More from Books

Tuesday

Christopher Akers

The Panic of 1873 seems eerily familiar

On 18 September 1873, the leading American bank Jay Cooke & Co collapsed after a disastrous bet on the railroad boom. Like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was a watershed moment in an unfolding global financial crisis. Yet ‘the first Great Depression’, which lasted until 1896, is now mostly forgotten, despite some intriguing parallels to contemporary events and a fascinating dramatis personae, which includes the Rothschilds, Ottoman sultans and Otto von Bismarck. The Panic of 1873 and its aftermath took place in a period of financial globalisation and technological growth, with bond markets funding the epochal projects of America’s first transcontinental railroad and the Suez Canal. US railroads were the artificial intelligence investment of the day.

Christopher Webb

Will robots simply bore us to extinction?

A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a ‘tidal wave’; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind co-founder talks urgently about an ‘impending deluge’ (while repeatedly warning us that the ‘wave is coming’, and, even more alarmingly, ‘the coming wave really is coming’). It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a ‘tsunami hitting the labour market’.

Patrick West

The humiliating truth about the way we think

Over the long span of human existence, different cultures have held varying notions as to how responsible we are for our own thoughts and beliefs. Before the dawn of the Abrahamic religions, and in places untouched by these faiths, it tended to be the rule that individual members of the group could only be understood as parts of the whole, or in the grander cosmic scheme of things. The ascendence of Christianity in Europe, with its idea of the indivisible soul, tilted matters more towards a belief in individual agency and accountability. This concept, secularised by Descartes, who gave us the commanding rational ego, has proved resilient ever since, despite the best efforts of Freud, neuroscience and gene selection theory to dethrone it.

Guy Stagg

Putin and Erdogan are playing with fire in the Balkans and the Caucasus

There are 34 disputed territories in and around Europe. In some cases, two or more nations claim the same patch of land. In others, separatist governments demand their own sovereignty. Many of these disputes have a quaint, eccentric interest: Italy and France struggling over the summit of Mont Blanc; or Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Iceland arguing over the barren islet of Rockall. But a few of them – such as Cyprus, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria – provide more urgent political challenges. As Hannah Lucinda Smith argues, these places are Petri dishes – experiments in populism, nationalism and covert conflict that are being repeated across the continent. Her book Hinterlands explores several of these blind spots in most people’s mental map of Europe.

Lynn Barber

Wham! How George Michael shot to stardom straight from school

It turns out that the writer Sathnam Sanghera, ‘The Boy with the Topknot’, has been a besotted George Michael fan since the age of eight, when he started listening to his older sisters’ Wham! records. This was an unusual thing to be as a Sikh growing up in Wolverhampton and it got him teased at school. But he stuck with it. So when a friend suggested that he write something fun to compensate for the years of heavy historical research he’d put into his excellent book Empireland, he decided to set off on a sort of pilgrimage in search of his dead hero. First stop was Mondial Cars, a showroom in Northwood, north London, which used to be the Bel Air restaurant, where the teenage Michael worked as a DJ.

Annie Walton Doyle

The Battle of Cross Street: High and Low, by Amanda Craig, reviewed

Writing a state-of-the-nation novel that is also tense and funny is no mean feat, but that’s what Amanda Craig seems to have accomplished in High and Low. Ambitious and far-reaching, ittakes not a scalpel but a machine gun to the issues of modern city living, leaving no target safe. Set on a north London street over the course of a single day, it compresses time and space, which, together with its plethora of characters, gives a feeling as oppressive as the city itself. Cross Street houses a cosmopolitan mix of the privileged and the poor. Prospect Park and the Cross Estate are both metaphorical and geographical parallels, rubbing together while rarely intersecting. Alongside these highs and lows, Craig focuses on the world of the writer.

Philip Marsden

The wonder of nature’s ability to heal itself

A decade ago, I planted 12 acres of trees in a field that had proved unsuitable for productive grazing. The trees themselves are doing well but the most remarkable change has been the increase in birds, invertebrates and flora. Each year brings new species, new levels of abundance. It has been very satisfying and strangely quick. We’re encouraged to think that the planet’s natural processes work if not always at a geological pace, at least not in the instant reward timeframe that characterises our own brief lives. In Nature’s Echo, the leading ecologist Thomas Crowther takes this capacity for nature’s rapid recovery as one reason why we should temper pessimism about environmental catastrophe.

