More from Books

Thursday

Michael Bywater

The stuff of life

‘I didn’t realise we were carbon,’ said a friend to whom I mentioned this book. She was the first of several. It’s odd to think of clever and educated people not knowing that we are made of such stuff. But The Many Lives of Carbon is an odd book to come to grips with. Its title promises plain speaking about carbon, which the book then delivers. Nothing to lose sleep over. Yet one does. This is partly because it mines a rich seam. I fell asleep thinking about the carboniferous period, and dreamt I was one of the seven dwarfs, trapped underground with a pickaxe and a vile hod, and woke myself up with a sepulchral groan of horror, which woke the dog, and there was nothing for it but to go downstairs and put the kettle on.

Suzi Feay

All their wits about them

From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to announce their singularity; to be, as Mary Wollstonecraft announced, ‘the first of a new genus’. Each of the women in Michelle Dean’s survey of mostly American essayists, reviewers and novelists had to defend her right to debate, critique and observe. The lives of Sontag, Arendt, Parker, West, Didion, Ephron and others are woven into a thick braid running the length of the 20th century and into ours. It’s not quite a group biography, but more a study of how their lives and work dovetailed with each other and with the major political and cultural movements of the era.

Jeff Noon

The murderous past

How can you defend a man you hate? John Fairfax, in his Blind Defence (Little Brown, £16.99), explores this dilemma. Diane Heybridge is found dead in her London flat. She was poor, working-class, without much of a future to look forward to. But did she take her own life, or was she murdered by her callous, jilted partner, Brent Stainsby? Into the fray steps William Benson, an ex-con, a murderer himself, now turned maverick barrister, a person the press and the public love to hate. With his legal partner Tess de Vere, he takes on Stainsby’s case and finds himself defending a man that nobody likes, and that Benson himself despises. As the true and hidden nature of the victim’s life is uncovered, the moral fog turns even murkier.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Trigger-happy madcap

This is a biography that begins with a bang, swiftly followed by puddles of blood, shrieks of ‘Murder!’ and a chase through the foggy streets of Victorian London. On 8 December 1854, a French émigré was walking through Fitzrovia, close to the heart of radical London, having recently left a pistol-shooting range in Westminster. He had a companion: a mysterious woman with a letter in her pocket and unknown intentions in her heart. It was a cold, wet night. At just past eight o’clock, they arrived at 73 Warren Street, a narrow town house near Tottenham Court Road, where George Moore (a soda water manufacturer who had employed the émigré as an engineer) lived, and were shown into the plush parlour to wait for him.

Thursday

Mike Jackson

A brave, bold failure

In the high summer of 1944 the Allies achieved their major victory in Normandy with the closing of the German pocket centred on Falaise. By the end of August, Paris had been liberated, and the Wehrmacht was apparently in full flight; Brussels fell to the Allies in early September. For many, the end of the war in Europe was in sight — perhaps by Christmas that year. But Allied success brought serious logistical problems: supplies were still having to be landed on the Normandy beaches and transported forward along increasingly distant lines of communication.

A.N. Wilson

Prejudice and Popery

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when everything belonging to a wife — goods, chattels, children — automatically became the sole property of her husband. Those born since the 1960s can’t really envisage what it was like for practising homosexuals in those days. By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.

John R. MacArthur

Analysing the dream

The figure of Donald Trump looms over Sarah Churchwell’s new history of American national identity, which highlights the ugliest features of the country’s ingrained traditions of intolerance and bigotry. But it is the current president’s father, Fred, who first leaps off the page in a startling cameo appearance. On Memorial Day 1927, as Churchwell recounts, the white supremacist, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan organised a march in New York City’s borough of Queens, home to the German-American Trump family, whose patriarch, Friedrich Trump, had emigrated to the United States in 1885.

Alastair Smart

How ever did they find time to paint?

Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates. Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró. In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of a latter-day Vasari, penning mini-biographies of 32 artists who were associated with Surrealism.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

An accident waiting to happen

In the early days of the atomic age, Soviet students debated whether it was nobler to become a physicist or a poet. Some of them seem to have been genuinely torn, and one of those may well have been Anatolii Diatlov, who was the deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl during the late-night turbine test that led to the 1986 explosion. Such was Diatlov’s reverence for verse that he described the great blasts of steam, hot water and machine oil, along with the violent crackling and popping of the inundated electrical system, as ‘a picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante’. The disaster, as Serhii Plokhy shows in his haunting new history, left Ukrainians grasping for similes and allegories. One of Diatlov’s colleagues reached for ‘Hiroshima’.

Rachel Bedford

An intellectual colossus

When a man is tired of Samuel Johnson, he’s tired of life. James Boswell intended his biography of Dr Johnson, published in 1791, to be no mere chronology, but a life packed with the minutiae of ‘volatile details’. Thus he presented a deluge of correspondence, liberal literary extracts and copious Latin quotations; extensive conversations with ‘utterances from that great and illuminated mind’ (always prefaced by an emphatic ‘Sir!’), as well as the abject prayers poured from what Johnson called his ‘soul polluted by many sins’. Delivered with magnificent aplomb by David Timson, Johnson bursts from these 51 hours as an intellectual and physical colossus.

Harry Ritchie

Our cloth-eared nation

Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rab C. Nesbitt excepted, it has become quite difficult to infer much from people’s appearance. In these democratically dressed and coiffed times, we usually have to wait until people start to speak before we get a bead on them. Voice has become the best, and often only, signifier we can rely on. A flat vowel here, a glottal stop there, a hint of sibilance about an ‘s’ — ahah: northern, possibly Yorkshire, probably lower-middle-class-ish background and, going by the ‘s’, gay. We make such judgments with great confidence. And, it transpires, little justification — it’s the great insight of this study of human conversation that our voice-interpreting skills, on which we often set much store, are actually pretty poor.

