More from Books

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

The greatest American Arctic disaster

In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships which sooner or later expired in the pincers of an ice floe while crewmen ate their shoes. These stories bear retelling for our own age, and Hampton Sides does well to identify the gruesome story of the USS Jeanette, which ended in the greatest American Arctic disaster ever. The idea began with James Gordon Bennett Jr, the proprietor of the New York Herald (the largest circulation daily in America) and a flamboyant character who enjoyed riding round Manhattan in the nude. He had already sponsored numerous expeditions and popularised the now standard technique of creating news, the more sensational the better. (The phrase ‘Gordon Bennett!’ was minted for him.

Nicholas Farrell

Good time girls: Italian women prefer sunglasses to babies, according to Nicholas Farrell

Like so many Britons who chased the dream and woke up in Italy I have contemplated writing a book about the Italians. I even thought of what to call it: Those Italians.The title was prompted by what an Albanian port official told the media during some international crisis in response to the news that the entire cargo of an Italian aid ship had disappeared one night in the Albanian port of Durres. ‘Yes it is incredible,’ the official conceded, ‘but — my friends — there is always something funny going on with those Italians.’ An Albanian, of all people! But such books are a poisoned chalice. The theme demands that you capture the spirit of the place and its people and yet avoid stereotype and cliché.

Charlotte Moore

Powers of persuasion: how Churchill brought America on side

In time for the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death comes this pacy novel about his attempts to persuade the Americans to join the war. It is January 1941; President Roosevelt’s special envoy Harry Hopkins arrives in Blitz-torn London and is subjected to Churchill’s charm offensive. Hopkins, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking man of principle with a dislike of hereditary privilege, finds himself guided down every corridor of power. It’s port and cigars at Downing Street, roast pheasant at Chequers, even champagne in the prime ministerial bathroom while the great man fires questions at him from the tub, ‘a pink, round, gleaming Michelin man’.

Stephen Bayley

From classical to post-modern: a beginner’s guide

My career at school and after was greatly enhanced by a series of books called The Bluffer’s Guide to....These gave mischievous advice, often on the reliable when-in-doubt-confuse-the-issue lines. A favourite of mine, still in use in emergencies, was: ‘I think Jack Kerouac was more a Franciscan Christian than Buddhist, don’t you?’ Martin Kemp’s Art in History is several clicks up the ratchet of sophistication, but, being a beginner’s guide, retains something of the character of a prop for the indolent. The curious title betrays a little uncertainty. It is one of the publisher’s ‘Ideas in Profile’ series which includes Shakespeare, Criticism and Politics. But why the preposition between ‘art’ and ‘history’?

Candy Neubert

Approaching America

Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly where I am to within a metre. This is the same way we track our missiles and drones. You stare for a moment and say oh. Then remembering your manners add thank you for showing me.

A.D Miller

The fallen idol: seeing Putin in a new light

The way to think about Russia, Bill Browder told me in Moscow in 2004, using a comparison he recycles in Red Notice, is as a giant prison yard. Vladimir Putin, he argued then, had no choice but to destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the yard’s top dog and country’s richest man. One of a tribe of Western financiers who traversed a hermetic circuit of offices, guarded apartments, upscale restaurants and the airport, Browder would berate reporters for banging on about human rights abuses or atrocities in Chechnya. Putin was already Putin, for anyone who cared to notice — autocratic, corrupt, nationalistic — but, for Browder, Russia was an oil-powered success story, and Putin was a seer.

Tim Bouverie

Tony Judt: a man of paradox who made perfect sense

Tony Judt was not only a great historian, he was also a great essayist and commentator on international politics. Few in this country will be familiar with his journalism, however, since it was largely published in America by the the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. Thankfully, this situation can now be remedied through this collection of his writings, ranging from 1995 to his untimely death in 2010 from motor-neurone disease. As was often observed during his life, Judt was a man of apparent paradoxes. A secular Jew, who as a teenager had been a left-wing Zionist, he was castigated for criticising the actions of Israel. A historian of Europe, he spent most of his career teaching in America.

Nigel Jones

From prince to pauper: a dramatic overview of Britain on 18 June 1815

Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way, this has to be the best. David Crane has used the bloody campaign as a telescope, bringing into sharp focus not just the carnage along the Brussels road, but the state of Britain itself: a country on the cusp of vast, irreversible change. He achieves this within the compass of a single summer’s day — Sunday, 18 June 1815 — devoting a chapter to each hour and cutting cinematically between the three armies slaughtering each other in Belgium and the citizens at home. Some anxiously await news of triumph or disaster; others are utterly oblivious of what the cannonade rolling across the Channel, clearly heard by Kentish churchgoers, portends.

James Yorke

Cabinet of curiosity: we do not even know for sure the maker of the Sixtus Cabinet at Stourhead

Italian cabinets and tables decorated with inlaid semi-precious stones known as ‘pietre dure’ were a ‘must-have’ for English milords returning from their Grand Tours. The finest example is perhaps the Sixtus V cabinet at Stourhead, in Wiltshire, which has just been written up in a thorough, scholarly way by Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd, two eminent furniture and architectural historians. As well as placing the Sixtus V cabinet within the contexts of Roman manufacture and English collecting, the book brings to life its Roman provenance and its subsequent residence at Stourhead after the banker Henry Hoare bought it in about 1740.

Martin Vander Weyer

The low sculduggery of high Victorian finance

The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern for our own happiness recommends us to the virtue of prudence,’ wrote Adam Smith. ‘The profits of commerce,’ according to David Hume, carry us towards a state in which ‘the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace.’ In the first chapter of Forging Capitalism, Ian Klaus encapsulates this theory as an 18th-century artist might have titled an allegorical painting of intertwined figures: ‘Commerce encouraging Virtue, and Virtue harnessing Commerce.’ But that’s not really the way it was, Klaus goes on to argue — and certainly not the way it is today, he implies.

