More from Books

Thursday

Juliet Nicolson

Listen with Auntie

The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with a refuge from attack. Inside, a gender-segregating blanket divided the employees’ emergency dormitory in two. But such propriety masked the energy, idiosyncrasy and influence that ballooned within the Portland Place walls during the wartime years. From the morning of 3 September 1939, when Neville Chamberlain used the wireless to announce that Britain was at war with Germany, the same day that the Alexandra Palace indefinitely shut down all television broadcasting, radio became the nation’s indispensable source of up-to-the-minute information.

David Crane

Mother of the nation

It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets of the Holy Roman Empire was to provide the royal families of Europe with some of their most dismal consorts. In the century and a half after George I came to the throne in 1714 Britain imported more than its fair share, but if in Caroline of Brunswick we drew quite possibly the rummest of the whole lot, in another and largely forgotten Caroline, Wilhelmine Karoline of Ansbach, the wife of George II, 18th-century Britain and Matthew Dennison struck, if not quite gold, then at least a good solid lump of iron.

Thursday

Max Décharné

In cold blood

If you search Google Images for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered top hat, or the determined features of the world champion boxer Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, the ‘Aldgate Sphinx’. In between falls a picture of the crime writer Ted Lewis perched on a stool at a cable-strewn film location in 1970, portable typewriter on his knees, cigarette on his lip, and a sardonically knowing look which says that after years of struggle, overnight success has finally arrived. The film was Get Carter, anote-perfect transcription of Lewis’s hardboiled masterpiece Jack’s Return Home, published in February that year.

Stephen Daisley

The twice-promised land

If books about the Israeli-Arab conflict were building blocks, the Palestinians would have their own state already and then some. Most volumes bring little that is fresh or challenging, so selectivity is key. Daniel Gordis and Benny Morris are essential, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev unavoidable. Take time on unsexy stylists like Mustafa Kabha or Anita Shapira; they will reward you. Anything by John Pilger or Ilan Pappé should be tossed aside like an iffy shawarma wrap, and for the same reason. Disconcertingly, Ian Black defies this framework. Enemies and Neighbours, his history of a century of blossoming and bloodshed in the Holy Land, is not revelatory and yet it is quietly compelling.

James Evans

Catfight at court

Apart from glorying in a memorable name, Lettice Knollys has chiefly been known for her connections — with her second husband, Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester; with the woman who was deeply in love with Dudley, Queen Elizabeth I; and with her hot-headed son who, as Earl of Essex, for a time enjoyed a flirtatious closeness to the older Queen. Until now, there has been no biography of the Countess of Leicester in her own right. Elizabeth, having been close to Lettice in her youth, was enraged and embittered by her marriage to Dudley, the one man in the Queen’s life who was ‘completely off limits’, according to Nicola Tallis.

Stuart Kelly

It’s grim up north

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the Costa First Book Award. His new novel, Devil’s Day, is equally good, even though its similarities slightly muffle the surprises. Like his debut, it is a work of gooseflesh eeriness. The Loney artfully described the north-west coast of England; Devil’s Day as proficiently conjures the fells of an area hazily between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Loney featured a damaged family on a religious retreat encountering old paganisms; Devil’s Day has our protagonist, John Pentecost, returning to the family farm for the funeral of his grand-father, the Gaffer, which coincides with a ritual for placating the devil before the flock is brought in for the winter.

Laura Freeman

Pulling through

Grief is not being able to eat a small boiled egg. ‘Could you face an egg?’ the widowed Jean asks her daughter Eve in Susie Boyt’s sixth novel, Love & Fame. It is not long after Jean’s husband, Eve’s father, John Swift, a sitcom actor, a national treasure, has died. Eve can’t face an egg; Jean has lost her appetite for anything but eggs. One small boiled egg, morning, noon and night. This is a clever, wise, often sad book about failure, dashed hopes and bereavement. It could be bleak, but Boyt is fiercely funny, skewering fads and self-help trends. A professional de-clutterer in the Marie Kondo mode is called ‘the Prim Reaper’. The novel opens with a stop-start list of modern platitudes and wellness nuggets: You tried Tranquiltea?

Rose Prince

On the wild side

The terroir of the Kentish coast is faultlessly represented in The Sportsman (Phaidon, £29.95), a book of recipes from an acclaimed pub restaurant in the village of Seasalter, close to Whitstable. On the bill of fare (it’s that English) you will find slip soles and thornback ray, salt marsh lamb and oysters, seaweeds of all sorts, wild berries, venison and much else from this landscape with its watery edge. The food is seasoned with home-panned sea salt and the kitchen churns its own butter. The Sportsman’s chef-proprietor,Stephen Harris, writes that terroir is a troublesome word that has come to mean too many things, especially with wine. The French have perhaps deliberately mystified it, he says.

Julie Burchill

Gathering moss

Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I’ve been for the past four decades. It’s hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I’ve met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive in the Antipodes, while my colleagues were regularly flown to the USA and supplied with groupies and cocaine as if they themselves were rock stars. And then punk came along and rocked the gravy boat — and the internet finished the job. Last time I saw a copy, it was lying wanly in a bin marked FREE — PLEASE TAKE ONE.