Tuesday

Amy Liptrot

Portrait of an addict: Keshed, by Stu Hennigan, reviewed

In the tradition of literary lowlifes and lushes as conceived by Charles Bukowski or Jean Rhys, Keshed is a story about an alcoholic, with a distinctive 21st-century, northern English working-class setting. Formally inventive, the ‘now’ sections of the novel are not sentences but strings of words, effective and short: ‘Rancid liquid squirting chin soggy torso peristaltic rush rapid.’ One such section opens the book, setting the uncompromising tone. The protagonist, Sean (‘He was pissed when I met him and he hasn’t changed’), a bright, charismatic lad from an unnamed small Yorkshire town, has been to university in Manchester where he drank heavily. He then moved back home, and we meet him working as a plasterer, living to get smashed.

Stuart Kelly

Reading between the lines: the power of the unsaid

This is the kind of book I wish I had the chance to sit down and discuss with the author. It is accessible without sacrificing academic rigour, astute and ingenious in its close readings and balances breadth with depth admirably. But why on earth does it have a singular title, given that the whole thrust of the argument depends on silence being a multifarious phenomenon? The reader encounters the enigma of silence as rapture, failure, slyness, avoidance, challenge. Silence is both built into literature and a kind of enwrapping, enclosing ocean, out of which words will emerge and back into which they will sink, rather like the primordial chaos at the beginning of Genesis. Speaking or writing about silence is inherently paradoxical. Many years ago I interviewed A.S.

Viv Groskop

Caroline Aherne’s comedic genius is much missed

Who do we have on television now, or even on social media, who can unmask pomposity and self-obsession quite like Caroline Aherne did in the guise of Mrs Merton? What sitcom since 2010 is as original – and as British – as The Royle Family, always near the top of any best British sitcom list? This July marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Aherne. Given the popularity of The Mrs Merton Show, The Royle Family, which ran for 15 years, and her characters on The Fast Show (not least Poula Fisch, the weather girl who can only announce one type of weather), it’s perhaps odd that this is the first ever biography. It quickly becomes evident why. Aherne is not the easiest subject: having been hounded by the press, she was not fond of giving interviews.

Anna Aslanyan

How the 18th-century Panopticon inspired today’s giant distribution hubs

The future of work is increasingly on our minds. Now that AI is coming for our jobs, will we end up supervising or being supervised by it? One way of spending the time freed up by smart tech is to read Control Science, an economic history showing how work rules were established and have since come to dominate our lives. The book’s timeline covers the past 400 years, its settings ranging across the world from North America to Europe to Japan and back to the US. A historian of labour, Henry Snow dissects four entrenched ideas: that society is a mere collection of individuals; that they are solely driven by selfishness; that they are therefore incapable of self-administered planning; and that ‘everything is – and should be – a market’.

Andrew Lambirth

Witty, lyrical and abstract: the art of Kurt Schwitters

Aged ten, Jennifer Potter moved to Ambleside in the Lake District and was soon aware that one of the giants of modern art, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), had lived there some years earlier. He was a German artist associated with Dadaism, the anarchic movement that ushered in Surrealism, who developed his own brand of anti-rational art called ‘Merz’. He assembled urban detritus into two or three dimensions (collages and objects). His work was witty, lyrical and abstract, but also organic. He called art ‘structure’ or ‘creative evidence’, as natural as a plant or a crystal, but reliant, too, on the action of the artist’s imagination. He was a large man, somewhat shambolic in appearance.

Emily Rhodes

A family affair: Love Lane, by Patrick Gale, reviewed

The title of Patrick Gale’s latest lyrical novel alludes both to its central theme of the hidden, winding paths of love and also to the street by Wakefield prison where two characters, Mike and Pip, live. They are fictional renderings of the author’s grandparents – the names and address are real. In Love Lane, just as he did in his 2015 novel A Place Called Winter, Gale draws on his own history to frame a question about a family secret and then uses fiction to create a rendering of a possible truth. He develops the story of Harry Cane, who, in the earlier novel, we discovered was a gay man, blackmailed out of a privileged life in England and banished to the Canadian Prairies at the start of the 20th century.

