, novels, TV shows, they’re full of fangs and dripping with blood. We’re suckers for those suckers — so much so that even academia is getting in on the act. As Nick Groom, an English professor at Exeter university says in his densely researched new book: ‘Vampires are good to think with.’ Well, there’s certainly a lot to be said about them. Symbols don’t come more labile.

Houman Barekat

Sleeplesss nights and endless daze

A genre of memoir currently in vogue involves entwining the author’s personal story with the cultural history of a given phenomenon, so that each may illuminate the other. Mellow introspection and anecdotal whimsy are spliced with tidbits of cultural criticism; the prose is meandering and associative rather than linearly expository. This format can feel a little gimmicky, but in the case of Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia it is apt: the book’s digressive expansiveness and collage-like structure evoke the feeling of lying in bed at night with your thoughts racing – the freewheeling, seemingly autonomous tripping through utter banality, the night-time regurgitation of daytime crud...

Daniel Hahn

Think before you write

This is a sentence. As is this — not an exceptionally beautiful one, but a sentence all the same, just telling you what it needs to tell you, just getting on with things, doing its job. Sentences are everyday, functional things, ubiquitous and unappreciated. And Joe Moran thinks it’s about time we started noticing them. First You Write a Sentence is an often impassioned attempt to get us to take sentences seriously. Moran is interested in how they work — in how written language works, in construction and effect — and in sentences’ function as carefully assembled units of communication. That ‘carefully’ is especially important.

Steven Poole

The power of the poppy

America has for years been struggling with a shortage of the drugs it uses to execute people, yet it was only in August, in Nebraska, that the first judicial killing using opioids was performed. Aside from moral questions about the death penalty itself, the resistance for so long to this obvious solution denotes a particularly sadistic puritanism, as though it’s an unacceptable risk that even the last moments of a condemned man should be at all pleasant. Opium and its derivatives and synthetic imitators constitute a miracle class of drug: nothing else is as good for pain relief, as Lucy Inglis’s bright and anecdote-packed history shows.

Jon Day

A chronicle of modern times

Jonathan Coe writes compelling, humane and funny novels, but you sometimes suspect he wants to write more audacious ones. He has a long-standing interest in formally experimental writers — Flann O’Brien and B. S. Johnson are heroes — but it’s an interest that has never really become full-blown influence.

Laura Freeman

Wickedness in wax

The reader of Edward Carey’s Little must have a tender heart and a strong stomach. You will weep, you will applaud, you will wonder if your nerves can take it, but most of all you will shudder. In this gloriously gruesome imagining of the girlhood of Marie Tussaud, mistress of wax, fleas will bite, rats will run and heads will roll and roll and roll. Guts’n’gore galore: I bloody loved it. Carey, author of the children’s Iremonger Trilogy, tells his tale with gusto. If this is a fairy story then Marie is more Rumpelstiltskin than Rapunzel. Her nose is hooked, her chin pointed, her eyes short-sighted. Even in womanhood she is tiny. They don’t call her Little for nothing. Little Marie with big dreams. Or should that be nightmares?