More from Books

Thursday

William Leith

A book about human nature that makes your head spin – in a good way

Vincent Deary is a therapist, and this book is the first part of a trilogy. How We Are is about human nature. Books two and three will be called How We Break and How We Mend. Three serious tomes, backed by a serious publisher. You open it thinking: this is not going to be an easy self-help book where everything is mapped out for you. It won’t be a walk in the park. In fact, pretty much the first thing Deary does is to examine the concept of walking in a park. ‘“A walk in the park” is a synonym for ease,’ he tells us, ‘because the park knows how to walk.’ In other words, when you enter a park, you don’t have to make any decisions, because the park has already made them for you. The paths are marked out. All you have to do is follow them.

Lewis Jones

Enjoy gin but don’t read books? Or read them only while drinking gin? This is the book for you

Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful drink that embodies the best of London’, which is a judgment that would raise eyebrows even at closing time in Soho. It is not a remotely scholarly book. There are no notes or index, and on the second page Olivia Williams informs us that the first citation for gin in the OED is from 1714, as ‘an infamous liquor’. It’s actually from 1723, as ‘the infamous liquor’ — mere details, but still. I stopped checking things after that.

Robert Collins

How on earth did David Mitchell’s third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?

Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999), featured a disembodied spirit that wandered around making itself at home in other people’s souls. Transmigration spread throughout that book — the lives of its characters intertwined in brilliantly intricate ways — and has continued to throughout Mitchell’s fiction. When his characters aren’t being reborn as new people in one book, they’re turning up alive and well for a second outing in another. His latest, The Bone Clocks, continues the cycle of endless rebirth. Like four out of five of his earlier works, this supernatural, intertwining epic has made it onto the Man Booker longlist.

Aidan Hartley

The forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the Forgotten Army

The British who fought in Burma became known as the ‘Forgotten Army’ because this was a neglected theatre of the second world war. Barnaby Phillips’s tale is about the African forces fighting across this green hell — ‘the forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the Forgotten Army’. At the age of 16 Isaac Fadoyebo left his village in colonial Nigeria and joined Britain’s call for recruits in the war. Hitler did regard black people as ‘semi-apes’, but Britain enrolled 500,000 Africans to fight for a cause they barely understood against enemies on the other side of the world. Isaac was sent not to battle the Nazis in Europe, as many other Africans were, but to Burma, whose inhabitants were also caught up in a conflict that wasn’t theirs.

Thursday

Tobias Grey

In defence of the Jacobins

The French Revolution ushered in not only a revolution of rolling heads but of talking ones too. ‘Speech-making was a new political instrument,’ writes Eric Hazan. ‘The King of France never gave speeches and neither did his ministers.’ Indeed Louis XVI’s lack of eloquence, or more specifically his egregious line of sentimental claptrap, had fatal repercussions for him in the court of public opinion. He was certainly no Mirabeau, whose speeches, printed in their thousands, were heard right across the country.

Wynn Wheldon

Kafka goes to Dubai

‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his new novel is a riff on Kafka’s The Castle. Kafka’s ‘K’ has become X, struggling for recognition by his lover, by his employer, by the world. The Situation is a residential block in Dubai (desert sand for Kafka’s snow). X is a corporate lawyer who has been invited there by an old college friend, a dodgy Lebanese billionaire, to handle the family’s personal financial affairs. The burdens of this job constitute the first of the three threads that bind the novel together. The second is the story of X’s relationship and break up with his high-powered girlfriend, Jenn, of whom he is terrified.

Martin Gayford

Exactly how much fun was it being an impoverished artist in Paris?

What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds most appealing: the perfect recipe for a bohemian life, dreamed up by a supreme master in the art of having it both ways. To begin with at least, however, Picasso had to make do only with the half of his formula: living like a pauper with scarcely any cash at all. La vie de bohème, this enjoyable book makes clear, might have been romantic but was also hard. Sue Roe has written a portrait in words of an era, through which are threaded the stories of the various people who passed by — painters, models, collectors, dealers. But her book takes its main title from a place: Montmartre. It’s an address that still has allure.

Charlotte Moore

In love with the lodger

Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends meet in their genteel villa. Servantless, Mrs Wray keeps up appearances while her daughter Frances confronts the reality of hands-and-knees housework. Reluctantly, they advertise for ‘paying guests’, and are rewarded with Leonard and Lilian Barber, who are young, noisy, sexy and vulgar, with a whiff of the music-hall about them. This is perfect territory for Sarah Waters. Women reshaping their lives without men, social barriers dismantled through economic necessity, notions of respectability challenged by the world convulsion of the preceding years.

Christopher Howse

Floating bodies, seeing hands, rippling skies – is Jerry Uelsmann’s photomontage a tragic dead-end?

An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel Adams mountainside of conifers on one side and a bare mountain on the other; concentric ripples on a lake in the foreground are mirrored in the sky above. It will, I fear, remind readers of that BBC2 ident with Zen-ish sky-ripples. Each of Uelsmann’s photographs, always in black and white, is composed from three or five negatives meticulously aligned to make a single composite print. Naked female bodies float above water or clouds; anonymous silhouetted male figures observe from doorways; cupped hands grow from a tree stump. The connotations are surreal and Gurdjieffian.

