More from Books

Thursday

Steven Poole

The soldier savant

Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking. But before he devoted himself to metaphysical meditations, he had spent a decade as a soldier-scholar travelling the hotspots of Europe. How might a greater understanding of this period affect our view of the great man? This is a fascinating if dry kind of pre-intellectual biography, which hopes to hint at how the philosophy grew out of the action. René Descartes was born to a family of minor nobility in 1596, and educated by Jesuits. He studied some mathematics in Paris and then acquired a degree in law, after which he ‘set out to study the art of war’.

Patrick Skene-Catling

School of Soho

This is an important, authoritative work of art criticism that recognises schools of painters, yet displays the superior distinctions of individual geniuses. Martin Gayford, The Spectator’s art critic, concedes that the identification by R.B. Kitaj, an American painter, of a ‘substational School of London’ was ‘essentially correct’, though in London there was no ‘coherent movement or stylistic group’.The only characteristic shared by London painters has always been merely that they live in London. There have been some influential personal relationships, even cases of a sort of cosiness, especially in the French Pub, the Colony Room and other drinking venues in Soho and Fitzrovia.

Ian Sansom

Look back, face forward

You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star and scourge of political correctness whose book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a worldwide bestseller, beloved of serious young men seeking intellectual challenge and good old-fashioned fatherly advice. Summary: ‘Sort yourself out, bucko.’ We don’t really need the likes of Peterson here: we’ve got Ferdinand Mount. The book we should all be reading to sort ourselves out, buckos, is Prime Movers. Mount is, admittedly, an unlikely intellectual hero.

Daniel Hahn

They shall not pass

Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona desert. He has just received a college degree, studying international relations. His response to her bafflement — and concern — is that he wants to see the reality, what it’s like ‘in the field’. This will help him better understand the issues, so he can later use the power that this understanding gives him... for what? To attend law school? Become a policy maker? But first: to write this book.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Make or break?

My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I asked him how he was getting on. He said: ‘I’ve just got to the knifing.’ I said: ‘What knifing?’ I’d already forgotten about the knifing. A whole knifing in south London, complete with innocent dead boy and devastated mother. The incident’s strange forgettableness was a sign of the flaws of a novel so nearly very good, and admirable in many ways. It’s sprawling (like the suburbs of south London in which it’s set), and many of its extended scenes, though beautifully and richly imagined, lack the vital element of plot-forwarding relevance that would make them memorable.

Charlotte Hobson

A brutal band of thieves

Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more than timely. In these days of ever more bizarre Russian attacks, it reads like the essential companion to a bewildering and aggressive new world, a world that is no longer confined behind Russian borders but seeks actively to penetrate and disrupt our own society. Essentially a history of the development of Russia’s unique form of organised crime, it constantly illuminates and clarifies the familiar, legal narrative of Russian history and the attitudes of Putin’s clique. The Russian mafia’s distinctive culture originally emerged during the years of revolution and civil war.

Dorian Lynskey

Trading crime for rhyme

I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging them to repackage a horrendous experience as a juicy anecdote with which to promote an album. Some natural raconteurs are happy to play that game — 50 Cent can now tell the story of the day he was shot nine times with the fluency of Peter Ustinov on Parkinson — but many rappers are understandably coy, at least outside the recording studio, about sharing the gory details of their previous lives. In that respect, this memoir by one of the nine original members of the Wu-Tang Clan lives up to its title, being so brutally frank that it is hard to believe a single story remains untold.

John McEwen

His muse and anchor

Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013) CBE, RA, Hon RSA — to 20th- century Scottish art what his hero and acquaintance Hugh MacDiarmid was to Scottish poetry — but its inspiring message is that love conquers all. Helen Bellany is not a ‘quitter’, and her story triumphantly confirms it. It is a long book but does not drag. The past is so alive to her it seems only natural when she lapses into the present tense. She is a highlander from Golspie in ‘timeless and silent’ Sutherland, and the poetry of her descriptions encourages a visit to that far-off county.

James Womack

Into the woods

This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a ‘Trunk’; a ‘Crown’; some ‘Seeds’), and which unashamedly references every tree you might half-remember, from Eden to Auden (‘A culture is no better than its woods’). It revolves around various efforts to save trees, whether by seedbanks or political activism, and details the ways in which its group of protagonists becomes radicalised and willing to put their lives on the line, or even kill, to save the few remaining patches of old forest in the USA. One of these protagonists, Olivia, turns towards the forest when she has a near-death experience and starts to sense the spirit of the trees calling to her.

Francis Wheen

Overs and outs

E.W. Swanton’s first published article appeared in All Sports Weekly in July 1926, soon after his 19th birthday. Thence, swiftly, into Fleet Street, covering public-school sports for the London Evening Standard and ‘rugger’ for the Times. In the summer of 1930 he made his Test debut, reporting the Ashes match at Lord’s in which young Don Bradman scored 254 out of 729 for 6 declared. Swanton had not been selected for the cricket XI at school. He forestalled any such humiliations in adult life by founding his own team, the Arabs, whose one absolute club rule was that E.W. Swanton should open the batting. As for the other players, according to Fay and Kynaston, ‘being the son of a Viscount seemed to ensure automatic selection’. All very Wodehousean.

