More from Books

Thursday

Mary Keen

Is there anything new left in gardening books?

‘Whither the novel’ was a great dinner party topic in the 1960s. It is a question less aired these days, when novels come in strange and varied forms. From Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, set in the 11th century andwritten in cod Olde Englisshe, to the versifying of Constantine Phipps (much chosen as ‘book of the year’), there is plenty to please us all. Gardening books, however, have now reached the whithering stage. Samey, samey, samey is what they are, and this year even that most traditional of booksellers, Heywood Hill, has lamented the lack of anything new in the horticultural line. There are the inevitable huge picture books, the horticultural porn. The largest of these is Madison Cox’s The Gardener’s Garden (Phaidon £49.

Catherine Brown

Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home

Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s — are regaled by picturesque extracts from Vita’s landscape poems, and moving professions of love to and from her husband Harold Nicolson. Matthew Dennison’s title, Behind the Mask, indicates his ambition to get beyond such projections to something more real. But the metaphor is unfortunate. There was no single image that Vita adopted or which others imposed on her — nor a single real self which has been concealed until now. Dennison knows this.

Graham Robb

Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously

For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in France, France is ‘the sick man of Europe’. The land of liberty was once admired by the whole world. Then came May ’68, feminism, immigration, consumerism and homosexuality. On the surface, nothing has changed; espressos are still being plonked down on zinc counters, and ‘the legs of Parisian women still turn heads’. But ‘the soul has gone’. Gays and Muslims are taking over, and France is ‘dissolving in the icy waters of individualism and self-hatred’. The blurb calls Le Suicide français an ‘analyse’, but there is nothing analytical about it.

Cory Doctorow

The Anonymous ghost in the machine

Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable hacktivist phenomenon whose operations (‘ops’) and giddy, menacing, profane video-manifestos have seized the media and the public consciousness from 2006 to the present day? Because Anonymous is, above all, an anthropological phenomenon. At first glance, you might think that the Anonymous story — the Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing, meme-spewing, terrifying, hilarious non-collective that hacked the church of scientology, the government of Tunisia, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the Pentagon (for starters) — is a story about computer security, or youthful alienation, or political activism.

David Ekserdjian

The Duke of Wellington also invades Christmas art books

Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning (Phaidon, £59.95, Spectator Bookshop, £53.95) examines its hero’s career from his extraordinarily accomplished — and resolutely conventional — teenage productions, by way of his glorious middle years, on to the final works, which were created when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Lavishly illustrated not only with works by the artist, but also with photographs of him and his friends, it does full justice to his towering — if not always entirely lovable — achievement.

Mark Mason

Did anyone ever really love Bob Hope?

Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the guy in their book blows everyone else out of the water? Bob Hope, claims Richard Zoglin in this biography, was the most important entertainer of the 20th century. In fact, he adds, you could argue that Hope was ‘the only important entertainer’. Can Zoglin really believe this? Is he really telling Chaplin, Sinatra, Elvis, Monroe et al to roll over? Even if you made the ‘only important …’ boast about one of those people it would sound absurd. Making it about Bob Hope sets you up for a 486-page fall. It isn’t that Hope’s story lacks importance.

Sophia Waugh

God, aliens and a novel with a mission

They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God. A raft of readers hate sci-fi, and probably more sheer away at the very idea of a novel about a missionary. And yet… And yet The Book of Strange New Things works. It is in many ways extraordinary; its narrative drive, its lack of sentimentality, its occasional (emotional) brutality, its humour (albeit rare) all add up to a novel which is both intelligent, thought-provoking and as readable as a potboiler. Peter, ex-junkie, loving husband, cat-lover, sets off on a journey. The novel opens with his farewell to his wife, and we gather that he will be gone a while and that he might be in danger.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Songs for the road: through his music and his classic car collection Neil Young hopes to escape his childhood traumas

Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I write this, I should experiment with a glass of beer. In any case, one day back in the 1970s — when rock stars were particularly prone to experimentation — Bob Dylan dropped in on Neil Young, who played him a song detailing his extensive drug-related experiments (with grass, cocaine and amphetamines). At the end of the performance, Dylan remarked drily, ‘That’s honest.’ Young still laughs when he remembers this. Partly it was because Dylan, who had done some experimenting himself back in the day, knew where Young was coming from. Also, though, what makes it funny is that all artists are in the business of revelation.

Marcus Berkmann

The 10 best loo books of 2014: why we sing so much better in the shower and what became of Queen Victoria’s children’s milk teeth

Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I know favour ‘bog books’. And having written one or two books myself that teeter on the edge of frivolity, I know that for your book to be kept in what Americans call the ‘bathroom’ is essentially a compliment. As long as it’s there to be read, of course. Oddly enough, the two best loo books of the year I have already and separately reviewed in these pages. The Most of Nora Ephron (Doubleday, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16.

Andrew Taylor

Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work

If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the crowd. Cayetano Brulé, the hero of The Neruda Case, sets himself a course of Maigret novels on the advice of his first client, Pablo Neruda. ‘If poetry transports us to the heavens,’ the aged poet remarks, ‘crime novels plunge you into life the way it really is.’ Brulé, a Cuban exile in Chile, has now appeared in six detective novels by Roberto Ampuero, a Chilean professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa. The Neruda Case is the most recent; it is also the first in the fictional chronology of the series and the first to be translated into English.

