More from Books

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

When ordinary men did extraordinary things – D-Day revisited

The ferry from Portsmouth to Caen is the most atmospheric way to visit the D-Day battlefields, if not always the most comfortable. As the Normandy coast emerges from the haze, the sand and shingle of Sword beach stretch away to starboard. This was the easternmost of five landing areas assaulted on 6 June 1944 with nearly 30,000 soldiers landed there that day. Over the port bow, on the far side of the River Orne, looms a ridge. Here the British 6th Airborne Division parachuted in by night to neutralise enemy artillery and guard the eastern flank. Out of sight ahead, some eight miles inland past the Pegasus Bridge, lies Caen, the largest city in the area and a strategic road junction.

Genevieve Gaunt

A cremation caper: Stealing Dad, by Sofka Zinovieff, reviewed

Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’. Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the human collateral damage consisted of furious women, abandoned offspring and wounded spirits’.

Lee Randall

Cooking up a storm of memories – Bee Wilson’s kitchenalia

When Bee Wilson’s husband abruptly called time on their 23-year marriage, she was left with a house full of memories embedded in the everyday objects around her. Two months after his departure, the heart-shaped tin of the title – in which she’d baked their wedding cake – clattered to the floor for no apparent reason. Symbolic or what? That leap inspired another, sending Wilson on a quest to explore our relationship to objects, specifically kitchenalia. After years of use, all possessions hold symbolic memories and actual DNA, and kitchen tools are handled more than most household items, from wooden spoons and cooking pans to salt shakers and china.

Patrick Kidd

Rafael Nadal: king of the orange brick court

Even the greatest have setbacks. It is how they respond that makes them great. Take your chances, forget the lapses. The triumvirate who ruled men’s tennis this century – Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer – each won just 54 per cent of the points they played. It was about turning it on when it counted. No one could turn it on like Nadal on Parisian clay. The orange brick dust of Roland Garros on which he slid and scampered so well seemed to inspire the Spaniard with magical powers. From 19 visits to the French Open, he returned to Mallorca only five times without the Coupe des Mousquetaires – and once was due to injury. No performer was so suited to a stage.

Thursday

Horatio Clare

The complexities of the dawn chorus

‘Tawny owls,’ I tell friends and family, ‘can’t see in the dark any better than we can. So they memorise the whole wood! But they may be able to see sound,’ I burble. ‘And the Latin name for a blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus obscurus: Heavenly hidden blue one!’ In Bird School, Adam Nicolson rejoices in the detailed stories of some of the birds on his farm in Sussex. Its precursor, The Seabird’s Cry, a love letter to a dozen species, soared over the coasts of Scotland, ablaze with sea light. The Sussex Weald on a dull spring dawn offers a claggier setting. Puffins seem more interesting than marsh tits. But in fact Bird School is even better. Nicolson makes like the bowerbird, which constructs elaborate artistic temples of seduction.

Tuesday

Henry Jeffreys

The satisfaction of making wine the hard way

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs. Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions were mostly right. Hahn is an American whose career as an investment banker came to an end when he suffered a breakdown in the back of a London taxi. He decided to give up the rat race and bought a neglected Vouvray domaine, where he moved with his family to live la belle vie.

William McEwan

Alzheimer’s research is challenging enough without a data manipulation scandal

‘In science, truth always wins,’ said the molecular biologist Max Perutz. In 2022, Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science, published an article posing a new set of obstacles to Perutz’s truism. He revealed cases of fabricated data in the area of Alzheimer’s research, setting off a cascading set of consequences for the researchers involved and for the field more generally. Doctored details how the dossiers of evidence were compiled in the lead-up to the publication of that 2022 article and the subsequent fall out. The central character is Matthew Schrag, a scientist at Vanderbilt University, who provided the expert analysis for Piller.

Philip Hensher

Whether adored or despised, Princess Diana is never forgotten

What happened to the condolence books? They swiftly multiplied, that mad week in September 1997. The original four at St James’s Palace had to be increased to more than 40. People queued for hours and often spent many minutes composing their contributions. That’s not even to mention the thousands of similar books organised by councils, embassies and private businesses. The official set were ‘offered’ to the Spencer family. Perhaps they are at Althorp. Edward White’s Dianaworld, about the phenomenon of the former Princess of Wales, shows an indefatigable resourcefulness. It is not really about the woman herself but about the effect she had on people who never laid eyes on her.

Chloë Ashby

The mother of a mystery: Audition, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed

It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’s beautiful, almost half her age, and she’s aware of how that must look to the other diners, the waiter hovering at her elbow, and her husband, who inexplicably enters after their food arrives before exiting in a hurry. She and Xavier had met two weeks earlier when he appeared at the theatre where she was rehearsing for a play and said he had something ‘complicated but important’ to tell her: he had good reason to believe she might be his biological mother. This is the piece of information around which Kitamura’s confounding and quietly intense fifth novel shapeshifts.

Guy Stagg

The enduring lure of Atlantis

When you picture Atlantis, what do you see? For most people, this mythic city is a classical arcadia sunk beneath the sea – fallen columns, shattered arches and perhaps even an aqueduct. But that is not the place described by Plato, the original source of the Atlantis myth. His version consists of an immense Atlantic island, many millennia older than the Egyptian and Babylonian empires. The popular image of Atlantis was created by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. When that novel’s narrator, Professor Pierre Aronnax, joins Captain Nemo on his underwater exploration, they encounter a ruined city. He notices temples and even ‘the floating outline of a Parthenon’.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The Russian spies hiding in plain sight

In June 2022, Vladimir Putin tipped up at a party at the headquarters of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. This was to mark, of all things, the centenary of the country’s programme of deep-cover spies, who live for years abroad under elaborate false identities while passing secrets back to their masters at home. The weirdness of that espionage hoopla, just four months after the invasion of Ukraine, leaves one wondering what other bizarre birthday events Putin might have in his diary. The 85th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, perhaps? Ah, you can imagine the banter. The cracker hats. The roll-out noisemakers.