Dennis Duncan

The forerunner of Google

On 9 May 1502, a young Spaniard joined the fleet setting sail for the newly discovered Americas. The boy, Hernando, was 13 and his father was Christopher Columbus, ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’. Although Columbus père had already crossed the Atlantic three times, this would nevertheless be a journey of almost unimaginable privation. Hernando would witness hurricanes, shark attacks and brutal battles, both with the tribes of the northern Panamanian coast and with mutineers from his own ship. He would suffer fevers, see his father denied entry into the port he had founded a decade earlier, and he would be shipwrecked, for more than a year, on the southern coast of Cuba.

Ian Sansom

Smart, sardonic, delightful

Is there anything more depressing than the prospect of reading a writer’s collected essays, journalism and occasional pieces? Most of it is sheer dross, the work of the left hand, written under the cosh in double-quick time and for easy money. There are of course exceptions: Orwell, though even then you have to wade through a terrible lot of dreck; the late, great, much-missed Gilbert Adair; the New Yorker’s ever-so-sweet E.B. White; the definitive bouncing Czech Karel Capek (whose journalism was translated into English some years ago, published as Believe in People); and Marianne Moore, whose reviews are almost as astonishing as her poetry.

Brian Switek

Ancient success story

The age of dinosaurs is a perennial favourite on any time traveller’s wishlist. Even though we’re technically still in it — birds carry on the legacy of Velociraptor and company — there’s an irresistible urge to visit the time when towering, scaly, feathery, toothy saurians stomped around the planet. Since backwards time travel is impossible and DNA degrades too fast for us to have any hope of creating a real Jurassic Park, however, what we know of the ‘terrible lizards’ is written in bone and fossil footprints, and paleontologist Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs weaves together these prehistoric pieces into a vibrant view of how dinosaurs originated and what happened to our Mesozoic favourites.

Nicky Haslam

Unpretentious, and enormous fun

One would have thought this particular can of worms might, after nearly 80 years, be well past its sell-by date. But books about Mrs Simpson and her infatuated king appear with thudding frequency, each with some ever more far-fetched theory about this curious union. Now comes the leaden hand and leaden prose of Andrew Morton, with yet another: that Wallis was, all her life, in love with another man long before, during and after her experience of vitriolic abuse, first as the besotted prince’s obsession, then scapegoat for his abdication, and object of vilification during her years as his wife. This love (to borrow words from her step-great nephew, ‘whatever love is’) may well have been real. The man in question was Herman Rogers.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Trailing clouds of perfume

In his robust new biography of Alcibiades, David Stuttard describes how the mercurial Greek general shocked his contemporaries by adopting Persian customs: Certainly, he embraced their lifestyle, tying his hair up in a bun, curling his well-oiled beard (a symbol of machismo in the Persian court), dousing himself in the perfumes for which Sardis was so famous, and dressing not just in sumptuous robes and beautifully fringed tunics of linen, wool and mohair (deep-dyed in vibrant reds and vivid yellows, and adorned with ornaments in glittering gold foil), but in those other garments so associated by Athenians with decadent, eastern effeminacy: trousers. I’ll be honest.

Edmund Gordon

Tokyo through the lens

In 1975, the 24-year-old Ian Buruma (now an award-winning essayist and historian, and the editor of the New York Review of Books) left his native Holland to study film at the Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo. It was a bold move. The 1970s was a wild, tumultuous decade in Japan, often known as the Showa Genroku, after the hedonistic period at the end of the 17th century, and Tokyo came as a shock to the few Westerners who went there: a teeming, neon-strafed megalopolis, where the trappings of hypermodernity jostled with elements of a sublime tradition, and the whole culture was drenched in eroticism.

Andre Van Loon

Love me, or go to hell

This is a wonderful and moving book of correspondence and biographical documents promising one Tchaikovsky in its subtitle and introduction, but actually delivering another — and thank the musical gods for that. Nothing here is horrid or even secret; the Russian edition was published in 2009 and has been used by English-speaking authorities since. And yet it claims to ‘unlock’ scandal: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky often swore in his letters (shock!), had many homosexual encounters, including one-night stands (covered in previous biographies) and felt at home in the upper echelons of the 19th-century Russian autocracy.

Sean Mcglynn

Great balls of fire

Lionheart! Saladin! Massacre! There is no shortage of larger-than-life characters and drama in the epic, two-year siege of Acre, the great set-piece of the Third Crusade. But, as John Hosler relates in this accomplished study, there was so much more besides. Acre proved the strategic point for armies from across Europe, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Maghreb; and the siege provided a kaleidoscope of competing ambitions, objectives and self-serving manoeuvrings amid the most arduous conditions, in which Bedouins ‘exchanged the severed heads of their victims with Saladin in return for robes and gifts’. The coastal city of Acre, in present-day Israel, was the first objective of the crusaders, as it would be their primary port for supplying the army.

Thursday

Vonny Leclerc

Knickerbocker glories

One September day the 16-year-old Tessie Reynolds got on her bike. In a homemade suit, she pedalled from London to Brighton and back, in eight and a half hours. It was 1893. The intrepid velocipedienne made the 190km journey in record time in an age of masculine heroics. But it was not her derring-do that scandalised the press into conniptions but her clothes: she was in short trousers. This was an era when women were shunned for egregious displays of ankle, meaning that Tessie’s dress was both revolutionary and overtly political. Behind the public tutting, her ‘rationals’ ignited women’s imaginations, showing a new way of moving and being in the world. She was inundated with pattern requests. Cycling fever peaked in the 1890s.