More from Books

Thursday

Adam Mitchell

The Brazilian paradox

As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be the case for biographies too: an admiration for the protagonist comes first. But once one has a taste for the flair, language and music of Brazil, the extraordinary tale of the pressure cooker that forged it heaves into view. Five centuries of pharaonic boldness and brutality meander through this hefty tome. In relating the events that shaped Brazil’s vast and unlikely realm, the authors seek to dispel the ‘fairytale’ myths that continue to distort reality. Take cachaça, Brazil’s national liquor. The reader may consume it in a genteel setting in a caipirinha cocktail.

Jonathan Mcaloon

A multitude of sins

Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler for order and rules — admits that ‘the truth isn’t always the right way’. A wasting disease has given her dementia, ‘but is kind enough to leave the summer of 1969 intact’. She dips in and out of her memories in a fugue state of disorientation and, it would seem, sedative-induced dreams. ‘A sharp stab of pain in my arm and once more I am in the attic at Lyntons.’ Lyntons was a Georgian stately home in Hampshire, whose garden architecture, including ‘orangery, grotto, mausoleum and sundry follies’, she was sent to survey for things of value.

Melanie McDonagh

Adventures with robots

Imagine a world where we’re all hooked to our individual electronic devices, which feed us our music, communicate with our friends and know our needs; imagine a tech company that dominates an entire city, where your social pecking order is reflected in the devices you possess. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. It’s all there already… Apple, Google, Facebook. So Jinxed, by the young Canadian Amy McCulloch (Simon & Schuster, £7.99), is very much of the moment. It’s set in a city in Canada dominated by a tech corporation: ‘The final goal of Moncha Corp is to make life better... And to make people happier.’ Its academy is where every bright teenager wants to go.

Ian Sansom

Entertaining cousin Nicky

First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year even Buckingham Palace is getting in on the act with a new exhibition, Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs (‘Through war, alliance and dynastic marriage the relationships between Britain and Russia and their royal families are explored from Peter the Great’s visit to London in 1698 through to Nicholas II’).This is the year we were all reminded of our close relationship with the Russians. Some of us, of course, are more closely related than others.

Richard Davenporthines

Two men on a mountain

A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater, and then swoops between the Ranigunj coalfields in Bengal, Belsize Park, a handicrafts exhibition at Kharagpur, Kensington Gore, military intelligence headquarters in Calcutta, an aircraft factory in Wembley and the Himalayas is bound to keep its readers jumping. In The Last Englishmen, Deborah Baker has written an exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography, with John Auden and Michael Spender as its chief human protagonists. But she makes the Himalayas, and Mount Everest, palpable and vivid characters in her story too. John Auden was the geologist elder brother of W.H. Auden and became a global expert on the Himalayas.

Anna Aslanyan

Stolen youth, stolen homeland

‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to Dalia Grinkeviciute’s memoir. The author was 14 in 1941, when the Soviets deported her with her mother and brother from their native Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city. In 1949, the women escaped from Siberia and went into hiding. Grinkeviciute began writing about her ordeal, but soon, facing another arrest, she buried the unfinished manuscript in a garden. More prisons and camps followed before she eventually returned home in 1956. Found in 1991 after her death, the memoir was published and became part of the school curriculum in Lithuania.

Mark Cocker

Pet perversions

It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s originality as a thinker, when he described him as ‘an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier’. Britain’s greatest natural scientist was indeed a keeper of fowl, with pigeons among his favourites. The habit arose from Darwin’s instinctual recognition that in the animal-rearing experiments conducted over millennia by our ancestors, we had inadvertently stored away crucial evidence about the way in which all of life can change in response to environmental stimuli.

Thursday

Ben Myers

The way things were…

Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan Garner dismantled and moved 17 miles to join it in Blackden in rural Cheshire, sits Jodrell Bank Observatory. Here huge telescopes scour the cosmos, seeking radio waves from distant planets and stars. This juxtaposition between past, present and future, all existing in harmonious symbiosis on land that Garner’s family have lived on for 400 years, seems the perfect metaphor for the creative output of this most singular of English writers.

Boyd Tonkin

Impish secrets

Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown — a bit like having Matisse turn up to decorate your kitchen. After we talked, Jane shot. She managed to convert a tiny hotel courtyard into a sort of antique Grecian glade. In her pictures, White peeped through the foliage with the smile of some demonic faun come to spread ribald chaos in the service of the great god Pan. I remembered that look when, in this patchwork of pieces about his life as a reader, he discloses that a heart attack followed by surgery in 2014 had one weird outcome. Temporarily, he felt ‘no desire to read’.

Peter Frankopan

A tale of two addictions

China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world’. It was an obvious exemplar for a man who was trying to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In the late 18th century, when Smith published his seminal work, Britain had not only already begun to build an empire; it was about to learn from the experience of losing parts of it too, as the colonies in North America detached and went their own way. Despite the shock of the US Declaration of Independence — in the very same year that The Wealth of Nations was published — it was Asia that was much more important, lucrative and interesting than the Americas to the British.