Rose George

A different kettle of fish

Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the historical record, too: fishing equipment is soft and decays (bamboo, hemp, lines made from kelp, cedar bark, women’s hair). Brian Fagan is an archaeologist, a profession that we associate with dust and soil and stone, but here he attempts to capture the history of fishing in ancient civilisation. It is not just fish that elude the historian: fisherfolk have always lived on the margins — of land and in recorded history (and still do). ‘To a scholar,’ writes Fagan, ‘the illiterate fishing people of the past are elusive, and their trade is a challenging puzzle of clues.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Problems of her own

If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato nation, it will make you feel great affection for it. Sprawled on L-shaped sofas with comfort cushions or slobbering dogs on their tummies, or sitting side by side on armchairs with a vase of carnations on a doily between them, the programme’s chosen telly-watchers make what must be the most unselfconscious, and therefore genuine, remarks spoken by anyone on air. There’s no doubt in my mind that Giles and Mary are the most watchable of all the watchers.

Thursday

Laura Beatty

Angel and demon

Read cover to cover, a book of essays gives you the person behind it: their voice, the trend of their thinking, their tastes and the nature of their engagement with the world. So, here are two, one from each end of the human spectrum. Think of Milton’s Archangel Raphael, intellectually wide-ranging, lucid, informative and fair, and you have Francis Spufford. Think of his darkly glittering Satan — vivid, passionate, partisan and fatally persuasive — and you have Martin Amis. Read these books together and you have, in essay terms, a Miltonic whole. These are collections of what might be called ‘pre-loved’ pieces, not originally designed to cohere, so they have been washed and brushed for resale.

Daniel Hahn

The art of deception | 9 November 2017

Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a charismatic Nazi concentration camp survivor, and more. In January 2005 he addressed the Spanish parliament to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is, everyone agrees, an extraordinary man. Heroic, almost. The thing is, his extraordinary, heroic biography is at least partly a lie. But which parts? In The Impostor, the novelist Javier Cercas seeks to disentangle Marco’s lies from those small provable truths supporting them.

Stephen Bayley

High wire act

‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation that turned PR and branding into art forms, wanted homegrown creative heroes. In design there were Charles Eames and George Nelson with their homey hopsack suits and wash’n’wear shirts, their sensible Wasp homilies: a counterattack against imported — and often baffling — exotics from the Bauhaus. It was the same in fine art. Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) was a roughneck from cowboy country in Wyoming who became a darling of the media, not least because of his readily reportable deplorable behaviour.

Ian Thomson

Italy’s road to ruin

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without.

Mary Keen

The future isn’t rosy

Emotional geography is now a recognised academic subject. Is emotional botany heading the same way? This is a year for thoughtful books about plants and the way they affect lives, what they make people feel and how we can respect nature. Many of the year’s works might appeal to non-gardeners. Readers hoping for rose-tinted pages may be disappointed. Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £14.99) is ostensibly a diary of his allotment over a little more than a year. But, he writes: ‘Sometimes, when I think of this book, I am almost bewildered. It has taken such a turn. It was to be about gardening... with personal stuff added in.’ The editor of the Observer food magazine, Jenkins grows exotic vegetables and describes them lusciously.

Claudia Massie

A blunt instrument of war

It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura lamenting ‘the number of bad books that have been written and will be written’ about it. Fortunately, James Attlee’s study of Picasso’s superstar work of art is not a bad book and he builds on a solid cultural and historic understanding of the painting to collate 80 years of evolving reaction to it. Attlee begins in May 1937, when, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republic commissioned Picasso to create a painting for its pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. They hoped the famous artist would help secure sympathy, funds and, significantly, political intervention in the Republican cause.

Hugh Thomson

Blowing hot and cold | 9 November 2017

I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how capricious Homeric weather can be. In the space of a few days the wind shifted dramatically to three different points of the compass — and none of them was the gentle westerly Zephyr that brought Odysseus and his men back to almost spitting distance of their homeland. Almost, because just as they approached, the crew became suspicious of the goatskin bag in which Aeolus had helpfully packed away the other hostile winds and let them all loose. Nick Hunt tries to track down a few of Europe’s more errant and potent winds. He starts with the homegrown Helm, which blusters across the Pennines.

Nigel Jones

The revolution devours its children

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of his native Georgia, and was an avid reader of history, novels and Marxist-Leninist theory, marking the pages of the 20,000 books in his library with expletives scrawled with the same coloured crayons with which he signed mass death warrants and international treaties: ‘Rubbish!’, ‘Piss off!’, ‘Fool!’, ‘Scumbag!’, ‘Ha-Ha!

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

A vanishing vision

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey at Oxford. One of their earliest conversations concerned the political implications of the passions. A month later, on 28 July, the French Revolutionary Terror climaxed in the guillotining of the Incorruptible, Maximilien Robespierre. Evidence from across the Channel notwithstanding, Coleridge and Southey were certain that the passions are not vicious — ’tis society makes the indulgence of them so. They resemble an assemblage of waters, destructive if they run wildly over the country, but the source of abundance if properly guided.