More from Books

Thursday

Alan Judd

Mossad’s secret allies in Operation Wrath of God

More than half a century ago Palestinian terrorists stormed the 1972 Munich Olympics, murdering two of the Israeli team and taking another nine hostage. The West German authorities, ill-equipped to deal with such incidents, agreed to fly the terrorists and their hostages to Egypt. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, offered to mount a rescue operation. The Germans launched their own, resulting in the deaths of a police officer, four of the seven terrorists and all the hostages.    One consequence was the Israeli government’s Operation Wrath of God, a programme to assassinate any leaders or planners associated with the massacre.

Tuesday

Lee Langley

A road trip like no other – crossing America by Greyhound bus

There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice.  In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, ‘running away from loss’. Seventeen years later she has gone back, looking for the motels, diners, cities, suburbs and truck stops encountered on that first trip, and she is stunned by what she finds – stations closed or pared back, with nowhere to wash, rest or buy food.

Mark Bostridge

The boundless enthusiasm of Asa Briggs

It’s doubtful whether Asa Briggs ever had an idle moment in his life. Bestselling historian, pioneer of the new universities of the 1960s, chronicler of the BBC, champion of adult education, academic globetrotter and much more besides, he possessed phenomenal energy. He was a miracle of the kind of boundless enthusiasm that his Victorian hero Samuel Smiles had extolled in his book Self-Help. Short and tubby, with large glasses, Briggs effortlessly outpaced academic colleagues who tended to be left panting behind him. A joke did the rounds that if a word were to be coined for a unit of intellectual energy it should be an ‘Asa’. He was dubbed ‘the last great Victorian improver’ and ‘the Lord Macaulay of the Welfare State’.

David Honigmann

The powder keg of 1980s New York

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s romp through the status and racial anxieties of 1980s New York, begins with an unnamed mayor being Mau-Maued by Harlem activists. As he soaks up the abuse, he fantasises about the confrontation spreading: Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third World down there!... Staten Island! Do you Saturday do-it-yourselfers really think you’re snug in your little rug? You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge? This fictional world, a collision of riches and poverty and criminal justice and electoral politics, maps neatly on to the period described in Jonathan Mahler’s new book.

Tuesday

Mia Levitin

Madcap antics: The Pentecost Papers, by Ferdinand Mount, reviewed

Ferdinand Mount has had an illustrious career, including posts as head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, literary and political editor of The Spectator and editor of the TLS. He is a prolific author to boot, with 29 fiction and non-fiction books under his belt. His latest novel, The Pentecost Papers, is an ‘ill-starred odyssey through an incurably slippery world’, he writes, ‘recorded by several hands – most of them unsteady’. Our first narrator is Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent (‘an anachronism,’ he admits, ‘like still keeping a hat-stand in the hall’). Dickie will be familiar to readers of Making Nice (2021), a satire of spin dedicated to Mount’s ‘fellow Wonks and Spads’.

James Cahill

Looking on in anger: Happiness and Love, by Zoe Dubno, reviewed

The fantasy of telling disagreeable friends how awful they really are is a relatable one. But rarely does it find such extravagant, relentless expression as in Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness and Love. The narrator is a nameless woman who finds herself among former friends in New York. While she never succumbs to an outburst, her interior monologue issues forth like a furious esprit d’escalier. The dramatic scenario – modelled on that of Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters – is a dinner party in the loft dwelling of an ‘art world’ couple with whom the narrator used to live, following the funeral of one of their cohort.

Lynn Barber

The trials of ‘the sexiest man alive’

This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping. Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was a relatively unknown 22-year-old actress, but he auditioned her for the female lead in a film he was making of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson were also up for the role, but as soon as he saw Heard he decided ‘Yep... That’s the one.’ Amber arrived for filming with her girlfriend Tasya van Ree, whom she introduced as her wife. The director Bruce Robinson panicked: ‘She’s gay?!

Helen Brown

An explosion of toxic masculinity: The Fathers, by John Niven, reviewed

‘Fucking men,’ spits a woman towards the end of John Niven’s brilliant tenth novel, The Fathers. ‘Why do they always think it’s about fixing everything?’ It’s a classic hit of deadpan humour from a novelist best known for sending up the most appalling blood, spunk’n’booze-spattered excesses of modern men. A former A&R man with a reputation for partying harder than any rock star, Niven made his name satirising the Britpop scene in his 2008 novel Kill Your Friends. Influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh, he excelled at condensing his characters’ most brutal, misanthropic thoughts into kick-in-the-balls prose.

Kapil Komireddi

Romantic fantasies of the French in India

‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’ Reduced to ‘slaves’ who ‘tremble before the Englishman’s whip’, the Indians in this tale yearn for the ‘heroic Dupleix and his deputy de Bussy’. Had Louis XV’s jealous court not betrayed those two men, ‘India would have been French, not British’. The book was a work of fiction. It had to be. In reality, scarcely anybody in India, barring a reactionary nawab here and an obscurantist sultan there, longed for French rule. The French were history’s losers.

Tom Miller

What’s next for Taiwan?

When Portuguese traders sailed past a verdant, mountainous land on the fringe of the Chinese empire in the mid-16th century, they named it Ihla Formosa – ‘beautiful island’. But Kangxi, the third emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was less impressed when his naval forces captured it in 1683, scoffing: ‘Taiwan is no bigger than a ball of mud. We gain nothing by possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it.’ Beautiful or not, Taiwan was a pirates’ lair, inhabited by tattooed head-hunters and best left alone. Yet the Qing clung on to Taiwan for two centuries, with Chinese settlers gradually displacing the indigenous Austronesian population.

