More from Books

Tuesday

Peter Carty

The stigma still surrounding leprosy

One of the earliest leper hospitals in Britain was built in London near the beginning of the 12th century by Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I. It was a benign combination of housing, hospital and chapel, with patients free to come and go as they wished. Matilda started a fashion among the wealthy, so that by 1350 there were more than 300 such hospitals across the kingdom. Far from lepers being shunned and feared as outcasts, therefore, their treatment for much of the medieval period was enlightened. ‘The mythology of the “medieval leper” seems no more real than that of the vampire or ghoul,’ writes Oliver Basciano. The author is a journalist who has worked for the Financial Times and the BBC.

Brian Martin

A small world: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, reviewed

Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in a world of wealthy public school boys with ‘a social calendar, rugby fixtures and sexual assault hearings’, and girls from sister schools, ‘fully recovered from eating disorders’. This fictitious world is outdated, but Lambert’s satirical touch still hits the mark about ‘the creatures of the written word [the university] specialised in churning out, as if the country needed more of them’.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The secret child: Love Forms, by Claire Adam, reviewed

Claire Adam’s compelling first novel Golden Child won the 2009 Desmond Elliot Prize and was also picked as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped Our World’. It told the story of contrasting twins in Trinidad – one an academic high-flyer, the other a misfit. When the latter is kidnapped, the father must act to rescue the son he has never quite understood. Adam has followed this with an ostensibly quieter novel about a Trinidadian woman called Dawn, divorced with two adult sons, who lives in south London and works for an estate agent, after abandoning her medical career. She decides to search for the baby girl she gave up for adoption more than 40 years earlier, having got pregnant by a tourist at Carnival, aged 16.

D.J. Taylor

Comfort reading for the interwar years

A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows, Nicola Wilson’s galère – Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden, Sylvia Lynd and J.B. Priestley – turn out to have made up the selection panel of the early 1930s Book Society. The subtitle is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Even at its high-water mark, the Society’s membership was in the low five figures.

Christopher Bray

Instantly captivating: the mysterious harmonies of Erik Satie

The first time I heard a piece of music by Erik Satie it was on the B-side of a Gary Numan single. Played on a synth that sounds like a theremin sucking on a dummy, ‘Gymnopédie #1’ is so saccharine sweet it actually makes the music seem sorry for itself. And yet. It got me hooked on Satie’s catchy yet sombre ironies. Par for the course, says Ian Penman in this dazzling study. People who know nothing about music beyond the top tens of their teens can be so ‘instantly beguiled, captivated and transported’ by Satie that his ‘pop single length’ works are ‘now part of some collective audio memory’. Those who know nothing much about music can be instantly beguiled, captivated and transported by Satie For all that, there is no mention of Numan here.

Andrew Hankinson

Is nothing private any more?

How did the UK become a place where young people think it’s permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others? A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as ‘queer identity’. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I’m a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not.

David Honigmann

‘Genius’ is a dangerously misused word

For several centuries, the word ‘celebrity’ meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by ‘genius’. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal.

Thursday

Olivia Potts

Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?

Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis’s previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic ‘came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences from all the other people who conquered Iraq’.

Francesca Peacock

No escaping mother: Lili is Crying, bv Hélène Bessette, reviewed

‘Everyone has a mother, but we don’t all smash up our lives for her sake,’ we hear in the first few pages of Lili is Crying. It’s a sensible message, but one which seems suited to an entirely different book. Hélène Bessette’s 1953 debut novel – translated into English for the first time – is a tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter. Charlotte and her daughter Lili live in Provence, and the novel jumps between the 1930s and 1940s, from Lili’s ‘ribbons and Sunday dresses’ to her first freighted dalliances with boys.

Tuesday

Tibor Fischer

Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers

I have to be honest: I’ve never been much concerned with what happened in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387. I suspect that may even be true for many Lithuanians. In Silence of the Gods, Francis Young pinpoints this year – of the conversion of the duchy to Christianity – as the official triumph of Christianity in Europe over paganism and idolatry. But he then goes on to examine the debris – and the survivors of paganism and their traditions in the northern regions of Europe. The first difficulty is defining and identifying paganism. The book is published by Cambridge University Press, so there is an unmistakably academic, seminar-ready, conference-hardened edge to the text.

Diana Hendry

Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed

As a poet, Ocean Vuong has won every prize going. Now here’s The Emperor of Gladness, his second novel. His first, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a coming-of-age story, is currently being filmed. This latest oneis wild, unwieldy and too long. It is fiction/autofiction mixed with 19th- and 20th-century warfare, plus contemporary angst and craziness. It has one preposterous scene that you wish were true, and never has a title been so misleading. It’s a book of moral, imaginative ideas with gripping stories, wonderful characters and writing that’s poetic and witty. I loved it. It opens with an introduction to the rural town of East Gladness, Connecticut, its citizens ‘not ambivalent to hope’.