Thursday

Hugh Cecil

Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped. An all-female camp at Ravensbrück, set up in 1938, soon afforded the prison doctors a steady supply of women — the ‘rabbits’, as these prisoners became known — for medical experiments .

Jonathan Rugman

A state of terror: Islamic State longs to be left alone to establish its blood-stained utopia

The Sykes-Picot agreement will be 100 years old next year, but there will be no congratulatory telegrams winging their way to the Middle East from London, or from Paris on high alert. The Islamic State, the world’s most powerful jihadist group, has filmed its men bulldozing border posts between Syria and Iraq, dealing perhaps the final blow to those Anglo-French cartological ambitions of a century ago. The ‘Caliphate’ is inhabited by some six million people and is now larger than the United Kingdom. In the words of Patrick Cockburn, ‘a new and terrifying state has been born that will not easily disappear’. Yet far from appearing out of the blue in 2014, IS was fostered for years by those who profess to oppose it, as this book argues convincingly.

Frances Wilson

Muriel and Nellie: two radical Christians build Jerusalem in London’s East End

This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie Dowell is invisible in the sense that Claire Tomalin described Nelly Ternan in The Invisible Woman. While Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens, simply ‘vanished into thin air’, Nellie Dowell, who may or may not have been the mistress of Muriel, trod so lightly on the ground that she left barely a footprint behind her. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a Baptist shipbuilder with progressive ideas, has been the subject of several books already, including Vera Brittain’s The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers.

Matthew Dennison

The merry monarch and his mistresses; was sex for Charles II a dangerous distraction?

In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh have written a swashbuckling life of Charles II. This is narrative history that seldom slows to accommodate analysis, the Restoration court presented as the stuff of a TV mini-series: febrile, frenetic and vivid. At the centre of the vortex, Charles himself emerges as an amorous roisterer, dominated by his libido. The King’s Bed reminded me of the Ladybird history books of my childhood, biography in bite-size chunks, centred on suitably memorable happenings or themes, the events of the past pithily retold and pared down to externals.

Tom Hodgkinson

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura: a masterpiece of German Gothic

In the early 19th century, the Romantic movement was in full swing across Europe. You could probably date its birth from the publication in 1775 of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the gloomy novel of unrequited love that led to a spate of suicides among young men in Germany. Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798, with its Taoist argument for simplicity and the importance of contemplating nature. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1794 and his daughter Mary Shelley’s extravagant Gothic novel Frankenstein in 1816. The Romantics attacked the new numbers-based utilitarian philosophy which underpinned the Industrial Revolution.

John Gohorry

Persuasions

Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an ambulance, rips his shirt up for bandages, risks his neck to protect others. Persuasions of word and image, graphics of ridicule, of subversion. Who should enforce their silence? Citizen B’s undeceived, seeing the hypocrite-bigot untrousered, the judge in the brothel, the Faith- Founder, hand on the trigger. Of the two modes of persuasion which gives the greater offence? which does the greater good? The response of the dead is muted but citizens in their millions packing streets shoulder to shoulder in freedom’s name give their answer.

Michael Moorcock

The King Kong of the thriller: the phenomenal output of Edgar Wallace, once the world’s most popular author

At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of short stories, several volumes of verse, countless newspaper and magazine articles, movie scripts, radio plays and more. His work was dictated, transcribed and sent directly to the publisher. In one year alone (1929) he wrote a dozen books. People joked about getting ‘the weekly Wallace’. Despite their speed of creation, Wallace’s stories were, said The Spectator, written in plain, clear English and ‘read by everyone, from bishops to barmen’. His influence on the thriller genre was extensive, profound and continuous. He inspired a thousand imitators with The Four Just Men, Mr J.G. Reeder, Sanders of the River and Educated Evans.

Thursday

Peter Parker

Sophia Duleep Singh: from socialite to socialist

Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian maharajah who had been exiled to England, her mother the Cairo-born illegitimate daughter of a German merchant and an Abyssinian slave. The young princess was brought up in considerable splendour on a vast Suffolk estate as a thoroughly anglicised aristocrat who would be presented at court and become an enthusiastic participant in the Season before unexpectedly joining the battle for women’s suffrage. Anita Anand traces what she calls the ‘roots of rebellion’ to Sophia’s father.

Michela Wrong

Refugees and resilience: a story of Africa

I would love to sit in on a Jonny Steinberg interview. Over the years this South African writer has perfected a form of reverse ventriloquism, in which he becomes the mouthpiece for the Africans whose lives intrigue him. I’d like to know how he does it. The process must require relentless badgering, as interview is piled on interview, memory upon memory. One suspects his subjects occasionally come to regret agreeing to cooperate. As a reader, I can only thank them for their patience. For the results are true, relevant, modern narratives conveyed with such eloquence and poignancy they acquire almost Shakespearean gravitas. In his previous books, Steinberg told the stories of South African mobsters, beleaguered Afrikaner farmers, Aids sufferers and exiled Liberian refugees.

Wynn Wheldon

A ghost story without the scary bits

Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress, then tie them up and gag them with their own underwear, and set fire to the place. However, See How Small is not interested in the why or the who, but rather in the lives of a group of characters affected by the incident. We learn about these lives both before and after the murders, mostly after. This book is a kind of modern ghost story, without the frightening bits. Kate Ulrich is the mother of two of the girls. She is haunted by them. Jack Dewey is the firefighter who discovers their bodies. He too is haunted by them.