Ian Thomson

Britain’s new role as a bastion of black culture

One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who was born in Jamaica in 1934 and worked in London as a bus conductor, was disappointed to find that the British were not only unmindful of the Commonwealth, but disinclined to help African-Caribbean immigrants. (Gallingly for him, Italians in the Soho confectionary business were extended a warmer welcome, even though they had fought on Hitler’s side.) Inevitably as a ‘clippie’ on double-deckers, Hinds was exposed to racism.

Ian Birrell

The insoluble link between government and crime

In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such illicit activities. When the government tried to crack down in 1781, it had to send in a 1,000-strong militia, headed by 100 men on horseback. Yet smuggling may have accounted for more than half of England’s trade at the time – and it often involved respected figures in communities who regularly bribed officials. This underlines how the imposition of taxes creates illegal markets that can eat into state revenues and corrupt society.

Minoo Dinshaw

The merchant as global reporter

Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique, the Great Tew Circle. Wren more than once returns to Microcosmography’s comparison of the nave of St Paul’s, where London’s freshest newsletters were to be procured, with the commercial buzz of the Royal Exchange, with news replacing goods and hard cash as a potentially fruitful alternative currency.

Boyd Tonkin

A rebellious childhood: Lowest Common Denominator, by Pirkko Saisio, reviewed

How do you dispose of 48 uniform volumes of the collected works of Lenin and Stalin? Pirkko Saisio and her mother hatch a plan. The books are ‘dumped into the trash bin’ by their apartment block, then coated with ‘a week’s worth of eggshells and fish guts and newspapers’. No one will find them, Mother insists. If anybody did, ‘there’s no way they’ll know they’re ours’. So Pirkko no longer has to hide the embarrassing tomes when friends drop round. Executed during true-believing Father’s absence, Lenin and Stalin’s stinky downfall is one of many bittersweet episodes that make Lowest Common Denominator such a piquant account of a childhood and a time.

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Mothers’ union: The Benefactors, by Wendy Erskine, reviewed

This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics. Erskine teases out narrative strands through a handful of characters’ viewpoints and intersperses these with vignettes written in a first-person verbatim style from a wider cast. She has carefully selected her main parts. Alongside Misty, the assaulted teenager, the focus is on the three women whose 18-year-old sons were the perpetrators.

Ian Sansom

Bristling with meaning: the language of hair in 19th-century America

In Whiskerology, Sarah Gold McBride combs through a bristling, tangled mess of data, facts and theories about gender, race, national identity and their relationship to – yep, you guessed – hair. Do not buy this book if you are looking for a fun read about vintage updos, goatees and ponytails; Ye Olde Horrible Haircuts it is not. It’s a book about hair as a kind of cultural text; readable, manipulable, highly permable and ideologically curled. One does not, it turns out, simply go and get a haircut: one enters a vast semiotic salon, more Saussure than Sassoon, where you’re lucky to get out without a scalping. McBride is a 21st-century American scholar writing about 19th-century American hair, but the manner is classic mid-20th-century French plait.

Mike Cormack

Tedious, lazy and pretentious – Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love is a disgrace

There are 32 years between the publication of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and his Men in Love – a gap roughly equivalent to that between Sgt. Pepper and ‘Windowlicker’ by Aphex Twin. Perhaps three cultural generations. It is disturbing, therefore, to find Welsh still pumping out further sequels to his spectacular literary debut. But whereas that had verbal fireworks, razor-sharp dialogue, superb character ventriloquism and a fearless examination of Scottish moral rot, Men in Love is – let’s be frank – tedious, lazy, pretentious and simply bad writing. Under the influence of American Psycho, Welsh has had characters narrating their fleeting perceptions since Filth (1998), in the hope that accumulation will create meaning.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Pity the censor: Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, reviewed

After her America is Not the Heart was published in 2018, Elaine Castillo was named by the Financial Times one of ‘the planet’s 30 most exciting young people’, alongside Billie Eilish and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That debut novel told the story of three generations of women torn between the Philippines and the United States. In Moderation, thirtysomething Filipina-American Girlie Delmundo (not her real name) works as a content moderator, removing the most hideous material to be found on the internet. The author doesn’t pull her punches. In an early scene, Girlie has to moderate a video of child sexual abuse as part of her final assessment to get the job.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

With glee to the silvery sea

Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great North of Scotland Railway described the Moray Firth as ‘the Scottish Riviera’. The Furness Railway named Grange-over-Sands ‘the Naples of the North!’ (The exclamation mark injected a smidgeon of doubt, Martin feels). More realistic companies toned down their boasts. The LNER decided it should go no further than claim it took passengers to ‘The Drier Side of Britain’. A North Eastern Railway poster proclaimed: ‘Scarborough Braces You Up.

Andrew Rosenheim

A summer of suspense: recent crime fiction

Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying ‘Prithee Sir’ a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen. The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by Joseph Farrell (Open Borders Press, £18.99), is one such addition, though an unusual one. It is set in Bologna in 1944, the vicious period after Italy’s first surrender, Mussolini’s capture and daring escape, and the invasion by Nazi troops to counter the Allies’ advance from the south.