Simon Heffer

Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history

Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I. His book – a guide to the nature of British intellectual curiosity since the mid-16th century – begins there, just as England had undergone a liberation from a dominant European authority: the shaking off of the influence of the Roman Catholic church and the advent of the Reformation, and the new opportunities that offered for the people. He describes how a culture based largely on poetry and on the court of Elizabeth then redirected the prevailing intellectual forces of the time.

Susie Mesure

The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

Sarah Moss is a prolific and vital novelist whose books encompass an array of subjects from Victorian social reform and 19th-century Japan to broken Brexit Britain and eating disorders. She combines teaching at University College, Dublin with writing in real time: The Fell, set during the second lockdown, came out in the summer of 2021, while My Good Bright Wolf, an experimental memoir about her anorexic breakdown in late 2020, was published last year. A forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Summerwater, which explored national identity and isolation against the backdrop of a soggy Scottish holiday park, may catapult her into the sort of gold-foil territory enjoyed by Maggie O’Farrell or Ali Smith. If not, then perhaps Ripeness, her ninth novel, will.

Marcus Berkmann

The titans who shaped Test cricket

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major’s weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before I would willingly start another. But Wigmore has written a splendid, comprehensive book full of good stories and droll asides.

Owen Matthews

Who started the Cold War?

Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the ‘valiant Russians’ who had fought alongside Britain and America had ‘transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation’. So begins Vladislav Zubok’s thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides’s formulation – are now very contemporary questions. ‘The world has become perilous again,’ writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West: Diplomacy ceases to work; treaties are broken. International institutions, courts and norms cannot prevent conflicts.

Sarah Moorhouse

The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability

As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens’s essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the ‘stunning complexity’ of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, ‘we are always living on the verge of catastrophe’.

Philip Hensher

A.C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists

All great diarists have something intensely silly about them: Boswell’s and Pepys’s periodic bursts of lechery and panic; Chips Channon’s unrealistic dreams of political greatness leavened with breathless excitement over royal dukes and handsome boys; Alan Clark’s fits of romantic, almost Jacobite, dreaming; James Lees-Milne’s absurd flights of rage. I dare say the mania that drove the Duc de Saint-Simon in his demented campaign against Louis XIV’s attempts to create a place in court hierarchy for his bastards seemed ridiculous to his more sober contemporaries. Often the silliness comes from a mad overestimation of the writer’s ability. There is no more fascinating diary than Benjamin Haydon’s. He was an indifferent painter who never achieved the success he dreamt of.

Thursday

Rupert Shortt

Church teaching on homosexuality can be revised

Studies of Christianity’s problems and prospects often entail a distinction between the singer and the song. At an institutional level, the world’s largest faith is in deep trouble throughout much of western Europe – and increasingly in North America, too. Widely rehearsed elsewhere, the reasons for this steep decline include the spread of individualism along with an allied flouting of deference, mistrust of agencies said to lie beyond the tangible, and self-inflicted wounds such as the abuse crisis. Yet many who mourn the spread of secularisation remind us that for all its flaws, the Church has a good story to tell overall. How so? Two answers stand out. First, Christian outreach still forms the largest single source of social capital on Earth.

Andrew Rosenheim

A searching question: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige, reviewed

The Appalachian Trail is America’s secular version of the Camino de Santiago but more than twice as long. In Amity Gaige’s Heartwood, Valerie Gillis is a 42-year-old nurse and experienced trail-walker who nonetheless vanishes one day in the northern stretch, in Maine, the wildest of the New England states. Heading the search for her is Beverly Miller, a senior game warden, who stands out among her colleagues because she is 6ft, female and not a native Mainer. As the days go by, and despite the impressive number of volunteers looking for Gillis, the chances of finding her alive diminish. Miller, a veteran of similar searches, has to continue to motivate her teams, even as her own appraisal of the situation grows gloomy.

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

Nunc est bibendum – to Horace, the lusty rebel

Horace suffers from a reputation as an old man’s poet. Classicists often joke that Catullus and Martial are for the young, and Horace for those of a certain vintage – wine being a favourite Horatian theme. Many lose their thirst for his Odes at school, only to realise their brilliance decades later. Classroom Horace is just a bit too bombastic and patriotic to be cool. The Horace of Peter Stothard’s beautifully written new biography surprises with his sexiness. Not many pages in we find him poring over scurrilous papyri in the libraries of Athens. A verse by the Archaic-era poet Archilochus has caught his eye. It describes a woman with a man, ‘head-down, as she did her work like a Thracian drinking beer through a straw’. Golly.