Leanda De-Lisle

Elizabeth I, queen of the waiting game

Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded Queen Elizabeth I. His sermon reassured her that her personal qualities made her exceptional. But Elizabeth was not merely an ‘exceptional woman’, snorts Lisa Hilton. She was also ‘an exceptional ruler’ — one who refashioned her kingdom as ‘a modern monarch, a Renaissance prince’. Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 coincided with the publication of John Knox’s notorious blast against the ‘monstrous regiment’ or ‘rule’ of women. Happily such views were ‘based more on hostility to Catholicism than to female rule per se’, we are told.

Allan Massie

Scotland’s miraculous century (it started with the Union)

In 1707 Scotland surrendered what it had of its independence by the Treaty of Union with England. That independence had been limited since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and arguably for at least half a century before that. But the treaty was, as Lord Seafield, Chancellor of Scotland, said ‘the end of an auld song’. It was unpopular in Scotland, popular in England because, in the middle of a war with France, it secured the Protestant succession to the throne and meant that the new kingdom of Great Britain no longer had an internal frontier to defend. Nevertheless, it would be 40 years before domestic peace and security were assured. In that time there were three Jacobite risings — attempts to restore the exiled Stuart kings.

Stephen Bayley

An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book

Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the superstars of German art history. After Richard Schlagmann acquired the imprint in 1990 Phaidon maintained, even enhanced, its reputation for good design, but visual style was prioritised over editorial substance and writers were marginalised. That is, more or less unwanted and, if wanted, not paid very well. Since 2012 Phaidon has been owned by hedgie Leon Black. The interest in massive, high-concept illustrated product remains, but design and production have slipped. Or so I thought, effortfully working my through Room: Inside Contemporary Interiors, edited by Nacho Alegre and others (£49.95, Spectator Bookshop, £44.95).

Philip Hensher

Stefan Zweig: the tragedy of a great bad writer

Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of the intellectuals of the German speaking world during the decades before 1940, in which Zweig gathered a colossal and adoring public both in German and in multiple translations. It was like a password among the sophisticated. Zweig might please the simple reader; but a true intellectual would recognise his own peers by a shared contempt for this middlebrow bestseller. The novelist Kurt Tucholsky has a devastating sketch of a German equivalent of E.F. Benson’s Lucia: Mrs Steiner was from Frankfurt, not terribly young, alone and with black hair. She wore a different dress each night and sat quietly to read cultured books. She was a devoted follower of Stefan Zweig.

Thursday

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

A misery memoir from Alan Cumming that’s surprisingly thoughtful

Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-style erotica, what keep the tills ringing are misery memoirs. The shelves are groaning with them. Their titles can vary from the merely toe-curling (Cry Silent Tears) to the queasily exploitative (Please, Daddy, No), but even if the names of the characters vary, all these books share the same basic plot. A child is horribly abused in some way, but eventually manages to break free from its upbringing, like a chick hatching from an egg. Good comes out of bad.

Peter Scupham

Goodman’s Garden

Where did they all go? Thickets of love and pain rustle in a dry light and skeins of corvidae traipse to a dusk roost. Time is a flip book. Lift your dear hand and feel the pages purr as years fan by in their lost variegations of green, gold, brown, and an old cat, white as a child’s Christmas, trots a careful way through his once kingdom.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

I guarded Rudolf Hess

I had the misfortune to meet Lord Richards on probably the darkest day of his 42 years in the military. In July 2009 I went to visit the then Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces in his office on the edge of Salisbury plain and we spoke about his career, and the army in general. All the while staff officers ran in and out with updates and requests concerning a double IED attack which had left five soldiers of 2nd Battalion, The Rifles, dead and a dozen wounded — the single worst incident in our 13-year involvement in Afghanistan. Richards was, as the title of his auto-biography suggests, in total command of himself and the situation — eloquent but concise, knowledgeable and incisive; and while far from unfeeling, his judgment was completely unclouded by emotion.

Lewis Jones

From head-shrinking to skull-seeking: a history of the severed head

A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’. History is ‘littered’ with such heads. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica of St John Lateran. Artists are inspired by them, especially the erotically charged ones in the stories of Salome and Judith. Medical students dissect them, thereby acquiring the ‘necessary inhumanity’ of their profession. And Americans pay $50,000 to have their own heads cut off — cryonicists prefer the term ‘cephalic isolation’ — and preserved in thermos flasks of liquid nitrogen.

Joanna Kavenna

A book about the ordinary nothings that, in the end, are everything

We live in a world in which nuance is trampled on and cannot survive. Is that true? I don’t know. But the further point is, must authors now preface their novels with introductory letters, in which they carefully explain the central themes of their work? Epistolary prefaces in general are not remotely new: you often find editors and publicists addressing readers with disinterested solicitude. (‘We care about you dear reader and only want the best for you, Buy this book’). Of course, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of such novels as A Thousand Acres and The Greenlanders, is entitled to communicate with the reader in any way she likes.