Andrew Roberts

The vexed relationship of Winston Churchill and George V

It is ironic that although Winston Churchill revered the concept of monarchy – his wife Clementine joked that he was the last believer in the Divine Right of Kings – half of the six monarchs under whom he served had anything but reverence for him.  He never met Queen Victoria, who signed his officer’s commission but died when Churchill was 26. He had a complicated relationship with Edward VII. As Prince of Wales, in 1876 Edward had been blackmailed by Winston’s father Lord Randolph Churchill, and had later slept with Winston’s mother, Jennie Jerome, after Lord Randolph’s death.

Daisy Dunn

Why should it be shameful to study the Classics?

Mary Beard opens this book with a recollection of her first meaningful encounter with the ancient world. It was 1960, and she was five years old, visiting the British Museum with her mother. Peering into one of the glass cases, she spotted an unassuming, oddly triangular loaf of bread from ancient Egypt. Seeing her struggle to obtain a better view, a curator lifted the object out. ‘Never under-estimate how powerful the simple act of unlocking a museum case can be,’ Beard reflects 66 years on. She describes Talking Classics as ‘more a memoir than a thesis’, but it is also a thought-provoking meditation on wonder. It was thauma, she reflects, that Aristotle held responsible for sparking philosophical thought to begin with.

Alexandra Coghlan

The indomitable spirit of the Wigmore Hall

If you’ve ever strolled to the Wallace Collection or hurried to an appointment in Harley Street, fled an overcrowded Selfridges or sat on a sunny bench in Cavendish Square Gardens, you’ll probably have walked past the Wigmore Hall. It’s easy to miss – a wrought-iron canopy and a small mosaic embedded in the pavement the only signage. But this ‘modest building tucked away behind a busy London shopping street’ contains multitudes. Now celebrating its 125th birthday, it has been variously described as ‘London’s most sumptuous temple of music’ and the symptom of a ‘faded, bombed-out world’; ‘a place where it was possible to experience the exotic, unfamiliar and bizarre’ and one filled with ‘too many dull concerts and too many indifferent debut pianists’.

Wednesday

Hugh Thomson

Another heroic freethinker is wiped from Russian history

It sometimes seems that those people chosen to be subjects for biographies are drawn from a strictly limited cast. Every few years, another book about Tolstoy, Dickens or some other great literary figure comes along to make library shelves groan further. At a recent talk given for a new biography of George Orwell, I asked the author why he had felt a need to add to the pile, given the plethora of perfectly good existing ones. ‘Because OUP commissioned me,’ was the answer. I didn’t buy the book. So how refreshing that Miranda Seymour should choose an absolute unknown to write about, whose life was genuinely interesting and surprising.

Boyd Tonkin

Macbeth in Swahili? There might even be improvements

Let’s start with some low-hanging fruit. When, in Henry V, the king inspires his army before Agincourt, the Danish translator – here, Niels Brunse – can hope for a relatively easy win: ‘Vi fa, vi muntre fa, vi flok af brodre.’ Or, in the classic Schlegel-Tieck version of Macbeth, now rooted in German literature, the cursed usurper finds that tomorrow and tomorrow ‘Kriecht so mit kleinem Schritt von Tag zu Tag’. Linguistic kinship, comparable speech rhythms, shared verse forms: sometimes the happy not-so-few, the global band of brothers (and sisters) who translate Shakespeare out of English, face a stiff but still feasible task. Even in familiar languages, though, pitfalls await in every line. Surely, Richard III’s opening soliloquy will slip smoothly into French?

Annie Gray

The punishing gluttony of Georgian high living

Georgian dining, if you were wealthy, was an incredible experience. Everything, from the location to the furniture, was carefully planned and meticulously executed to really hammer home the taste, status and impeccable education of the host. This was of course regardless of the actual likings, wealth and intellectual leanings of the party-giver. One of the delights of Amy Boyington’s book is the descriptions of the many, frequently ghastly, aristocrats whose country pads feature. There are murderers, adulterers, gluttons and spendthrifts. They did eat well, though. The Country House Dining Room is a Yale publication and, as such, can be expected to err toward the academic and the artistic.

David Profumo

Highland noir: The Grey Coast; The Serpent; Blood Hunt, by Neil M. Gunn, reviewed

Before he died in 1973 at the age of 81, Neil Gunn was arguably Scotland’s greatest living novelist, a leading figure in its literary Renaissance and the author of 28 books (most famously his bestselling 1941 maritime epic The Silver Darlings). Now, to mark the centenary of his first novel, The Grey Coast, the independent Sutherland-based publisher North House Press is reissuing three of his works in nice clothbound editions. Taken together, they give an impression of his versatility and shortcomings.