More from Books

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

The story of food in glorious technicolour

Have you ever suffered from museum blindness? A complete overwhelm at the sheer amount of stuff – often quite similar stuff – that prevents you from focusing on any one item? I know I have. Two-thirds of the way around a museum, even one I have true enthusiasm for, I find my eyes sliding off exhibits, reading the captions but not taking anything in. I have discovered the antidote in Repast by Jenny Linford. Produced in conjunction with the British Museum, using its collection and curators, it explores the global history of cooking, eating and drinking. At first glance it could simply be a coffee-table book. A thing of beauty, it is heavy to hold, with gorgeous full-page illustrations. But it is far more than that. ‘Food is universal, yet particular,’ Linford begins.

Thursday

Benedict Allen

Why we never tire of tales of pointless polar hardship

I’m not altogether a fan of what the writer Sara Wheeler has called the Big Willie school of expeditions. ‘To me,’ I once intoned loftily, ‘exploration is not about conquering nature or planting flags or going where no one’s gone before in order to make a mark. Rather the opposite.’ It’s more about a spirit of inquiry, I went on. If anything, the place should make its mark on you.  How then, do we want our explorers to be? The sort with steely eyes and frosted brow who silently trudges their way poleward despite the odds – though it’s never quite clear any more what they’re usefully discovering?

Franklin Nelson

Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?

Not far into The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon quotes from this balladesque 1980 track by the French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat: We have to be reasonable You can’t go on living like this Alone if you fell sick We would be so worried You’ll see, you’ll be happy there We’ll sort through your affairs Find the photos you love It’s strange that a whole life Can be held in one hand With the other residents You’ll find lots to talk about There’s a TV in your room A pretty garden downstairs With roses that bloom In December as in June You’ll see, you’ll be happy there ‘You’ll see, you’ll be happy there’ presents us with an adult gently addressing a parent about the latterâ.

Caroline Moorehead

Only Hitler could have brought the disparate Allies together

‘Allies,’ declared Stalin on 8 February 1945, the fifth day of the Yalta Conference, ‘should not deceive one another.’ In order to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese, the British, Americans, Soviets, French and Chinese had indeed all worked closely together. But in his meticulous, scholarly and highly enjoyable history of the second world war, Tim Bouverie makes plain just what this entailed: a collaboration that was both deep and rivalrous, riven by secret deals, prejudice, changing loyalties and betrayals, conducted by people who at different times admired, feared and despised one another, while in public most often remaining models of civility.

Bryan Appleyard

Christianity in England is dying – and our national identity with it

‘Christianity,’ writes Bijan Omrani in his opening sentence, ‘is dying in England.’ Does it matter? His next sentence makes it clear that, for him at least, it does. ‘In this generation, the religion that has defined the spiritual life, identity and culture of the country since its origins as a unified state in the 10th century has come into its death agony.’ This, he adds, is ‘far more profound than anything like Brexit.’ The implication is either that we are nothing without our religion or we are becoming something unrecognisable and untested by history, a people without a story, with no tale to tell themselves. This book is a history of what we are losing. It is compendious, well written and alarming because we are evidently in danger of losing everything.

Andrew Taylor

The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed

Cock’s bones! This is a most wonderly historical novel, the very reverse of a wind-egg. It tells the story of Lambert Simnel, the youthful figurehead of a Plantagenet uprising against Henry VII in 1487. The historical Simnel is an elusive figure, and most of what little we know comes through Tudor propagandists. Jo Harkin fills the gap in the record with enormous brio, channelling this bloody epilogue to the Wars of the Roses through a hapless adolescent who usually has his mind on other things. Simnel is a pretender in more ways than one. Even he doesn’t know who he really is. The son of an Oxfordshire farmer? A Yorkist bastard, retained by the sinister Lord Lovell as a form of dynastic insurance? The 17th Earl of Warwick and the rightful Edward VI?

Julie Burchill

The pain of being a Bangle – despite sunshine through the rain

I must say that my feelings about the 1980s American rock band the Bangles were – unusually for me – moderate. I loved some of their hits while being left cold by others. They were pleasant. But after reading this book’s press release, I realised how sorely lacking in appreciation of their impact I’d been: It’s a story of the challenges faced by women attempting to follow their artistic dreams in a media and music industry ecosystem which seemed set up for their failure from the start... It is a long overdue corrective that restores the Bangles to their rightful place in music history as feminist trailblazers... As Debbi Peterson herself notes: ‘It’s about time that our true story was told.

Lynn Barber

Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali

Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in 1894 in Kazan, on the banks of the Volga. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who vanished when she was ten. Her mother, a midwife, moved the family to Moscow where Elena attended an exclusive school. But in 1913 she started coughing, so was sent to a Swiss sanatorium, Clavadel. There she fell in love with a fellow patient, Paul Éluard, who had just published his Premiers poèmes. They got engaged but had to wait until he turned 21 (she was 22) to marry – by which time she had adopted the name Gala. They had a daughter, Cécile, but they left her with his parents. Éluard was one of the Dadaist circle around André Breton. The big event in spring 1921 was the debut show of a German artist, Max Ernst.

Andrew Rosenheim

Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction

Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable exception, with the added bonus of being brilliantly written. Maggie Burkhardt is an 81-year-old widow who has spent the six years since her husband’s death living in a succession of resort hotels. We now find her installed in the grandly named but slightly shabby Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor.

