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Thursday

Ian Birrell

The murderous gangs who run the world

Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test — shoot dead a man tied to a chair — then moved into a nice house in Texas. Soon he was earning $500 a week for stakeouts and odd jobs, but the big money came from slitting the throats of the gang’s enemies, which paid a $50,000 bonus. Four years later he was arrested after 20 murders; his only remorse was over accidentally sparking a massacre that left him fearing his bosses might exact revenge on him. Such bloodstained stories of obscene violence in pursuit of obscene wealth fill the pages of the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano’s investigation into the cocaine trade.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Stately Spanish galleons with gold moidores

As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied to the nobility who ruled it for most of its history. And every schoolboy is wrong. The phrase was coined to describe the dominions of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (or Charles I of Spain), which were the first to span the requisite number of time zones; and ‘blue blood’ — sangre azul — referred to his Visigothic ancestors who reconquered Spain from the Moors, who had held it since 711 AD. These northern warlords would apparently show the purity of their ancestry by revealing the visible veins in their untanned forearms.

Graham Robb

One événement after another

The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during which the nation was repeatedly destroyed and recreated. How is it that a heap of cobblestones, furniture and overturned vehicles — handcarts in 1848, 2CVs in 1968 — erected at particular points on the Left Bank of Paris can bring down a régime whose domain extends from the North Sea to the Mediterranean? As Baudelaire observed when Napoleon’s nephew conducted a coup d’état in 1851 and installed himself as supreme leader, it seemed that ‘absolutely anybody, simply by seizing control of the telegraph and the national printing works, can govern a great nation’.

Clare Mulley

Mission near impossible

Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June 1976 Air France Flight 139, travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens, was hijacked above the Gulf of Corinth by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans from the Revolutionary Cells, a violent leftist organisation connected to the Baader-Meinhof gang. Eventually landing in Uganda at Entebbe airport, the crew and passengers were guarded by Idi Amin’s troops while the president attempted to take credit for promoting negotiations. The demands were the release of 40 pro-Palestinian militants imprisoned in five countries, within 48 hours.

Vicky Ward

The rich are a different species

The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway through his brother’s eulogy and brazenly strolls down to the front pew, ignoring the scandalised glances. He’s late, a whisper spreads, because he had a meeting with director James Toback. Wait. James Toback? Lame! The hearse leaves, and the congregants assemble on the street. An attractive brunette in her late forties weeps desolately. Did she know the deceased well? Not at all: she has discovered that someone at the service walked off with her Christian Dior trench and left her with a shabbier coat from a chainstore.

Anna Aslanyan

Reality games

The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator, who pilots his hi-tech camera without leaving his room, propped up against cushions. The corpulent Damilola Karpov lives in Byzantion, or Big Byz, an ‘offglobe’ hovering over what’s left of the old world after the collapse of its superpowers and other apocalyptic events. Down below is a country called Urkaine (the apparent misspelling is a pun on a slang Russian word for ‘criminal’), populated by drunks and ruled by gangsters, its symbol a golden ‘spastika’, its economic goal ‘to catch up with and overtake Big Byz in terms of major stock indices’.

Frances Wilson

Lovely house of ill repute

Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust people in pools.’ If he wanted to swim he should take a dip in the River Thames, which flowed through the grounds. But when his horse won the Oaks, Bill Astor built his long-desired pool, and before long Christine Keeler was emerging naked from the water and Cliveden was branded a den of iniquity. Scandal, it transpires, is in Cliveden’s DNA. The house was conceived by the second Duke of Buckingham, favourite of Charles II, who wanted a love nest for himself and his mistress, Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, whose husband he had killed in a duel in 1668.

Thursday

Tom Holland

The glory that was Greece

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp, the Athenian general Xenophon wrote a briefing paper designed to help his city negotiate the aftermath of a disastrous war. His proposals mixed supply-side reform with Keynesian stimulus. The regulatory powers of Athenian officials, so Xenophon suggested, should be streamlined and enhanced; simultaneously, the city should invest in increasing its commercial and housing stock. The economy, boosted by these measures, would also benefit from encouraging foreign investment. ‘Imports and exports, sales, rents and customs’: all would then surely flourish.

John Fuller

Epitaph for a Star

A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped When told it was all in the future, and not in the past, And someone (who?) had forgotten to give him the script. He tried his damnedest, but there were other factors That made the going tough. The director allowed No rehearsals and gave the supporting actor All the best lines. His face was lost in the crowd. The shooting proceeded in too much of a rush For him to be shown the rushes. All those heartaches! That foiled ambition! He demanded re-edits, But the final cut revealed his busted flush. There was never an occasion to save the out-takes, And in the end his name was removed from the credits.

Samantha Ellis

The song of the sirens

The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid, holding a heart not a mirror. Not your average mermaid, then; but as the folklorist and playwright Sophia Kingshill delves further into their complex cultural history, it becomes clear there’s no such thing. Mermaids can be gorgeous but deadly, like the ones in Pirates of the Caribbean who lure sailors into the sea, then bare their horrible fangs and move in for the kill. They can be vulnerable, like Ariel in Disney’s joyous The Little Mermaid. They can be harbingers of storms, or symbols of female inconstancy.‘It’s always a risk to meet a mermaid,’ writes Kingshill.

