More from Books

Thursday

Diana Hendry

Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?

Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box set masquerading as a novel. As such it will be great. A New York setting, a cast that’s a Noah’s Ark migrant mix (from Afro to Vietnamese), a gripping crime investigation and a historical and dramatic time-frame running from the New Year’s celebrations for the American bicentennial in 1976 to the nightmare of the 1977 New York blackout. A box set is a distinct possibility. Hallberg has already sold the film rights.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Mary Beard minds her S, P, Q and R

Having rattled and routed Mark Antony and his bewitching Egyptian at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian was on his way home to Rome when he was confronted by some punter. The man produced a talking raven, which obligingly squawked, ‘Greetings, Caesar, our victorious commander!’ Octavian was delighted at this evidence of loyalty, and rewarded the bird-trainer accordingly. However, it later emerged that the man had had another raven in reserve, which he had taught to croak, ‘Greetings, Antony, our victorious commander!’ He hadn’t been taking any chances. Nor, in a sense, does Mary Beard in her ambidextrous history of Ancient Rome, whose title proclaims her bifurcated programme.

Alexandra Coghlan

The polyphonous Babel of global music

‘Following custom, when the Siamese conquered the Khmer they carried off much of the population, including most of their musicians, to be resettled in what is now Thailand.’ The history of music isn’t a story of chords and scores, instruments or their players. Music’s story is one of wars, invasions and revolutions, religion, monarchy and nationhood. Whether you look at the histories of Africa or Iran, Europe or Uzbekistan, the narratives are the same: colourful, bloody, complicated. Music is not an aesthetic response, an artistic translation of life; music and musicians are society itself. It’s a principle that acts as the guiding thread through the labyrinth of traditions and terminologies that make up The Other Classical Musics.

Tim Butcher

The greatest surprise about Nigeria on its centenary is that it exists at all

A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the trenches a framework was laid out for a nation that over the next century would grow into Africa’s mightiest economy, one with a population so prodigious it will soon overtake every other barring China and India. The founding on 1 January that year of the colony of Nigeria was an act of extreme imperial chutzpah. Desert emirates in the north and coastal kingdoms in the south had for years been under nominal control as British protectorates, but for London to unite such diversity was to believe a mosaic has no cracks. The story of Nigeria, first under Britain, later as an African nation independent since 1960, has largely been the story of those cracks.

Harriet Waugh

Curtain call for Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds or to unwitting acts of great courage — and extraordinary things can happen quite by chance to anyone. Carl, the central character, is a young man pleased with his life. He has written a novel that has been published, inherited his father’s small mews house in Maida Vale with its furniture and, significantly, a large supply of alternative remedies in the bathroom cabinet, and has a beautiful, kindly girlfriend called Nicola. He does not have a job, but he does have a tenant, Dermot, on the top floor who pays him £1,200 a month — enough for Carl to contemplate life as a writer.

Matthew Walther

The best thing about Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Inequality is the paper it’s printed on

Ten years ago, a philosophy professor at Princeton wrote a book with a provocative, slightly indecent title. It was a surprise bestseller, reaching number one on the New York Times’s list, and university book shops in America still do a roaring trade in copies of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, along with the usual Vonnegut and Sartre. In 2014, something similar happened when Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century sold 1.5 million copies in English, French, German, Mandarin, Urdu, Norwegian, Choctaw and so on. Not to be outdone, Princeton University Press has enlisted Frankfurt to produce a response to Piketty.

Kate Womersley

Beyond the call of duty: the kindness of strangers is a pleasing mystery

When I applied to medical school, an experienced doctor offered me some advice: ‘Don’t give them reason to think you’re a “wounded healer”. They’re suspicious of that.’ The term is Carl Jung’s, by which he meant that personal difficulty is a powerful spur for joining a caring profession, but the results of such motivations are not always constructive. If you appear too altruistic, questions may surface about whether you might, in some way, be damaged. So what about those people who don’t just do their job, but dedicate their lives to helping others? The New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar examines our ambivalence about goodness in her brilliantly thoughtful new book.

Mark Cocker

Green is the colour of happiness

According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it is now. In those days people showed genuine wonder at their ‘strange existences and unquantifiable powers’, especially the British, who fashioned the most ambitious glass building of the age —the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park — drawing on the weird architecture of the amazonica lily as a blueprint. Richard Mabey suggests that these are more prosaic times, where trees are invariably seen as primary producers, economic heavy-lifters or practical oxygen-supply operatives, or merely as a vegetative background to the planet’s real agents: ourselves and other animals.

Thursday

Adam Nicolson

A Mile Down: David Vann’s memoir of a disastrous career at sea

When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread, as Vann puts it, ‘of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be’, and who had failed first as a dentist and then as a commercial fisherman in Alaska — blew his head off while talking on the phone to his second wife. ‘She heard parts of his head dripping from the ceiling,’ Vann told the New York Times not long ago. ‘She still can’t use the phone with that ear.’ That history of grief, violence and trouble haunts every page of this memoir. When it begins, 30-year-old Vann, with his cool and beautiful Nancy by his side, has already had some sea-adventures and disasters.

