More from Books

Tuesday

Simon Ings

Thrilling tales of British pluck

December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no resources left to prevent the Turkish empire from expanding into India.  Edward Noel, an aristocratic Catholic political officer who is supposed to be in Persia, sends a telegram to his betters from the city of Baku, perched on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and the source of half the world’s oil. He wants to plug the strategic gap in central Asia by raising a force of local troops.

Nicolette Jones

Farewell to Lyra: The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman, reviewed

In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust novels is how much they make us feel – about the tie between characters and their daemons, the fear of Lyra’s sinister mother Mrs Coulter, the love between Will and Lyra, the protectiveness of the courageous pot boy Malcolm Polstead... The driving emotional force that carries us through The Rose Field is our desire to see Lyra and her daemon Pan reconciled.

Guy Stagg

The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen

In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While in Paris, Matthiessen helped to found the Paris Review with funding from CIA sources.

Susie Mesure

Trouble in Tbilisi: The Lack of Light, by Nino Haratischwili, reviewed

For a newly independent Georgia, the 1990s were a dark time literally and figuratively, as civil war raged, criminality flourished and the power stayed off. The Lack of Light, Nino Haratischwili’s fourth novel to be translated into English, turns that darkness into a gripping story about the power and pitfalls of female friendship that seeks to unpick the horrors of that decade. The narrative opens, briefly, in Tbilisi in 1987. The four protagonists – Keto, Dina, Nene and Ira – are on a schoolgirl mission to hang out in the Botanical Garden after hours. The escapade introduces the girls, who are all neatly – too neatly – ascribed various characteristics.

Julie Bindel

The disturbing allure of sex robots

By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have granted those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse by enabling victims to sue both the producers and the distributors of porn.

Andrew Hankinson

Few people are as dangerous as an insecure man mocked

‘I have had more direct clinical experience than almost any other forensic psychiatrist of assessing and managing lone-actor perpetrators of massacres,’ writes Paul Mullen, professor emeritus at Monash University in Australia, in his introduction to Running Amok. He’s got non-clinical experience, too. In 1990, when he lived near Aramoana in New Zealand, he was disturbed by gunfire one night. It turned out that the neighbour of one of his patients was busy killing 13 people. Afterwards, Mullen supported the survivors and his patient, who felt ‘anguish’ at not spotting the red flags to prevent the massacre.

Thursday

Christopher Bray

Revelling in illusion: the French sociologist-cum-philosopher who hit peak absurdity back in 1991

‘What is he talking about?’ Marine Baudrillard would sigh whenever she read her husband’s work. Anyone who has studied for an arts or a social-science degree over the past few decades will know what irked her. A sociologist-cum-philosopher’s prose is to thought what mud is to a windscreen. ‘There is no more hope for meaning,’ Jean Baudrillard wrote with unconscious exactitude in Simulacra and Simulation. ‘This is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, though, are immortal, invulnerable to nihilism. This is where seduction begins.’ In their admirably brief critical biography, Emmanuelle Fantin and Brian Nicol praise Baudrillard’s writing for its ‘enigmatic verve’. One might as well commend Bruckner’s 8th for its enervating brevity.

Allan Mallinson

When, why and how came the fall – the success and sorry decline of the British Army

I wonder how many people appreciate what a remarkably capable army we had for the first three decades of this book’s range – and how incapable that army has become. Forward defence in Germany during the Cold War (56,000 troops); keeping the peace in Northern Ireland; bringing Rhodesia/Zimbabwe back into the fold; liberating the hostages at the Iranian embassy in London; retaking the Falkland Islands; ejecting the Iraqis from Kuwait; bringing order to the Balkans; halting the civil war in Sierra Leone – the ‘rise’ part of Ben Barry’s book is indeed inspiring.

Robert Potts

Everything and the girl: a lit-crit dissection of the Swifty world

Stephanie Burt is a Harvard professor of English, a poet and a literary critic who recently created and taught a course on ‘Taylor Swift and Her World’. This not only attracted an unusually high degree of student engagement but also international media attention, with, one suspects, greater measurable benefits for Burt and Harvard than for Swift. Now Burt has produced Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift. The thesis is that Swift is a hugely successful artist because her songs are both ‘relatable’ and ‘aspirational’ The title suggests the sort of literary and musicological analysis that has been devoted to singers such as Morrissey (most brilliantly by Gavin Hopps) and Bob Dylan.

Genevieve Gaunt

When two worlds collide: Well, This is Awkward, by Esther Walker reviewed

Esther Walker, an established journalist and writer of non-fiction, opens her debut novel in the business world but segues into the concerns of balancing children and career. It’s a page-turner, silly yet serious; and, as with many good comedies, the humour comes from pain. Mairéad Alexander is a childless 44-year-old social media exec in London, caught in the hamster wheel of corporate work, hair bleaching and ‘buzzkill’ bad dates, when her life is tripped up by the unexpected arrival of Sunny, her 11-year-old niece. When we meet Mairéad she has recently sold her social media business for a packet and is now a consultant for the company that bought it. She finds herself working alongside poisonous colleagues with saccharine overtones and enduring the Gen-Z fashion police.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison

All that was bravest and best: William Miller, forgotten Victorian hero of South American independence

John Hemming is the doyen of historians of South America. In his previous books he has revealed the tragic history of the Incan empire (The Conquest of the Incas); the impact of the arrival of Europeans on the Brazilian Indians (Red Gold); and the story of the Amazon (Tree of Rivers). Now he has produced a biography of a modest baker’s son from Kent who became one of the greatest figures in the liberation of Spanish South America. William Miller was born in 1795, and fought as a teenager in the Peninsular War against Napoleon. Then, like many other Englishmen, he travelled to South America to fight alongside some of the greatest commanders battling the Spanish and striving for independence.

