More from Books

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Beautiful, bedevilled island

The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Arab rule was generally tolerant, its dolce far niente evocative of sultans, minarets, concubines and other jasmine-scented delights. Walking round Palermo today, however, one is assailed by less lovely smells. Parts of the city remain unreconstructed since the Allies bombed it in 1943: fire-blackened palazzi and rubble-strewn slumlands speak of the Mafia’s systematic ransacking of the public coffers. A still darker side of Palermo finds expression in the 19th-century catacombs of the Capuchin friary, situated near the Arab-Fatamid pleasure palace of La Zisa (‘the magnificent’).

Keith Miller

Nasty piece of work

Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled detective fiction’. The new book is not so much hard-boiled as slowly poached, Heston Blumenthal style, in a sous-vide water oven, then finished on a violently hot grill. King has the popular novelist’s gifts in spades — a flawless sense of pace, an ear for dialogue, an eye for the telling detail, a no-mess-no-fuss approach to characterisation. He also has special insights into the uncanny: his frequent forays into the supernatural are wrenchingly plausible, while his rendering of ‘ordinary’ things — a face, a doorway, the hollowed-out roots of a tree — is steeped in mystery and threat.

Houman Barekat

Lulzfags v. moralfags

It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about fine-dining establishments. Their star-rating system had become a mainstay of lifestyle reviews long before the Internet came along. In the digital age, this work has been comprehensively crowd-sourced: the immense success of review sites such as Yelp and Amazon has been built on the voluntary input of users. In theory, it should have been a consumer rights utopia. But product reviews are big business — and where there is lucre, there are shenanigans.

Ariane Bankes

Dizzying swirls of impasto

With a career of more than 60 years so far, Frank Auerbach is undoubtedly one of the big beasts of the British art world. His personal reticence, however, and the condensed, impacted idiom of his painting have contributed to his enigmatic, somewhat opaque reputation. Catherine Lampert, who has sat regularly and patiently for him since 1978, is uniquely qualified to throw light both on the man and his art, but the tactics she employs here are very different from those of Martin Gayford in Man with a Blue Scarf, his intimate, engrossing account of sitting for Lucian Freud. Matching Auerbach’s reticence with her own, she keeps herself largely out of the story, focusing instead on observations made by the artist over the many decades of his career.

Eliza Griswold

Host

In eastern Congo years ago on a road logged into a hill I drove or was driven one evening to see pygmies who claimed they were being eaten. This was possible. I’d met a woman with my name who’d watched the fire on which her arm was cooked and then devoured. The pygmies turned out to be lying and this isn’t about pygmies. In the truck I argued with the driver about gays and the Bible as we lurched through the intestinal dark toward the safe haven of a Catholic priest who fed us the baby chimpanzee we’d seen fighting his tether on the father’s porch.

Simon Bradley

Something sensational to read on the train

Readers who have put in some time on the railways may remember the neat, brush-painted graffiti that appeared in 1974 on a wall facing the line just outside Paddington station: FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE. Not until Banksy took up his spraycan did a piece of London graffiti make such a stir. The Telegraph’s Peter Simple column attributed the long-lasting inscription to the shadowy ‘Master of Paddington’ and the Oxford commuter-poet Roger Green mused on the hauntingly unspecific slogan in his journal Notes From Overground, a minor publishing hit of 1984. Another 20 years passed before the perpetrators were outed; it turned out that their declaration was a mash-up of the words of two other poets, Robert Graves and Ruth Padel.

Robert Collins

A triumphant failure

I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a nutty, occasionally hilarious, flaccid carrier bag of a comic romp, all dazzling one-liners and no comic paydirt. Like his debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole (about a misfit philosopher and his troubled son), it is narrated by a pair of human catastrophes: a New South Wales police constable, Liam Wilder, who’s a failed novelist; and his best friend, Aldo Benjamin, who’s a failed husband, entrepreneur, everything. Toltz probably intended this novel to be a failure. It’s that difficult beast, his second book, after all (his first made the shortlists of the Man Booker and the Guardian First Book Award).

