More from Books

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

A treasure-trove of grisly Arab tales may appeal more to an Isis fighter than your average British reader

The marvellous tales of the title are not just confined to the contents of this book, for the travels and travails of the lone manuscript in which they were inscribed are also something of a wonder, and deserve to be told. The original collection appears to have been composed in the 10th century, and it is easy to imagine some of these stories doing the rounds of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus while the crusaders were making trouble in the neighbourhood. This particular version of the stories was written down in the 14th century, probably in Cairo, for that is where the manuscript can be traced.

Melanie McDonagh

Grimms’ fairy tales: the hardcore version

Child murder, domestic slavery, abusive families, cannibalism and intergenerational hatred — what could be better for the festive fireside than a new edition of Grimms’ fairy stories? There hasn’t been a straight translation in English of the original 1812 edition; most retellers in English relied on revised versions by Wilhelm Grimm. Now Jack Zipes has produced the complete first edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. It’s a good translation, faithful to the simple character of the originals. It’s been well received by the fairytale industry, writers and academics who like to remind us that the original versions were rawer than Wilhelm’s family-friendlier edition of 1857.

Simon Heffer

Cambridge, showcase for modernism (and how costly it is to fix)

The Pevsner architectural guides are around halfway through their revisions — though it is like the Forth Bridge, and soon it will be time for the revisions to be revised: it is 30 years since the new London: 2, for example. Aficionados have keenly awaited the Cambridgeshire volume, the latest in the series, because of the substantial new building undertaken by Cambridge University since Pevsner himself last catalogued it in the early 1970s (his first edition appeared in 1954). For most people the county is summarised by two buildings: Ely cathedral, ‘the ship of the fens’, and King’s College chapel.

Julie Burchill

Wonder Woman: feminist symbol or the ultimate male fantasy?

It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both a Monkee and Tippex, or Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful film star who also helped develop wireless communication, or Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger who also invented the artificial heart. (If only he’d played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz!) William Moulton Marston created both the cartoon heroine Wonder Woman and the lie detector machine, though by the time I had finished this book I was wondering how he found the time or the energy to do either.

Eric Weinberger

After the trilogy (and the hurricane): the likeable return of Frank Bascombe

The story of Frank Bascombe, a sports-writer turned estate agent but always a New Jersey homebody, has already taken Richard Ford nearly 30 years and three volumes to tell, totalling 1,300 pages — longer than War and Peace. But for Frank, aged 68 (and for Ford, aged 70), it’s not over. In the autumn of 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New Jersey shoreline. And though Bascombe is retired from real estate and living safely inland in Haddam (the town where his first-person chronicles began, in 1986, with The Sportswriter) he is not unaffected by the devastation. In the four long stories that comprise this fourth Bascombe volume, he learns that his former beach house has been destroyed. A woman made homeless by Sandy has retreated to Haddam and shows up at Frank’s door.

Craig Raine

Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces

The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his audience. Counterintuitively, we like the imposition of imposture. We connive at deceit, at replication, for the release of neurotransmitters, the flood of endorphins — the brandies of the brain. I once heard Peter Ustinov on a chat show replicate the sound of an electric bell being pressed. Pleasure on a different, even more vertiginous level. The audience was convulsed. Unless a poet can produce this ungainsayable instant delight in the reader, this drench of dopamine, the poetry is automatically of the second order.

Viv Groskop

Transnistria: a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic

Transnistria is not an area well-served by travel literature or, really, literature of any kind. The insubstantial-seeming post-Soviet sandwich-filling between Moldova and Ukraine, it doesn’t have a bad reputation. It has no reputation. As Rory MacLean, the author of the ‘across-the-old-Iron-Curtain-in-a-Trabant’ bestseller Stalin’s Nose, explains: ‘Transnistria is a breakaway republic of a ba lot smaller than Devon. And it is recognised by no country in the world except itself. You could indeed be forgiven for thinking that Transnistria is a made-up place (and at times the author of this book almost treats it as if it is).

Roy Strong

The quirkiest garden book Roy Strong has read in years

Incredulity is rarely a word that crosses my mind when it comes to garden writing. This genre can, of course, be quite straight-forward and descriptive, like Miss Jekyll’s rather boring volumes. It can equally be wildly funny, as when Anne Scott-James and Osbert Lancaster hitch their respective wagons to horticulture and produce a spoof history. But where, oh where did Sam Llewellyn’s exotic aberration spring from? Is it fact or fiction? I don’t think I ever decided which. This is one of those books where you spend the whole time worrying less about what’s happening in the kitchen garden in spring and more on trying to work out what the hell is this place and who on earth is this man with a less-than-house-trained duchess in tow.

Thursday

Christopher Howse

Five of the best celebrity biographies of 2014

Cilla Black has become a strange creature during her 50 years in showbiz. When her husband Bobby was in hospital she found to her dismay that she didn’t now how to take the dogs for a walk. That was some time ago, for Bobby Willis died of liver cancer in 1999. ‘They lived their lives almost like Siamese twins,’ writes Douglas Thompson in Cilla, Queen of the Swinging Sixties (Metro, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.59). He is an old hand in Cillagraphy, having published Cilla Black: Bobby’s Girl in 1998 and Cilla: the Biography in 2002. He is not the author of this year’s Cilla: the Adventures of a Welsh Mountain Pony, which will disappoint fans since it makes no reference to the long-term hostess of Blind Date (1985–2003).