James Ball

The end is nigh – or is it?

When most people start screaming that the sky is falling, they can safely be ignored. But Eliezer Yudkowsky is not most people. He was one of the first to take the idea of superintelligent AI – artificial intelligence that greatly surpasses humanity – seriously. He played a role in introducing the founders of Google DeepMind to their first funder; and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, credited Yudkowsky as a man who was ‘critical in the decision’ to start the organisation. His influence goes still further – he was a key thinker motivating the effective altruism movement and its founders, and the wider rationalist movement to which they belonged.

Michael Arditti

Mad, bad and brilliant: Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers, reviewed

Klaus Kinski was one of Germany’s most celebrated postwar actors. Although he appeared in more than 130 films, including five for the director Werner Herzog, he began his career on the stage, returning in 1971 to perform a monologue, Jesus Christus Erlöser, before an audience of 6,000 in West Berlin. Benjamin Myers has long been fascinated by the surviving footage of Kinski’s performance and, in his latest novel, Jesus Christ Kinski, he attempts to recreate it on the page. He divides the book into two ‘acts’. The first consists of Kinski’s interior monologue as he struggles with both his own demons and an increasingly hostile audience.

Joanna Pocock

On the road, high society style

In 1949, aged 26, the bright, well-connected Judy Montagu (first cousin of Mary Churchill and friend of Princess Margaret) criss-crossed the United States on a Greyhound bus. The Greyhound Diary is a vivid and often humorous account of the three months she spent on the road. Montagu’s life, like her diary, reflects a specific time, place and atmosphere – that of postwar optimism, the disappearing shreds of aristocratic influence and a burgeoning interest in New Deal America. She was the epitome of the socialite whose sarcasm could be wielded like a scythe. At a luncheon in the American South, she meets a woman who tells her that she had once been married to an Englishman: ‘I used to drink beer with him – I hoped it would fatten me up, you see’ (coy smirk).

Tuesday

John Niven

Justin Currie’s truly remarkable rock memoir

In 2022, at the age of 58, Justin Currie – singer, bass-player and main songwriter with the Scottish rock band Del Amitri – faced what might be mildly termed a series of setbacks. In short order his mother died, his long-term partner suffered a catastrophic stroke, leaving her requiring constant care, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. About the first two there was not much to be done but weep. When it came to the third, Currie decided he would manage the ‘Ghastly Affliction’ (the ‘GA’ as he calls it) as best he could with medication and keep playing music as long as he was able to. The following year his band undertook a mammoth 52-day trek across North America as support act to the 1990s Canadian rockers the Barenaked Ladies.

Justin Marozzi

Will Israel always have America’s backing?

Marc Lynch is angry. The word ‘rage’ appears six times on the first page, and comes in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. This should be sufficient warning to anyone expecting a cool, calm, dispassionate analysis of the Middle East that they might have picked up the wrong book. That is not to say that Lynch, who runs the George Washington University’s Middle East programme, is not worth reading. On the contrary, and despite the occasional lapse into the sort of political-science-speak favoured by academics, he is a fierce and compelling voice.

Tiffany Jenkins

The radical power of sentimentality

When Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was published in 1740, it unleashed something unprecedented in literary history. This epistolary novel about a virtuous servant girl resisting her predatory master saw new depths of feeling on the printed page, reducing readers across Europe to tears. The revolutionary impact of emotion informs Ferdinand Mount’s ambitious cultural history, Soft. The former TLS editor and one-time head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit has crafted what reads like an elegant love letter to the human heart itself. Mount grasps an important truth: emotions do not mean the same thing across time, nor are they consistently valued in the same way. What one era celebrates as virtuous emoting, another dismisses as mawkish excess.

Julie Bindel

The gay rights movement threatens to implode

In the UK and elsewhere in the West, lesbian and gay rights have largely been won. Over the past two decades, rights to adoption, marriage, military service and workplace protection from discrimination have become law. Social inequality is another matter, and acceptance of same-sex relationships is now less widespread than it was ten years ago. According to Ronan McCrea, the author of The End of the Gay Rights Revolution, this can be explained – at least in part – by the political overreach of the LGBTQ+ movement. Is McCrea self-hating, riddled with internalised homophobia? Could it be that the movement has demanded too much, over and above acceptance and tolerance? As the title suggests, the book is a critique of the overreach and demands of some of the more radical campaigns.

Lee Langley

A literary Russian doll: The Tower, by Thea Lenarduzzi, reviewed

A girl in a tower. The words trigger instant curiosity. Who is she? Who locked her away, and why? Was it punishment, or sequestration to keep her safe? Thea Lenarduzzi’s The Tower is a literary Russian doll, one story concealed within another, blurring identities, blocking memory. A far from reliable narrator – ‘let’s call her T’ – steers us between fiction and real life while the author herself occasionally amends the telling. Clues are offered as we turn the pages, but we may have misread some of them, or been misled, and the conclusion upends expectations. If this is all beginning to sound rather too Fernando Pessoa, breathe easy. Lenarduzzi’s book is a compelling read, elegant and artful, intertwining myth, fairy tale and reality. Is it a novel or a memoir?

Marcus Nevitt

The traitor who gives Downing Street a bad name

Samuel Pepys didn’t much like the subject of Dennis Sewell’s new biography. Sir George Downing (1623-84) was for a short time Pepys’s boss at the Exchequer, during which period the diarist observed that his employer was ‘so stingy a fellow I care not to see him’. Despite being one of the richest men in Restoration London, Downing’s parsimony was legendary and was the subject of one of the Diary’s most celebrated comic anecdotes. Having recently purchased a country estate in Cambridgeshire, Downing learned that it was customary for the landowner to host a Christmas dinner for the poor of the parish.