Justin Cartwright

Lost in the telling

This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key fact I can provide without giving away the plot is that Caroline, the film-making wife of Michael, the novel’s main protagonist, is killed in the badlands of Pakistan by a drone controlled from a facility near Las Vegas. Caroline is filming Taleban leaders when they and Caroline are killed. Michael, who is ‘an immersive journalist’, has spent some years on a project with gangs in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is dangerous but rewarding work, and after a few years his findings are published to some acclaim under the title of BrotherHoods. Now back in London, he falls in with Josh and Samantha, neighbours in the adjoining house and flat on Hampstead Heath.

Malcolm Rifkind

There’s no substitute for human intelligence

Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot over the years, and continues to do so. During the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, the main preoccupation of our intelligence agencies has not been with classic espionage by the Soviet Union, or with identifying new Philbys operating on their behalf. Espionage still goes on, but it is small beer compared to the terrorist threat that commands no less than 75 per cent of our agencies’ time and resources. Stephen Grey takes us through the transformation in the recent past experienced by MI6, MI5 and GCHQ, as well as their counterparts in the United States.

Thursday

Rose Prince

Romance of the old kitchen garden

Considerable areas of our memory are taken up with food: it might be the taste of Mother’s sponge, the melting texture of an aunt’s buttery pastry or something recent, like the flavour of the first spoonful of a sour and nutty south-east Asian dish. Especially good meals are recalled with the same clarity as revolting school dinners and the stench of stale fish — we can conjure aromatic memories with ease thanks to the olfactory nerve, the brain’s cache of stored eating experience that helps us to tell good from bad when choosing what to eat. Jennifer A. Jordan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, believes we should be remembering more than just the sensual pleasures of eating, however.

Pippa Goldschmidt

The strangest objects we know of

The idea of black holes sounds so quintessentially modern and 20th-century that it may come as a surprise to learn that it originated over 200 years ago; John Michell, a natural philosopher and clergyman, used Newtonian physics to conceive of a star massive enough to prevent even light from escaping its gravitational pull. Marcia Bartusiak’s lively and readable account of the history of black holes kicks off with an account of Michell’s 1784 paper. There’s a lull in the story after that, because a proper formulation of the physics had to wait until Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915.

Jonathan Meades

A 50-year infatuation

The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions to painting is René Magritte — whose best work David Sylvester rather rashly claimed induces ‘the sort of awe felt in the presence of an eclipse’. Julian Barnes discusses what he calls the artist’s doctrine (doctrine?) of ‘elective affinities’, which proposes the antipodes of Lautréamont’s ‘chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. Thus in the painting of that name a birdcage is filled not with a random safety razor or knuckleduster but with a giant egg.

Mark Mason

Funny things happen on the way to the Scillies

It’s a real skill, writing about a journey where nothing ever happens. We shouldn’t be surprised that Simon Armitage is so good at it: he’s a poet, and therefore used to reporting on nothing happening, or rather spotting the little things that are always happening but the rest of us are too busy to notice. His chosen route this time — the South West Coast Path through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall and on to the Scillies — is normally praised because it gets you away from everything. Yet while he’s there Armitage discovers … well, maybe not everything, but certainly a very entertaining book’s worth of stuff.

Claire Lowdon

In the name of the father

‘People talk about their childhood and it’s so mundane. I don’t remember much about it, if I’m honest. I can’t even tell you what my father’s voice sounded like.’ In Stuart Evers’s story ‘Frequencies’, in this collection, a besotted new father hears this pronouncement coming from the baby monitor. The monitor is picking up a radio signal, so the sound of eight-month-old Jack’s precious snuffling is overlaid with hardheaded recollections of an anonymous speaker’s parents. ‘They were such dull people… I… pitied them even before I knew what the word meant.’ Eventually the juxtaposition grows too much for the father, and he smashes the baby monitor. Then he goes to see his son.

