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Thursday

Kate Maltby

The Stuart supremacy

Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III, George W. Bush, Ed Miliband: monsters all three. Sophia, Electress of Hanover — bright, lively and self-indulgent — left a no less divisive legacy. The 12th child of an exiled Mittel Europa princeling, Sophia had scarce prospects when she was born in The Hague in 1630. Yet through her mother Elizabeth, daughter of James I, Sophia was able to pass the newly unified British crown to her son George I. (She missed out on the throne herself when she predeceased her cousin Queen Anne by less than two months.

Sarah Ditum

Read Rhys

The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that writers do not necessarily live very interesting lives. Wrangling with editors, hatereading your rivals, making coffee and (occasionally) typing are all consuming occupations, but not the stuff of prepossessing narrative. That, at least, wasn’t an issue for Jean Rhys, whose colonial childhood and dissolute adulthood gave her ample material for fiction. But reprocessed by Caryl Phillips as the subject of this new novel, Rhys (or rather Gwendoline, since she has yet to take her pen name in the period Phillips covers) is somehow rendered boring.

Tom Hodgkinson

Nothing doing

There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao Tzu argued that the wise man should refrain from action, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount also told us not to bother ourselves overmuch: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not.’ For Christ, idling was a spiritual and political position: he taught us to live in the moment and reject riches and status as a source of enlightenment or happiness. Now the self-help industry has taken idling and converted it into, paradoxically, a tool for productivity, i.e. getting ahead and making money, which is not what Christ had in mind.

Alan Rusbridger

Enjoy the ride

It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a biography, nor a work of musicology. As an extended historical essay it is patchy and selective. It is partly about pianos and pianism, but would disappoint serious students of that genre. It is not quite a detective story — though there are, towards the end, elements of a hunter on the track of his prey. It is probably best to begin the book with no expectations of where it will lead. It starts in the Palma workshop of one Juan Bauza in the 1830s as he fashioned an upright piano — crude, even by the standards of the day — from local softwood, felt, pig iron and copper.

David Patrikarakos

Beautifully out of sync

‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist, his childhood nickname (after Dostoevsky’s protagonist in The Idiot) remains. It is the first sign that this is a novel about people out of sync with their times and their surroundings. Abandoned by his mother as a child, Myshkin has received a letter ‘pulsing with the energy every unopened letter in the world has’. It involves his mother but he cannot bear to open it. Instead he narrates her life, and his own, one of tending trees with commendable diligence, and waiting for her return. As with Roy’s previous work, the prose is intensely visual.

Thursday

Michael Duggan

Coach, politician and agony aunt

When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it: heroic sporting underdogs, a new coach with nothing in common with his players, and the forging of an indestructible bond of comradeship, all topped off by success on the world stage. But I felt trepidation too. Books about sporting greatness often descend into a gruelling slog through humdrum match reportage, reheated banter and details of contract negotiations, game plans, diet plans and training. I needn’t have worried. In this account of three years in charge of the Fiji sevens rugby squad, Ben Ryan and his writing collaborator Tom Fordyce get the mix just right.

Jane Ridley

The British Dreyfus

One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat. Miss Gilchrist, who lived alone with her maid, was an obsessive collector and hoarder of jewels, which she hid among her clothes. There was no sign of a forced entry, but a valuable diamond brooch was missing. The month before the murder she had changed her will, cutting out her relatives, whom she hated, and leaving everything to her maid. The Glasgow police decided to arrest a foreigner named Oscar Slater. He happened to have pawned a brooch around the time of the murder. The brooch turned out to belong to Slater himself, but the police persisted in pursuing him, even though he denied having any knowledge of Miss Gilchrist.

Brian Martin

Eat your heart out, Holden Caulfield

Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar with Australian vernacular to appreciate the first-person narration by the young protagonist who says he is 17 but is thought to be ‘more like 15’ by an old renegade Irish priest he meets in the wastelands of Western Australia. Jackson Clackton is on the run in the scrub and salt-lands away from the coast. His voice is full of Oz-isms — roo bars, johnnycakes, mulga and gimlets. Jaxie flees small-town Monkton. His mother is dead, and his father kills himself in an accident for which Jaxie thinks he will be blamed. He embarks on a desperate quest to reach his girlfriend, who lives to the north, and takes us into the inhospitable hinterland.

Helen R Brown

Telling tall tales

‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date,’ says Glen David Gold. I emerged from his weighty memoir feeling more like I’d been through a marriage: sadder, wiser, still sifting the decades of detail for the moments when a little self-awareness could have spared hearts. My crush on Gold’s writing dates back to his sensational 2001 debut novel: Carter Beats the Devil. Set in the author’s native California in the 1920s, the tale of rival magicians combined seductively complex characters, wisecracking dialogue and vintage Americana in a plot as ingeniously designed and expertly sprung as an escapologist’s stage.

Owen Matthews

The road to Ekaterinburg

The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar naivety was shown by his would-be rescuers. Helen Rappaport’s frank and brilliant study of the various efforts to save the Romanovs begins, intelligently, with the race to save them from themselves. Their downfall began in 1916 as the course of the first world war began to run against Russia.