Lee Langley

Hitchcock without a murder

A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession: she imagines them as painted saintly icons, golden against a dark wall, ‘flies crawling across their faces... the first threads of a spider’s web spun from their eyes’. People in the Room is set in the early 20th century in the affluent Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano, where the author lived as a child.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Family fallout | 2 August 2018

Savi Naipaul Akal’s publishing house is named after the peepal tree, in whose shade Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment. The author’s industriously detailed memoir reveals nothing quite so brilliantly life-enhancing but presents persuasive statements in favour of family loyalty, domestic order and higher education, while allowing herself opportunities to express resentment of a disturbing sibling rival. She was proud when her brother Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, but dismayed when his acknowledgement of it failed to mention Trinidad, the land of his birth. He called his prize ‘a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors’.

Jane Ridley

Quite contrary | 2 August 2018

The best royal biography ever written is probably James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. Published in 1959, only six years after the queen’s death, it is a masterpiece: no one has written better about her German relations, about her larger-than-life mother, Fat Mary, the Duchess of Teck, or about the royal family in the early 20th century. It is an astonishingly candid book, considering that it was published at the time when the royal code of secrecy was at its height. The greatest tribute to the author is that no serious life of Queen Mary has appeared since. Pope-Hennessy didn’t actually want to write the book. When the royal librarian Owen Morshead asked him to do it, his first instinct was to refuse. He was an unlikely choice for the job.

Ben Hamilton

… and soon will be

Edmundsbury, the fictional, sketchily rendered town in which the action of this novel takes place, is part of a social experiment — its inhabitants lab rats for a digital overhaul that goes beyond surveillance. Everything they do is measured, tracked and recorded in exchange for treats, such as heightened security and increased download speeds. Sam Byers focuses on a handful of characters who are aware, to varying degrees, that something is badly wrong. Displaced Londoner Robert is a journalist with fading ethics, striving for ‘clickbait gold’, but needled to distraction by a persistently critical below-the-line commenter calling herself Julia. Quickly we discover that Julia is a persona adopted by Robert’s girlfriend, Jess.

Owen Matthews

At constant risk of violent death

Russia has always attracted a certain breed of foreigner: adventurers, drawn to the country’s vastness and emptiness; chancers, seeking fortunes and new beginnings in the Russian rough and tumble. Romantics, all of them, men and women in search of soulfulness and authenticity — the experience of life lived on and beyond the edge of the civilised world’s conventions. Thomas Atkinson was all those things — in addition to being a self-taught architect and stonecutter of middling skills, a decent watercolourist, a stoic traveller of apparently inexhaustible curiosity, and a bigamist.

Thursday

Kit Eastwood

Dusting off the past

Visiting Pompeii, it is hard to miss the garden of the fugitives. It is on every other postcard in the gift shop: an excavated garden with 13 bodies twisting in an agonising tableau of pain, caught at the instant of their death. They are frozen in history and separated from the onlooker by a glass wall and museum labels — a human moment presented with the cold distance of an archaeological exhibit. Ceridwen Dovey’s third novel is anchored in Pompeii and chooses the garden as its focal point. She tells the story of two characters, Royce and Vita, their rejections by their individual loves and attempts to find meaning after death. It touches on weighty themes: guilt, depression, repressed sexuality.

Stephanie Merritt

Too close to the sun

If you go to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February every year, you’ll find yourself surrounded by an eclectic crowd of atheists, free-thinkers, Catholic reformers, anarchists, mystics, students, scientists and poets all jostling to lay tributes before the statue of the hooded Dominican friar whose shadowed face stares inscrutably towards the Vatican. His name is Giordano Bruno and his statue, erected by public subscription in the 19th century, commemorates the site where he was burned for heresy in 1600 at the hands of the Roman Inquisition.

Mika Ross-Southall

Consumed by guilt

At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned yellowy-white, ‘like the mane of an old wooden rocking-horse’, not out of shock, she reassures us, but because ‘one couldn’t get one’s hair dyed’. She thinks she deserved to be there: ‘What I did was terrible. Terrible. The shame of it will never leave me until my dying day.’ For a long time in Cressida Connolly’s chilling new novel, though, it’s not clear what she has done. The year is 1979, and middle-class Phyllis, who is bitter and alone (her family don’t talk to her any more), recounts her story to a voiceless interviewer in mannered, first-person chapters that interject throughout.

Stephen Robinson

Writing behind bars

So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela that it is useful, finally, to be able to read about him and the privations of his prison years in his own contemporaneous, understated prose. At more than 600 pages including annotations, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela might be regarded as a volume strictly for the liberation struggle obsessive. But this collection tells us more about the man — in his fearlessness, grace and occasional pomposity — than almost all of the good and bad books that have been written about him. The key point about Mandela, often overlooked, is that he was high born, the son of a chief of the Thembus.

Peter Hoskin

Leaping dragon

Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the film which Lee made just before his death in 1973 at the age of 32, and that would in turn seal his worldwide stardom. There, on one side, stands Lee himself. There, on the other, is the villainous Han, who has a set of metal talons where one of his hands ought to be. The two men leap across each other, leaving Lee with an unpleasant gash on his shirtless torso. He pauses, dabs a finger in the blood, raises it to his mouth — and licks. It is weird, gruesome and oh-so-cool, all at once. Why did Lee do this? The answer is in Matthew Polly’s biography.