More from Books

Thursday

Henry Hitchings

Down and out in Park Lane and Plaistow

‘I was born in London,’ Ben Judah tells us early in this vivid portrait of Britain’s capital, ‘but I no longer recognise the city.’ London has become a building site where dirty money is converted into gleaming blocks of bullion. The smartest parts of town are lined with empty houses owned by foreign plutocrats, and London’s spirit is embodied not so much by the bearded hipster brewing your £3 cup of coffee as by the Shard, a soaring monument to wealth and inequality. Judah isn’t all that interested in the well-shod hirelings who lubricate this shiny capitalism. We’re halfway into the book before we encounter anyone who could be described as privileged (other than the widely-travelled, Oxford-educated Judah).

Andrew Taylor

Escaping the Slough of despond

Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown up with cut-outs and dead letter boxes. There’s little we don’t know about angst-ridden, morally fallible spooks in raincoats and sharp-suited, gun-toting agents in casinos. Mick Herron, however, takes a different approach from most other espionage writers. Real Tigers is the third novel in his ‘Slow Horses’ series. Its predecessor, Dead Lions, won the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger as the best crime novel of the year. The Slow Horses are a department made up of MI5 rejects — officers who have committed gross errors of judgment or made enemies of powerful figures in the organisation. (‘Persona non grata,’ muses one character.

Ian Harrow

Location

Old friends, we scarcely speak of death or dying. As ever, the displacements continue, just as when we used to fail to get round to speaking about love or confined ourselves to giving it a mention in letters — about which we didn’t speak. Until I knew better, I thought poets talked of such things, but as we see they share a guarded language of technical asides. If someone treats their work as a strip-tease, they back off, apparently confounded, the action — the real conversation — being somewhere else — but where?

Philip Womack

Odi et amo

Reading Daisy Dunn’s ambitious first book, a biography of the salty (in more ways than one) Roman poet Catullus, it struck me how lucky we are: only one copy of his collection of poems survived the ages, hidden under a bushel in Verona. Catullus might have gone the way of his contemporaries, such as Cinna, whose lynching is immortalised in Julius Caesar, and whose poems are now dust. Happily, we have Catullus’s small, polished oeuvre, varied and ravishing: there are squibs, lambasting his fellow Romans (‘The father has the filthier right hand/ But the son’s anus is the more voracious’); fascinating mini-epics traversing all of Greek myth; beautiful marriage hymns; and the ‘Lesbia’ poems, recounting his affair with the aristocratic Clodia Metelli.

Paul Keegan

Roaming in the gloaming

One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk’, an image of philosophy as posthumous, able to explain things only after we have experienced them. Or an image of dusk as threshold, the blue hour when light transforms itself, and other worlds become possible. The Last of the Light is a cultural companion to such notions. A cabinet of curiosities — paintings, poems, music — framed by the idea of Europe as an archipelago of regret, many of whose most vital artefacts have dealt in echo and obscure longing, translated into a feeling for light. This is a trail going back to Virgil, poet of shadows, or else starting from Christian ideas of a crepuscular fallen world.

Connie Bensley

Losing a Crown in the National Portrait Gallery

The cafe was full of connoisseurs of the scones. As he bit into his flapjack a sinister uncoupling took place and he felt the crown of a tooth jerk free — to be rescued behind a discreet paper napkin. Now the geography of his mouth was unfamiliar, harsh and sharp. No wonder those Tudors in their portraits kept their mouths shut. No white-clad guru for them, injecting, probing, drilling and finally murmuring: One more rinse for me please. No, they had to make do with white paint, and opium, and hiding unfortunate swellings under a generous ruff.

Jonathan Steinberg

No end to the Final Solution

David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25 October 2015. The book now appears without its author, a kind of huge mausoleum for an astonishing enterprise. Cesarani wants to change our view of the Holocaust and to close the yawning gap between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject… to challenge the traditional concepts and periodisations … the term itself. He substitutes the ‘Final Solution’ for the Holocaust, but that Nazi term has become an alternative name for the Holocaust, which remains after 900 pages entirely unchallenged.

Andrew Lycett

‘Crazy mixed-up Yid’

Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his mother’s first husband. So his elder half-brother, the respected writer Emanuel Litvinoff, informed Keiron Pim, adding that David was ‘an unfortunate character altogether’, prone to ‘inventing roles for himself that didn’t have any reality’. Yet this fantasist is the elusive figure whom Pim has endeavoured to capture in an ambitious book which seeks to resurrect an era as much as an individual.

Thursday

Helen R Brown

A legend in her own time

I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer the conversation away from the polite, mutually enjoyable discussion of whatever the star is currently promoting toward the juicy personal details that your readers really want to know and your subject really (and justifiably) wants to keep private. You sit in the consciously impersonal atmosphere of an upmarket hotel room with a total stranger, and broach topics you might spend decades dancing around with friends and family. I still have nightmares in which I blurt out lines worthy of Alan Partridge: Yes, the bass line on that track is terrifically deep isn’t it!

Jeff Noon

Recent crime fiction | 28 January 2016

We fully expect con artists to be caught in a sting themselves, but even with that thought constantly in mind I was still hoodwinked by Nicholas Searle’s The Good Liar (Viking, £12.99, pp. 288). The surprises start on page one: Roy Courtnay is in his nineties, with a longstanding pedigree of swindles behind him, and he relishes the idea of one last scam. His mark is Betty, a woman he meets via an internet dating site. Roy’s a slippery character, who adopts, or even steals, new identities as he chooses. It’s all about disguise, and telling a good lie. The perfect lie. There are dangers, not least existential. At one point he speaks of the difficulty of maintaining ‘the flickering self that was Roy Courtnay’.