Ian Thomson

The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda. His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings).

Thursday

Genevieve Gaunt

Marriage, motherhood and money: Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself. In the eponymous story, Ruthie, a writer, dismisses the notion that ‘women’s fiction’ is perceived as giving off ‘the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’. She reflects on internalised misogyny: ‘It took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.

Ian Sansom

What did John Lennon, Jacques Cousteau, Simon Wiesenthal and Freddie Mercury have in common?

Robert Irwin – novelist, historian, reviewer and general all-round enthusiast and scholar of just about everything – died last year. It might seem odd that a man whose previous works included the definitive one-volume introduction to The Arabian Nights and a controversial critique in 2006 of Edward Said’s Orientalism – not to mention what is one of the great novels about Satanism, Satan Wants Me (1999) – should have spent his final years working on a book about stamp collecting. But fear not. This is not some weird aberration in a career of weird aberrations; it is, in fact, another weird aberration.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock. The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming.

Michael Arditti

A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed

Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down from London to stay. The clear parallels with Angelica Bell and Charleston extend even further. Ivy develops a tendresse for, and eventually marries, Bear, a man 25 years her senior and Angus’s former lover. Like his prototype Bunny Garnett, Bear worked on the farm to avoid conscription during the first world war. Like Bunny with Angelica, Bear is present at Ivy’s birth and immediately contemplates marrying her.

Wednesday

David Abulafia

The great explorers of the past dismissed as mercenary opportunists

Ceremonial cannibalism was not a European invention but a regular feature of South American societies Simon Park, who teaches Portuguese history and literature at Oxford University, aims to recast the early period of European exploration as a story of disasters rather than successes. His target is the notion that those who led the first European expeditions across the Atlantic or into the Indian Ocean were ‘heroes who pushed forward boundaries of knowledge’. An obvious case is Christopher Columbus, who refused to his dying day to recognise that he had failed to reach the outlying islands of China. He was already the butt of bitter criticism during his lifetime.

Clare Mulley

Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany

Late one evening in 1994, an Italian magistrate walked into a storage room at the military prosecutor’s offices in Rome. There his eye was caught by a 6ft-high wooden cupboard, curiously positioned so that it faced the wall. His interest piqued, he pulled the cupboard around and opened its doors. Inside were stacks of documents dating from the mid-1940s. In all, there were 695 long-lost war crime investigation files, detailing more than 2,000 incidents that had taken place in Italy during the fascist period. Picking up the story, the Italian media dubbed the cupboard the ‘wardrobe of shame’ – which quickly became a metaphor for what Thomas Harding calls ‘Italy’s general amnesia about the fascist past’.

Leyla Sanai

The psychiatrist obsessed with ‘reprogramming’ minds

When the actress Celia Imrie was 14, she was admitted to an NHS hospital where she was given medication intended for delusional, hallucinating, agitated schizophrenics. Though not diabetic, she was regularly injected with insulin, which lowered her blood sugar so that she became shaky, anxious, ravenously hungry and so confused she couldn’t recognise her own family. Yet she was one of the luckier ones. Other patients were given enough insulin to induce a coma caused by dangerously low glucose levels, and some even died.  Why was Imrie subjected to this? Because she was anorexic and had been placed in the care of a notorious psychiatrist who believed in aggressive physical therapy.

Sarah Ditum

Urban gothic: I Want to Go Home, But I’m Already There, by Roisin Lanigan, reviewed

A horror story in three words: London property market. That’s the starting point for Roisin Lanigan’s brilliantly creepy debut novel, set in the sheer hell of being a young renter. Because once you’ve run the gamut of carbon monoxide-leaking boilers, coked-up estate agents, absentee landlords and frosty housemates (and been gouged in rental costs for the privilege), maybe a haunting isn’t a deal-breaker. The main character, Aine, is adrift in her twenties with a vaguely online job and a prescription for unspecified mental health issues. She’s also pathologically passive: she ends up in London because Laura, her best friend from university, asks to flatshare and Aine can’t think of anything else to do. ‘So why not London?

James Ball

Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time at Facebook, has landed top of the New York Times’s bestseller charts and fourth in the UK’s Sunday Times equivalent. It owes its success in large part to a ferocious campaign that Meta – Facebook’s parent company – waged against it on publication. When Meta faces a barrage of public criticism, which it often does, it typically stays quiet and gets on with things. And that approach works – its share price has continued to soar despite scandal after scandal. So when the company not only published a series of furious denials but also had staffers post about the book on their personal social media feeds, and even launched a legal action to prevent Wynn-Williams promoting it, people started to take notice.

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

The Pinochet affair: the pursuit of a Chilean dictator

Calle Londres 38 is the address in Santiago of one of the notorious detention centres where the government of the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered its opponents after the military coup of 1973. This book is mainly about the international row that broke out between 1998 and 2000 when Pinochet, by then retired, visited London for a medical operation and a Spanish judge applied to have him extradited for trial in Spain. There is a parallel narrative about the long and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring to justice Walther Rauff, a former SS officer deeply involved in the early stages of the final solution in Germany, who at the end of his life served as a consultant to Pinochet’s infamous security service, the DINA.