Alan Brownjohn

As No Art Is

The weekend’s on us, and no means of soothing it or kissing it away. The flat facades of mansion blocks curve towards silence. The sun gets everywhere in this canyon, but property holds its desperations in: the same flying ant is all that moves along the same trouser folds. I go to the park for late afternoon to arrive among the memorials in their set-back space, their immortality in the last century, their short life-spans. What settles on this time is not a haze or mist, but a half-visible moderation of the light among the trees in which appear the hour-long married with their picture-takers, from the distance down the long paths hurrying, where sunlight falls on patches between fallen leaves spread flat by sudden July showers.

Jonathan Mirsky

Deng Xiaoping: following in Mao’s footsteps

Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. But apart from his fondness for eating croissants and playing bridge, and the fact that his second wife left him for a party colleague — Michael Dillon records the divorce only — we still know little about Deng himself. Mao Zedong’s personality, on the other hand, was often remarked on — from Edgar Snow’s first meeting with him in 1936 to Henry Kissinger’s in 1971(both men swooned in his presence). Dillon rightly notes that Vogel compressed a large part of Deng’s life into a mere 30 pages. In this biography the entire life and career are given appropriate space.

Sarah Wardle

Goodwill to Men

Overheard in advent was this complaint of a bus driver to a passenger, ‘Don’t call me brother! We’re not of the same mother.   And as the 24 passed Trafalgar Square, there by the giant Christmas tree were the police arresting a freak for disturbing the peace.   Yards from Westminster Abbey were sleeping bags of the shabby seeking sanctuary in shop doors as pedestrians ignored the sick, the lame, the poor, and stores implored, Spend more!

Matthew Walther

What makes mankind behave so atrociously? Ian Buruma and Joanna Bourke investigate

The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature, one of the murderer’s descendants has his arm ripped from its socket by a young warrior who celebrates his gruesome victory by drinking himself blotto; the next day, our hero wakes up (not hungover, apparently) and kills his opponent’s mother. Not my cup of tea, Beowulf, or, perhaps, yours. But this is what literature was like until the 18th century or so, when the stakes were lowered and people began writing about inheritances, bishoprics and low-key adultery.

Mike Parker

An alternative map of Britain: caves, canals, megaliths and ley lines

Picture the map of Britain. Its strangely cadaverous shape, blobs of population and routes between them seem as familiar as our own faces; there is only one definitive map, surely? Not according to Joanne Parker, whose Britannia Obscura aims to tease out less corporeal cartography. Hers are not quite ‘maps of the mind’, for they exist as truly as a crisp new Ordnance Survey, but they are largely out of sight: above us, below us or otherwise in the shadows. Each of her five chapters takes on a different map: of our cave and canal networks, overhead air routes and patterns of megalithic remains. These four are clearly real enough; the fifth, a map of ley lines, rather less certain.

Ruth Scurr

Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print. Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien de printemps (Afterimage) 1993.

Nicholas Lezard

What Hanif Kureishi learned from being robbed by his accountant

Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs: ‘Long before this, though, and long before I learned that the insane, these days, might disguise themselves as money experts, I had heard that no one had met a sane accountant.’ To which an accountant might reply: ‘I have never met a sane writer. ‘(I am certainly in no position to wag the finger when it comes to this.) Hanif Kureishi, though, has cause for his observation, and his grievance. In the spring of 2012, his accountant, whom he calls here Jeff Chandler, managed to con him out of around £180,000. This booklet is his reaction to that. It starts out very promisingly.

William Leith

Your immune system’s war isn’t Saving Private Ryan — it’s Homeland

Before I read this book, I imagined the immune system as a defensive force, like the Germans on the beaches at Normandy on June 6 1944. When you’re young and vital, your immune system is the Germans in the early morning — scanning the horizon for movement, with plenty of ammunition in reserve. But life is a process of attrition; as you get older, you become like the Germans later that afternoon — your machine guns get jammed up, and then you use rifles, and pistols, and eventually bayonets, until the invaders finally destroy you — just like the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. That’s what I used to think. Now I’ve read this book, I see things a bit differently.

Andrew McKie

Not a barrel of laughs: a history of hogsheads, kegs and puncheons

Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their surname is Cooper. If it doesn’t have the wide appeal of the latest Lee Child or Jamie Oliver, though, there is plenty in it of interest, and not just for the many fans of wine and whiskey. Since the unexpected commercial success of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, there have been a number of attempts to dare to be dull, approaching apparently unpromising subjects with the attitude that anything becomes interesting if you look at it closely enough.

Thursday

Rose Prince

A mouth-watering selection: 2014’s best eight cookery books

The people behind the people are the ones to watch for, and we have all been waiting for a book by Anna Jones. Who? Well, if you are a fan of Jamie Oliver, you will have read a lot of Jones. For seven years she worked as his ‘stylist, writer and food creative,’ which means, we guess, that she was behind the curtain busily pulling levers for the great wizard. He has written the foreword to his protégée’s first book, and says he’s is ‘super proud’. But so he should be, for A Modern Way to Eat (Fourth Estate £25, Spectator Bookshop, £20) is a beautiful and inspiring one, and thankfully devoid of Jamie-speak — that is, nothing is described as ‘smashing.’.

Christopher Bray

Composer, conductor, author, pianist, lecturer — was there anything Leonard Bernstein couldn’t do?

On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a performance of Mahler’s Third. The next night he went to see Jimi Hendrix play Madison Square Gardens. And there you have him. Was Bernstein a fragile romantic or a firebrand rocker? Was he the spiritual visionary who gave us Chichester Psalms or the tin-pan-alley tunesmith behind West Side Story? Bernstein went to his grave claiming it was possible to be all these things and more — insisting that you could be a political activist and a concert pianist, a conductor of the challengingly atonal and a writer of the melodically unforgettable. Not everyone was convinced.