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Thursday

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.

Jonathan Mcaloon

Short stories: Life-changing moments

On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a decade — recognises the tendency of reviews of the form to begin with ‘an obligatory paragraph on “The Short Story” in capital letters, rather than talking about the work’. Power’s debut collection is itself a love letter to the form, a survey of it and the culmination of a life’s studious interest. So talking about the work itself doubles as a precis of ‘The Short Story’ and its moment. Happening around the world — often engaged with travelling itself — the ten stories in Mothers take the form’s austerity and turn it into something from which restless characters seek to escape.

Andy Miller

Clutching at straws

For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get inside the head of someone who is 50 and hasn’t. Less is, among other things, a novel about the aches and pains of midlife, real and imagined; its hero, Arthur Less, turns 50 in the course of the book. By a happy coincidence — or one engineered by The Spectator’s literary editor — while reading Less I too marked my half-century. (Send no flowers.) Reader, I laughed and I cried; this is a hilarious, heart-warming and thoroughly midlife-enhancing book. Less is a failed novelist, or at least thinks of himself as one. When we first meet him, he is waiting to interview the famous science fiction author H.H.H.

Christopher Priest

An electrifying genius

Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was 1902 and Tesla was broke. ‘Am I backed by the greatest financier of all time? And shall I lose great triumphs and an immense fortune because I need a sum of money? Are you going to leave me in a hole?!! Financially, I am in a dreadful fix.’ This was not perhaps the best way of approaching a millionaire who had made his fortune in the very industry Tesla was setting out to transform. It was a time of scientific entrepreneurs and robber barons. Morgan was a man of many concerns. He did not reply. Begging letters continued to be sent, and duly ignored.

James Mcnamara

Endless petty squabbles

I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer — he has a deserved reputation for excellence. But because this study of a privileged American family reaches for a significance it doesn’t achieve, and leaves a self-consciously literary novel with a surfeit of detail. There are admirable qualities. Markovits’s prose is elegant; his portrait of New York is vivid; his characters feel authentic. Paul Essinger is a mid-ranked tennis player facing retirement. Over a long weekend, his donnish siblings reunite in New York for his final match.

Yiannis Baboulias

Approaching mild panic

For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked as though social media would change the world. A row of laptops set up next to the subway entrance became the beating heart of an anti-austerity movement that promised to go well beyond simple protest politics, up to perhaps reshaping the political culture of a stale Greek parliament. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring and the streets of Europe, a demand for such new politics and more democracy made itself known to the wider world through tweets and Facebook posts. Truly it appeared that if you gave people the tools to connect and actually meet each other in the digital commons, a demand for progress and change would arise almost naturally.

Michael Tanner

A labour of loathing

The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been well served by their biographers, with Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times as the ideal. Wilhelm Furtwängler, by far the greatest of them all in my and many other people’s opinion, has not been nearly so fortunate. Partly that may be due to the nature of his genius, in that in most of his performances, as can still be heard on innumerable recordings, he seems to have a larger part in the creative process than almost any other performer (only Callas and Sviatoslav Richter, both passionate admirers of his, share that feature), and that is considered at least a dubious quality in this time of textual fidelity.

Thursday

Claire Kohda

Trouble for Lucia

In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the novelist’s daughter. Many saw the destruction of documents pertaining to Lucia, who had spent the majority of her life in asylums and had been close to her father, as the destruction of keys to understanding her father’s work. Stephen replied: ‘No one was going to set their eyes on them [the letters] and re-psychoanalyse my poor aunt.’ Stephen, still alive today, appears — though with his name blacked out — in this novel, an imagining of the life and legacy of Lucia. ‘A silly old cunt,’ he is called by a character we are made to sympathise with.

Katrina Gulliver

When voters lose faith

If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on the road to unfreedom, as Timothy Snyder, the well-known historian of Russia, argues in his new book. He sees threats to democracy in Europe and America as following the Russian model of oligarchic takeover: ‘The stabilisation of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.’ Snyder focuses on the Ukrainian crisis, noting how this conflict became a theatre of cultural memory: during the Russian invasion it was once again 1941, the enemies were Nazis, and tanks were even painted with slogans such as ‘For Stalin’.