Rose George

Very much like a whale

In principle, freediving is simple and perilous: divers take one breath, then dive as deep as they can, with no tanks or air, and come back up again. Watch a video of this — or Luc Besson’s 1988 film The Big Blue — and you have to hold your own breath, because it is beautiful, streamlined, pitiless: a human in the most powerful and unnatural element for humans. The beauty of freediving is that it does not look unnatural, but pure. What Adam Skolnick conveys in One Breath is how deceptive that is, and what a dreadful toll diving takes on the human body. He does this by telling the tale of one death, but also of the small freediving community that travels the world from one deep ocean hole to another to go as deep as possible, on one breath.

Roy Kelly

Siftings

And we awake like children to tiny snow sprinkled on shed and car roofs, thinking, Will it last, will it last. The roads already damply black.   Nevermindfulnesss Contemplating truth and time, the face in the hairdresser’s mirror for twenty minutes or more, seeing while attempting not to.

Jeremy Clarke

Tricks of the trade | 28 January 2016

This book, the blurb warns us, was written by ‘an established voice in popular psychology, with a regular column on the New Yorker online’. Maria Konnikova is also the ‘bestselling author of Mastermind’, a book which explains how we can train our minds to see the world as Sherlock Holmes saw it. The Confidence Game identifies a template pattern of stages peculiar to every successful confidence trick, and devotes a chapter to each: the Put Up, the Play, the Rope, the Tale, the Convincer, the Breakdown, the Send, the Touch and the Fix. (The first chapter offers a psychological profile of ‘the Grifter’ or confidence trickster and ‘the Mark’ — his prey.

Andy Miller

Alive and kicking | 28 January 2016

Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on this Earth — or on any other sphere, if his friend Richard Dawkins is correct. A quote from Dawkins graces the cover of And Yet..., a final gathering together of Hitchens’s essays and the sequel to the bestselling anthology Arguably; he was, notes his ‘fellow horseman’, the ‘finest orator of our time’. And here is that voice again, alive, fiercely engaged with many of the same issues he left us to deal with: politics, patriotism, God or His absence, death and, inevitably, books. There was much about Hitchens that was contradictory and he knew it and embraced it in his work.

Paul Levy

Rewriting the merchant’s tale

Howard Jacobson’s novelistic riff on The Merchant of Venice for the Hogarth Shakespeare project turns, unsurprisingly, on what makes some people (in Jonathan Miller’s memorable self-describing formulation) Jew-ish. Is it the gentile’s anti-Semitism, with its manifestations varying from relatively polite social snubs to persecutions down the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust, that defines Jew-ishness? Or is it the self-identifying Jew’s own attitude or beliefs that make him part of a clan? (The idea that Jews are a ‘race’ is too silly to consider. My own DNA profile shows that 97 per cent of my genes were probably shared by Jews of Biblical times, though my family has been blond and blue-eyed for at least the five generations I’ve met.

Nicholas Blincoe

A country in crisis

Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with frustration at the stupidity of the powerful. He made his name in Egypt, arriving with nothing more than a desire to be a reporter. As the revolution began, he moved to Tahrir Square and started to publish stories in the Guardian. He soon began to win awards, notably for a piece on the deaths of African migrants in the Mediterranean. He has continued to report around the world, but his first love remains Cairo. The Egyptians, his first book, is fuelled by anger and frustration.

Connie Bensley

Sharing the Dog

The Dog share didn’t work out well in the end. For a start, Dog — no mean manipulator — cadged extra rations in Home A, so that Home B was obliged to act the disciplinarian. Then there was the quasi-polite dispute about the missed flea drops and the bitten house-guest. Goodwill flagged, and it was decided to scrap the whole idea, and arrange for Dog to live in Home A or Home B. But which? The arrangement — something like an episode of adultery — had begun with elements of euphoria but later suffered painful side-effects.

Richard Walker

Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico

You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas, or the Knights Templar, or the Shower Posse. But you should have heard about them, says Ioan Grillo in his new book about transnational drug and crime gangs, because any one of them may have played a profitable and blood-drenched role in bringing you not only your weekend baggie of recreational powder, but also the gold in your earring, the lime in your gin and tonic, the avocado in your salad and even the steel in your Volvo. These ‘gangster warlords’ are the new century’s international mafias. They originate in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, although now they have trading subsidiaries everywhere from Bombay to Brixton.

Aidan Hartley

Not so happy valley

Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise — a special place presented here as the sacred ‘combe’ of the title, being a word with Celtic origins that describes a steep hollow or hidden valley. These paradises might be real or imagined, exist only in memory, or live in fiction like Narnia or Robin Hood’s forest; they can be unattainable, beyond reach, or ruined, like Eden. His point, frequently stated, is that we are always on a quest for them, and need them. The particular combe of this book is not on the edge of Dartmoor but in the national parklands of Zambia’s Luangwa river valley.

Thursday

Josephine Livingstone

The medium is the message

Molly Crabapple is an American artist and Drawing Blood is the story of her life. That life has only been going on since 1983, but despite its author’s relative youth Drawing Blood is a valuable political document. It tells of a life lived in struggle — against the prospect of going dead broke, against gross misogyny within the arts and against sex workers, against the obscene wealth splattering the fine art business — redeemed by intoxicating levels of exposure, then finally reoriented by a new political consciousness. Crabapple describes an artistic childhood followed by a pretentious adolescence spent performance-reading Nietzsche and hating everybody. Bored of America, the teenage Crabapple goes on holiday to Paris and Turkey.