Caroline Moore

Making the foreign familiar

Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign fiction prize, first won by Orhan Pamuk and his translator Victoria Holbrook. Translators are routinely undervalued. As with stage-lighting technicians, one is apt consciously to notice only glaring blunders; so it is good to know that the Independent’s prize is shared between author and translator. I nevertheless approached this book with some scepticism. I couldn’t quite see the point of it. If one has read a novel already, what would one gain from a three-page essay?

Minoo Dinshaw

New York times

Seven years ago Stella Tillyard, a successful historian of the 18th century, broke into historical fiction with Tides of War. This historically faithful and scrupulously detailed Napoleonic saga was thought in some quarters to have met its period’s gold standard: Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels. It also received the accolade, now obligatory for success in the genre, of being worthy of Hilary Mantel. For her second novel, Tillyard has adopted a fresher, braver setting — Cromwellian East Anglia, framed with 1660s New Amsterdam, the Dutch American capital about to succumb to the restored Charles II’s greed. In 2016 Francis Spufford produced Golden Hill, a hit of Mantelian proportions, set in the same city, by now 18th-century New York.

Olivia Potts

Setting the bar too high

‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly, this has been written off by literature undergraduates and fridge magnet makers as a joke at the expense of one of the oldest professions; but there’s another interpretation. Dick, although a comic character, was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who believed that by disrupting law and order he could overthrow the king and stand in his place. What this line actually means is that lawyers independent of the state are the final bastion of civilised society. Without lawyers, society falls apart.

Thursday

William Cook

Poetry in the back garden

When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has led expeditions in five continents and is the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed singlehanded across the Atlantic.’ Oh no, I thought, not another gung-ho memoir by some posh explorer, chronicling his adventures crossing the Andes on a pogo stick or paddling up the Amazon in a bathtub. Thankfully, Wild Signs and Star Paths is nothing of the sort. It’s a thoughtful, lyrical book about the hidden connections between flora and fauna, the landscape and the weather, and most of its wise and wondrous observations are gleaned from the author’s rambles around the English countryside — mainly amid the woods and meadows of his beloved South Downs.

Michael Beloff

The real wizard of Oz

What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job was in court and who moonlighted in the Commons — think F.E. Smith. But it is impossible today to double up with any distinction. As long as capital punishment survived, public attention also attached to those great defenders who rescued their clients from the noose — think Edward Marshall Hall. But English judges no longer don the black cap to pronounce the sentence of death. Geoffrey Robertson, the author of this riveting memoir, ticks the boxes which guarantee the reputation of the modern celebrity silk: chiefly, a concentration on the fashion-able area of human rights, with a special interest in press freedom, making him a hero of the left-wing media.

Jonathan Mirsky

The neighbour from hell

Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover more. Both groups will be surprised. The newcomers especially will be disabused of any belief that Tibetans were always non-violent, deeply spiritual and unworldly. Tibetanists and advanced students will learn that, decades after the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 and the escape of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the diaspora of about 130,000 Tibetan refugees, battered by decades of Chinese oppression and ‘soft’ propaganda, is riven by confusion. Some cling to their hope that Tibet will again be sovereign and they will be able to return to their homeland.

Sara Wheeler

Via dolorosa

Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The Crossway. It was a journey from darkness to light, as the author, who suffers from mental illness, looked for redemption. It was also a considerable feat, especially as Stagg proclaims lugubriously at the outset: ‘I’m not much of a walker!’ He stayed in convents, monasteries, in his tent, in disused schools or the homes of strangers, and, later, in mosques. He crossed the Alps in winter in order to make Rome for Easter, and it took him six days to clear the Apennines. On the trail, he reflectsa good deal on what he has been through — a breakdown, suicide attempts, the nature of mental illness.

Emily Rhodes

Ways of escape | 28 June 2018

Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her first novel, Crudo, is every bit as intelligent and provocative, with a roar of energy that comes from having been written, remarkably, in just seven weeks. Perhaps the novel’s most unusual element is its narrator: ‘Kathy by which I mean I’ is a 40-year-old hybrid of the post-punk icon Kathy Acker and a fictionalised version of Laing herself. Acker died in 1997, but Laing brings her back to life for the politically turbulent summer of 2017.

Ian Thomson

Hypnotic threnodies

The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones and industrial kling-klang of difficult German bands such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Faust and Can. A British fear and loathing of Germany and the Germans informed numerous New Musical Express Krautrock articles. (‘Kraftwerk: the Final Solution to the Music Problem’, or ‘Can: They Have Ways of Making You Listen’.) The term was made semi-respectable by Julian Cope, the erudite jester of English pop, in his ironically entitled book Krautrocksampler (1995), which commended the strange new music that rose from the moral and material ruins of post-Hitlerite Germany. It is hard now to imagine how startlingly new Can must have sounded.

Jeff Noon

Strewn with foreign bodies

Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more apposite. The action takes place in 1967, when Inspector Bordelli of the Florence police force is called to a house where a wealthy industrialist has been run through with a sword. Each member of the family is acting suspiciously, as are the various colleagues and associates of the deceased. Bordelli’s life is further complicated when an old friend, Colonel Arcieri, turns up in dire trouble and needing protection. The case unfolds in a slow haze of interviews and recollections. Vichi takes his time to explore Bordelli’s mind, his thoughts and his feelings, especially concerning the past and love lost. The book yearns for a bygone age.