Alex Massie

Sport’s first celebrity: W.G. Grace

Should you wish to have a good copy of the 1916 edition of Wisden, cricket’s annual bible, you should be prepared to part with at least £5,000 and, quite possibly, much more than that. This reflects its rarity — the Great War ensured that the almanac had a limited print run — but also the significance of its contents. For the 1916 edition carries the obituaries of Victor Trumper, the wondrous Australian nonpareil and of course, the greatest Champion of them all: W.G. Grace. The summer game had never seen anything like Grace before and never will again. Other cricketers have scored more runs and taken more wickets than Grace but none did so in more pressing circumstances.

Henry Jeffreys

Allan Massie’s Bordeaux Quartet is truer to Occupied France than any history

In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to novelists.’ Perhaps he was thinking of Allan Massie’s 1989 masterpiece A Question of Loyalties, an utterly convincing portrayal of a man making all the wrong choices for the noblest reasons in Vichy France. It’s such fertile territory that Massie has returned to it for a quartet of detective novels set in Occupied Bordeaux. The final part, End Games in Bordeaux, sees Superintendent Lannes suspended at the wishes of his German overlords. He is politically suspect but there isn’t much to do anyway: ‘Nobody’s been murdering anybody, except what they will call war-work,’ one character says.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Proof that the British hardly ever had a stiff upper lip

The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried was that my allocated room-mate, a malevolent pixie named Toby Cox who later became one of my closest friends, had informed me that he ‘knew a lot of people’ at Harrow and he was going to tell them all that I was ‘a total dick’. I bawled. I blubbered, and a cord of saliva swung from my lower lip, as I begged for mercy. He refused. And I haven’t cried since. Not at the deaths of pets or relatives. Not at the break-ups of relationships. There’s something satisfying, I suppose, in fulfilling so completely a national stereotype.

Duncan Fallowell

Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky knows all the secrets of his museum, and he’s keeping them

The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go to the Louvre. The Hermitage is perhaps the second greatest, one which its current director Mikhail Piotrovsky calls an ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, housing ‘the culture of humanity, which is represented in all its variety...’ Not quite. Like the Louvre or the other encyclopaedic museums, the Met in New York say, or the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, it does not incorporate primitive or folk art. London doesn’t have anything directly comparable: it would be as though the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert, the Royal Collections and a bit of Tate Modern were all rolled into one.

Ursula Buchan

The many lives of John Buchan

Up the stairs with flying feet, You would burst upon us, cheering Wellington’s funereal street. Fresh as paint, though you’d been ’railing Up from Scotland all the night, Or had just returned from scaling Some appalling Dolomite… Pundit, publicist and jurist: Statistician and divine; Mystic, mountaineer and purist In the high financial line; Prince of journalistic sprinters — Swiftest that I ever knew — Never did you keep the printers Longer than an hour or two… Still I hope with kindly feeling You recall the days of yore, When I watched you gaily reeling Off your folios by the score; Self-effacing, self-suppressing When your elder took the reins, Though at half his age possessing Twice and more than twice his brains.

Thursday

Rose George

Lover and fighter

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed. But another dead man is the focus of this book: our hero is the captivating, frustrating, brutal Emile Griffith, who we meet at the age of 22, ‘happy and beautiful’, and who one year later battered to death the Cuban fighter Benny Paret, the first man whose death was shown live on television (the second was Lee Harvey Oswald).

Stuart Kelly

Bard times

It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept these commissions to retell the plays — Margaret Atwood is lined up for The Tempest, Howard Jacobson for The Merchant of Venice — since the only certainty is that the texts will not be as good as Shakespeare. At least Winterson has chosen one of the more fascinating plays. Collected with the comedies in the First Folio, it is a singularly stark and strange work. Updated to the present day, the jealous King Leontes of Sicily is now Leo, the hedge-fund manager of Sicilia. His wife, MiMi, is a half-French chanteuse, and their mutual friend with whom Leo suspects her of having an affair is Xeno, not Polixenes.

Andy Miller

To wit, deWitt

Patrick deWitt is a Canadian writer whose second novel, a picaresque and darkly comic western called The Sisters Brothers, was much praised and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2011. For the follow-up, deWitt has produced a picaresque and darkly comic middle-European fairy tale called Undermajordomo Minor. Instead of brothers named Sisters, it features a lone anti-hero with a girl’s name: Lucy (Lucien) Minor. As is traditional in storybook narratives, Lucy leaves his village of birth to seek his fortune — well, not to seek his fortune so much as just because he hates his village and everyone in it. He accepts a position assisting the caretaker (i.e. majordomo) of the castle of the Baron von Aux.

Peter Stothard

What is written down

Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than most writers of any epoch; but more important than any particular work was that so much survived to define his time. He had a secretary, Tiro, who can reasonably be given the credit for researching, correcting, copying and casting out his master’s words. In Robert Harris’s three novels of Cicero’s life, Marcus Tullius Tiro, the freed slave who took his name as well as dictation from his boss, gets his full reward.

Dominic Cummings

The politics of prediction

Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision. In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly. Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives. A similar battle has begun in politics.