Peter Hoskin

Kultural icon

The almond eyes that rise towards their outer edges. The cheekbones that curve down to the corners of those upholstered lips. The dark strands of hair that fall wisplike on to her chest. The hourglass extremities that will exercise your ciliary muscles until they snap. Dear me! After looking at this book, you’ll be more familiar with the particulars of Kim Kardashian’s body than with your own lover’s. For this is her hardback collection of selfies. It contains almost 500 photographs of Kim, by Kim. Six of them include her daughter; 60 of them feature at least one of her siblings; 100 have Kim in a bikini, in her underwear or completely naked. The book’s title, Selfish, might be the most knowing of all time. But who is Kim Kardashian?

Andre Van Loon

The elite who tried to save Russia

The veteran Russian historian Dominic Lieven’s new study of Russia’s descent towards the first world war is deeply researched, highly valuable in its focus on Russia, and unfailingly well-written: more proof of Lieven’s profound knowledge of the Russian empire. One of his earlier works, Russia’s Rulers Under the Old Regime (1989), focused on the 150 men who ran Russia until 1917. Towards the Flame shares that work’s careful attention to a tiny elite of well-educated, cosmopolitan, mostly aristocratic men. With breathtaking directness, he says that fewer than 50 men (and it was all men) in Europe in 1914 took the decisions that led their countries into war.

Laura Freeman

Pursuing the perfect scoop

Paradise City, Elizabeth Day’s third novel, comes with an accompanying essay on The Pool — an online magazine for the Instagram, iPhone woman. Day, a feature writer for the Observer, discusses the novel’s male protagonist (you couldn’t call him hero) Sir Howard Pink, an East End Jewish boy turned rag-trade multimillionaire. Day urges women to stop being so self-effacing, people-pleasing, and permanently apologetic and instead to ‘Be More Howard’. ‘He sprung on to the page as unashamedly male and blessed with a defiant sense of his own entitlement,’ she writes. ‘He saw money, sex and power as his due. He took what he could, where he could get it and the world rewarded him for it.

Will Nicoll

A nation in trauma

Albania is a small country of 2.7 million people, wedged within the Balkan peninsula. Separated from both Greece and Italy by mere kilometres of seascape and shoreline, it borders the European Union, and, with official candidate status as a member country, strongly hopes for closer ties. As Fred C. Abrahams describes it, the country’s transition from cultish Stalinist dictatorship to functioning democracy in only three decades should be a source of debate, intrigue and pride. The principal protagonists in the ‘drama’ of transition are ‘a paranoid dictator, an ambitious doctor, a scheming economist and an urban artist’.

Thursday

Matthew Dennison

It takes a thief…

In the words of one of his contemporaries ‘a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes’, the 17th-century ne’er-do-well Thomas Blood sounds an unattractive proposition. His latest biographer, Robert Hutchinson, works hard to imbue him with the pantomime glamour of a lovable rogue. Hutchinson roots Blood’s rackety life firmly within the context of the equally rackety Restoration underworld, with its network of spies and spymasters, venial courtiers and religious fanatics. Appropriately he makes vivid use of the sort of rhetoric more often associated with old-fashioned adventure stories.

Ursula Buchan

Calm after the storm

I hesitate ever to criticise an author for the inappropriateness of a book’s title, since it’s more likely the fault of someone in marketing, who’s had a Bright Idea. But whoever is the culprit, the omission of the dates ‘1650–1800’ from the dust jacket certainly risks annoying the bookshop browser, who may grumpily set the book to one side in a huff. This would be a pity, since there is a great deal of value in Mark Laird’s exposition of his multifarious research projects. He is senior lecturer in landscape architectural history at Harvard Graduate School of Design, but probably best known this side of the Atlantic for the leading part he took in the restoration of Painshill, that most delightful of 18th-century gardens, near Cobham in Surrey.