James Walton

Obsession and obfuscation

The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of not being entirely up to speed on the life and works of the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) seem destined — even intended — to find Patient X a less than alluring combination of the tediously baffling and the bafflingly tedious. Peace’s fact-based fiction has always demanded a fair amount of patience and concentration, with obsession serving as both his subject matter and his method.

James Yorke

Splendour and squalor

The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established his court there in May 1682 until his great grandson Louis XVI was forced to leave by a mob of 30,000 in October 1789. Such was its reputation that Lord Chesterfield earnestly advised his son that ‘an hour at Versailles is now worth more to you than three hours in your closet with the best books that were ever written’. Embassies came from as far afield as Siam and Persia. Leather-bound engravings of the palace served as diplomatic gifts and spread its reputation throughout Europe. Every sovereign, leafing through his copy, simply had to recreate his own Versailles.

Simon Heffer

The Great War, viewed from all sides

The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians are finding angles hitherto unexplored that they can make books out of; or, at the lower end of the scale, they are content to retell the old story in a different way. What we have been short of in the English canon is a view of the war not just from the other side, but from all sides: it was, as Colonel Repington termed it, ‘the first world war’, and not simply four years of carnage between the British and the Germans. Jörn Leonhard’s epic and magnificent work — unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read — tries, with some success, to embrace everything.

Philip Womack

A love letter to France

When John Julius Norwich was a boy, his father was British ambassador in Paris.School holidays were spent in the exceptionally beautiful embassy which had been purchased by the Duke of Wellington from Pauline Borghese. He would mix dry martinis for Jean Cocteau, and sing songs to the dinner guests which he had been taught by his father’s mistress, the poetess Louise de Vilmorin, who got on famously with his mother, Diana Cooper. It makes you long to have been there. This warm, delightful short history of France, aimed convivially at the general reader, is his love letter to the country he knew so well: and, he writes, most probably his final book.

Thursday

Sam Mills

In search of Pygmalion

In 1994, Matthew De Abaitua, an aspiring writer and student on East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA, applies for a job as Will Self’s amanuensis. The first interview is preceded by Self passing De Abaitua a tobacco pouch and a large bag of weed, with the instruction: ‘Make something out of that.’ In the second, they meet at Self’s remote cottage and fire an air rifle at whiskey bottles. Matthew is 22, and spent his previous summer working as a security guard in Liverpool; Self is 33, has just published My Idea of Fun and appeared on the famous ’93 Granta list, and is a well-respected author embracing a mad, bad and dangerous to know persona. De Abaitua is not merely an assistant.

Lee Langley

Adrift in Tokyo

Before her death two years ago, Yuko Tsushima was a powerful voice in Japanese literature; a strong candidate for the Nobel. The New York Times rated her ‘one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation’. Tsushima relentlessly quarried her damaged life for her work: she was brought up by her mother after her writer father committed suicide. Abandonment is a recurring theme in her 17 novels, her protagonist often a single mother, as was Tsushima. Joltingly honest, she doesn’t spare herself or her readers. Territory of Light charts a pivotal year in the life of a vulnerable young woman and toddler daughter — both unnamed — adrift in a hostile 1970s Tokyo.

Henry Jeffreys

Deathly prose

‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect... Reading is love in action.’ Those are the words of the bestselling author Matt Haig and though I wouldn’t put it quite like that, I too feel that there is something inherently good about reading. Daniel Kalder has no such illusions. His latest book Dictator Literature (published in the US as The Infernal Library) looks at the dark side of the written word. It’s a study of what the great and not so great dictators of modern times read and wrote. In lesser hands this would be a romp (romp isn’t quite the right word, is it?) through Mein Kampf, Lenin’s What is to be Done? and Mao’s Little Red Book, but Kalder is nothing if not thorough.

Anne Sebba

The man who kept re-inventing himself

When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen Mother shortly after the second world war and asked about his background he apparently chose to remain silent. ‘Pour ne pas compliquer les choses,’ was his own version of the one-sided exchange. Gary, born Roman Kacew to Jewish parents probably in Vilna in 1914 and educated in Nice where he was taken as a teenager by his ambitious actress mother, was constantly re-inventing himself.

Ruth Scurr

A year full of birds

Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.’ Practicalities (1987) is a series of interviews Duras gave to a young friend with all the questions left out and the interview format effaced. Levy’s book is, similarly, one side of an intense conversation about life, love, power, home-making and writing. Her interlocutors, many of them dead but still living through their words and work, include Simone de Beauvoir, Louise Bourgeois, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Hepworth and Elena Ferrante. Levy is a playwright and novelist whose Swimming Home (2012) and Hot Milk (2016) were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Hermione Eyre

Blood and bile

Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and yearning for — television. Medieval Bodies could be the script for a landmark BBC Four series, while the author of How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain came to prominence as farthingale consultant on programmes such as Tudor Monastery Farm. She can tell you everything you never wanted to know about codpieces. Medieval Bodies skips between English, Welsh, Hebraic and Islamic medicine with ease, touching on caliphs and kings, Mamluks and djinns. One gem here is the inventor Ismail al-Jazari, the Heath Robinson of 13th-century Baghdad.