Emily Rhodes

Orphans of war: Once the Deed is Done, by Rachel Seiffert, reviewed

In Rachel Seiffert’s searingly beautiful fifth novel, the author returns to Germany, 1945 – ground she previously explored in The Dark Room, her Man Booker-shortlisted debut. Once the Deed is Done opens with a boy, Benno, looking out of his window at night, having been woken by sirens from the munition works. Elsewhere in the town, Hanne and Gustav discover a runaway woman and young child sheltering in their shed. In the morning, the woman has fled, leaving just ‘the winter child’. Hanne decides to care for her, in secret, ‘because she was a child – just a child – left behind in this cold time... What else could she do but hold her?’ They call her Ditte, although ‘the child wasn’t theirs to be naming’.

Ariane Bankes

Anselm Kiefer’s monstrous regiment of women

The visionary artist Anselm Kiefer has restlessly challenged and redefined recent German history and cultural shibboleths in an extraordinary body of work that spans more than six decades. Two months ago he turned 80, an anniversary marked by the staging of exhibitions from Amsterdam to the Ashmolean and the publication of this impressive study devoted to the notable women that thread their way through his work, endlessly shape-shifting. Women are to be found everywhere in Kieferland: haunting, teasing, beckoning, seducing; imperious, impassive, poetic and unknowable. There are martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, Brunhilde and the Valkyries, Madame de Stael and Marie-Antoinette.

Tuesday

Martin Gayford

‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts

On the morning of 7 May 1821 an urgent task was performed at Longwood House on St Helena. A day and a half previously, the celebrated prisoner for whom this dwelling had been built had died. Obviously it was necessary to make his death mask, and fortunately a British military doctor, expert in such matters, was at hand to do so. So it was that in times to come every bourgeois home in France ‘had its plaster Napoleon’, as Alain Corbin writes in this brief but highly original book. The proliferation of such casts was a feature of the age. Some homes became ‘virtual museums of the dead’. Artists’ sitting rooms and studios frequently contained a moulding of the emaciated features of Théodore Géricault; musical households would naturally have one of Beethoven.

Rachel Johnson

Bloodbath at West Chapple farm

Fifty years ago, the blasted bodies of three unmarried siblings, members of the Luxton family, were discovered at a Devon dairy farm, set in a lush stretch between the ‘lavender haze’ of Exmoor and Dartmoor. The youngest member of the family, Alan, was 55. He lay in his pyjamas and work boots on the cobbles in the farmyard. Robbie, 65, with cuts to his face, and Frances, 68, clad in a nightgown rucked up to her waist, were found together in the garden. All the doors to the primitive thatched family farmhouse were locked from inside. The ‘tragic trio’, as they were described by the tabloid press, were the last of an ancient line who had farmed at West Chapple, Winkleigh. Each of the victims had their heads blown off.

Philip Clark

My adventures in experimental music – by David Keenan

David Keenan acquired his craft as a music writer, he says, from reading the crème de la crème of critics who milked rock music for all it was worth during the 1970s – Lester Bangs, Griel Marcus, Paul Morley, Biba Kopf – before deciding that rock criticism was not his bag. In the preface to this weighty collection of his music journalism, he says he considered himself more of a ‘rock evangelist’. The pieces originally appeared between 1998, when Keenan was writing for hardcore music magazines such as Melody Maker, MOJO and the Wire, and 2015, after which he checked out of regular reviewing duties to pursue his career as a novelist. Luckily for him, his debut novel This Is Memorial Device proved a smash hit.

Lee Langley

Adrift in strange lands: The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel, reviewed

Borders have always played an important part in Mexican literature. Not only geographical/political frontiers but the more porous boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead. Between what is real and what is not. Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo were all drawn to this shifting, unreliable territory. Time moves on and new talents emerge. Guadalupe Nettel is widely regarded as a leading writer of her generation, and in various ways her four novels and three short story collections continue to seek out the fantastic that lurks in the interstices of everyday life.

Marcus Nevitt

Friends fall out in the English civil war

In April 1636, two aspiring lawyers, eager to make their way in the world, corresponded about the state of affairs in London. ‘Our best news,’ wrote Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, ‘is that we have good wine... the worse is that the Plague is in town and no Judges dye.’ The recipient of this letter was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a fellow member of the Middle Temple, who, like Hyde, would go on to write an indispensable contemporary chronicle of the British civil wars of the mid-17th century. What makes the intimate, wry irreverence of Hyde’s missive seem startling in retrospect is that the two men ended up on opposite sides of the revolutionary political gulf opened up by that conflict.

Nicholas Lezard

The benign republic of Julian Barnes

Not long into this essay I found myself wondering if it would have been published if the author were not Julian Barnes. I also wondered: would I have guessed the author’s identity if it had been withheld from me? Actually, it’s really five little essays, whose subjects are ‘Memories’, ‘Words’, ‘Politics’, ‘Books’, and ‘Age and Time’.

Chloë Ashby

The road trip from hell: Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts, reviewed

Throughout her quietly compelling second novel, Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts conjures a sense of trundling steadily towards disaster. The narrator, a young Australian woman called Eloise, is recounting a road trip that she and her husband Lewis took through the American Southwest in 2018 – while a deadly fire was sweeping through northern California. The trip was bookended by disasters you could describe as closer to home: before it, Lewis’s mother died; after it, Lewis disappeared. By combing through their time in and out of the ‘climate-controlled interior of the car’, Eloise tries to figure out what happened. The journey is part business, part pleasure. Eloise is researching her dissertation on the Colorado River.