Jonathan Aitken

Between Heaven and ‘L’

A.N. Wilson has had a tempestuous journey on the sea of faith. His first port of call was St Stephen’s House, in Oxford, the Anglo-Catholic seminary where he trained for ordination in the Church of England. He jumped ship at the end of his first year and travelled to the wilder shores of atheism, writing the polemical pamphlet Against Religion: Why We Should Try To Live Without It. Unable to follow his own advice, he created a niche for himself as the biographer of influential Christians such as John Milton, Hilaire Belloc, Nikolai Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis and John Betjeman, while also penning studies of the life of Jesus and the mind of St Paul.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Master of vitriol

‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966. Now, as the British Film Institute celebrates the life and work of ‘the writer who redefined TV drama’, Oberon Books, with perfect timing, offers this collection of Potter’s critical abuse in journalism and interviews at its most constructively eloquent. The Art of Invective essentially complements Humphrey Carpenter’s magisterial biography and all those DVDs of the plays that can still galvanise what Potter called ‘the palace of varieties in the corner of the room’. He believed that television, with its vast, all-inclusive audience, was a potentially powerful means of promulgating true democracy.

Andy Miller

An American Wodehouse

Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States a decade ago, but Ames hasn’t published a novel since, so the title still stands. He has produced a collection of short stories, several volumes of essays and a comic in the interim, as well as creating the HBO comedy series Bored to Death, in which Jason Schwartzman stars as a Brooklyn-based writer turned private detective called… Jonathan Ames. So he’s been busy. But Pushkin Press is to be applauded for bringing Wake Up, Sir! to British readers at last, firstly because Ames is a funny writer and this is a frequently hilarious novel; and secondly because its premise is quintessentially — and, in at least one respect, bizarrely — British.

Patrick Marnham

Bringing Camus to book

In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the work of a racist. Achebe objected to a story that used Africa as a setting for ‘the break-up of one petty European mind’, and depicted Africans as nameless savages. Achebe’s lecture — a masterpiece of special pleading, false analysis and anachronism — is now established as a founding text in the post-colonial school of criticism. On reading the cover blurb for The Meursault Investigation, one might have the impression that in this debut novel, Kamel Daoud, a native of Oran, has carried out a similar assault on Albert Camus’s first novel, L’Etranger (translated as The Outsider).

Ben Markovits

Running out of time

Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their races and careers, and talks to them about their lives. Part of what’s moving about the book is the sense you get that these athletes (the children mostly of subsistence farmers from the Rift Valley in East Africa, who sometimes had to break rocks to pay for their primary schooling) were born with an inheritance as rich as any Notting Hill trustfunder’s — except that instead of stock options and the deeds to a house they have inherited a series of genetic codes which give them long, light legs and an extraordinary capacity to burn oxygen efficiently.

Lee Langley

Between duty and desire

Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In this new volume of stories from the American writer Ken Kalfus no one, innocent or guilty, can be counted safe. The novella which gives this collection its title is an audacious fictional riff on a real-life scandal: the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, favoured candidate for president of France, arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid in New York. Couched in the form of an email apologia to the maid, this is like the story of Red Riding Hood told by the wolf.

Andrew Martin

When the journey, not the arrival, mattered

Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding. But Michael Williams is unafraid to state the obvious fact about Britain’s railways, which is that they were far more attractive in the past: It is sometimes tempting to wonder if, deep in every railway operations HQ, there is a department whose sole job is to think up ways of corroding the experience of passengers. Here are seats that don’t line up with windows, garish plasticky train interiors, an incomprehensible fares system, a cacophony of endless announcements.... In The Trains Now Departed Williams celebrates ‘the best of what is gone from our railways’ in 16 vivid, highly readable chapters.

Thursday

Daniel Hahn

Their heads in the clouds

As I got into a Brighton taxi this morning, my driver’s first words were ‘apparently it’ll clear in a couple of hours’. I gathered — of course — that he was talking about the morning mist. ‘It’s almost gone already up in town.’ A conversation about weather prospects is hardly uncommon in British taxis, and we launched into this one with no preamble at all (he hadn’t said hello), as though invisibly picking up the thread of a conversation already in progress, a perpetual, life-long discussion about whether it’ll rain tomorrow filling in as the default whenever nothing else is being said. It’s odd. And in The Weather Experiment, Peter Moore tells us how we got here.

Daniel Swift

A little loving irony

It doesn’t mean much to say that Renata Adler’s journalism isn’t as interesting as her novels — almost nothing is as interesting as Renata Adler’s novels. In 2013, the American publishing house New York Review Books reissued her two slim novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark. These had been cultish hits when they were first published, 30 years earlier, and it was easy to see why. They are excellent skewers of the complacency and pomp of American society and fashion: funny, manic, memorable and made up of tiny, brilliant scenes. ‘Her husband had invented a calorie-free spaghetti from seaweed,’ she writes of one party guest: ‘He was the world’s yet unacknowledged living authority on seaweed and its many uses. She was quite eloquent about it.

Alex Massie

The oldest sport in the world

This is the best book you’ll ever read about mixed martial arts fighting; and this will still be the case even if it’s not the first book you’ve ever read about mixed martial arts fighting. Kerry Howley’s debut is a riotously entertaining and piercingly perceptive account of the contrasting lives and dreams of a pair of Iowa-based fighters whose battles in the ‘Octagon’ become the vehicle for a philosophical treatise on the nature of glory. One of these fighters, Sean Huffman, is a journeyman; the other, Erik Koch, has dreams of the big time which, in this instance, means Las Vegas. Huffman, by contrast, makes do with dingy fights in hotel function rooms in a succession of no-name Iowa towns.