Dan Jones

When boxing ruled the world

The early 1970s was a good time for heavyweight boxing. Indeed, it was probably the last truly great age for the sport. Flamboyant fighters contested brutal matches in exotic locations, from the Philippines to the Caribbean. The world watched open-mouthed. The marketing slogans attached to some of those fights remain instantly recognisable: who has not heard of the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrilla in Manila? During these years boxing, and particularly American heavyweight boxing, was the most prominent and glamorous sport on the planet. Boxing in the early Seventies was also culturally important in a way that it is not any more. The sport was briefly about more than money and pain. It spoke to the politics of war, race, religion and international diplomacy.

Ian Thomson

The real Dad’s Army was no joke

Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private Godfrey’s genteel sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage for the feared Hitler invasion. ‘The Germans are coming, Miss Godfrey,’ Lance Corporal Jones warns. ‘Yes I know, so many people to tea,’ she chirrups, adding: ‘I think I’d better make some more.’ In contrast to Godfrey, the sitcom’s street-smart spiv Joe Walker could be relied on to come up with the goods. In his rakish trilby indeed he supplies the platoon with contraband cigarettes and is familiar with the legendary backs of lorries what things fall off of.

Honor Clerk

Ali Smith’s How to be Both: warm, funny, subtle, intelligent – and baffling

Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a history that is as gender-balanced as possible it is absolutely necessary to include every woman painter ever heard of, some perfectly worthy of their place, some less so. How the art historian might envy the novelist who at the stroke of a pen can change the sex of a little-known 15th-century painter — Francesco del Cossa, say — from male to female. Make the painter in question a woman disguised as a man, make her story the product of a teenager’s imagination and the trope is not only complete but irresistible. Such is half of the bare skeleton of Ali Smith’s brilliant novel, How to be Both. But which half?

A.N. Wilson

Peter Levi – poet, priest and life-enhancer

Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics expressed their doubts about the old boy. Levi leaned forward in his chair to say, with passionate intensity, ‘But Belloc is worth discussing... because he was... very nearly a poet.’ At the time, I thought this judgment a trifle snooty. Could the words ‘very nearly a poet’ not be applied to Levi himself? In the years since he died, however, revisitations of Levi’s work have convinced me that, uneven and florid as his poetry is, he was very definitely a poet. True, you can hear echoes of his masters in his verse – Valéry, George Seferis, Wallace Stevens.

Fred Johnstone

Like a Prayer

The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like a prayer he keeps his coat on, but he’s going nowhere the place is a circus of contradictions nurses anonymous as nuns push trays of benedictions in all colours and shapes; on the tongue they taste vaguely of a memory of Christ hung for our sins on a mates rates tree you count the minutes until the redemptive delivery kicks in; the bed’s unmade, it reeks of you the unrisen penis and the unrepentant view of a wall dulled in industrial blue paint you’d want the submissiveness of a consumptive saint to take it in your stride, not to feel the nails go in, the flogged skin crack and peel washing your face in vinegar from the tap, scrying unholy metaphor in the mirror, s.

Cressida Connolly

This thriller is as good as anything by Hilary Mantel

A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were plainly visible, I discovered a remarkable fact: if you wear a pink or even a crimson bra underneath a pale shirt, it doesn’t show. For several weeks I passed on this gem of truth to all my women friends. Was my enthusiasm met with relish, gratitude? It was not. They all said the same thing in response: ‘Oh, didn’t you know? I’ve always known that.’ I expected it would be the same in the case of Andrew Taylor. While reading The Silent Boy I was so overexcited by its brilliance that I asked numbers of friends if they’d ever come across Taylor’s work. Surely I was alone in the world in not having heard of this paragon?

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Sorbet with Rimbaud

The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would rather be a child and walk in a crocodile down a suburban path than write poetry, I have heard prose writers say,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, albeit tongue-in-cheek (maybe). Nonetheless, unsurprisingly, these non-poets steal the first chapter of this amuse-bouche of a publication. They are allowed to so that the author, or rather his sources, may describe the rather dull area of London that abuts the eastern end of the Euston Road to the north, and to the south High Holborn. ‘A cold grim house in a cold, grim district,’ wrote Harold Nicolson of Virginia and Vanessa Stephens’s house in Gordon Square.

David Gilmour

A Hello! magazine history of Venice

When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of the western world. The Venetian Republic had lasted over 1,000 years — longer than ancient Rome — without a revolution, a coup d’état or a successful foreign invasion.  Yet after 1797 it was never to be independent again: it was given to Austria, taken back by France, allotted once more to Austria and finally, in 1866, handed over to the young Kingdom of Italy.

Lee Langley

A novel that will make you want to call social services

Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary Hampstead family observed in all its turbulence by the teenage Stibbe, working as the nanny. Written as letters home to her sister, Love, Nina won over fellow writers and critics; reviews spoke of a quirky, life-affirming comic genius. Now she’s written her first novel, and again she has the domestic arena in her sights. Man at the Helm is a wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old narrator. Think What Maisie Knew with laughs and four-letter words, plus a touch of The Young Visiters — baroque formality undermined by an engagingly frank view of sex. Henry James meets Daisy Ashford.

Leanda De-Lisle

Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins

The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What do they believe?’ This is also a good place to begin when writing about the past, not least when your subject is Thomas Cromwell, a key figure in the English Reformation.  But Tracy Borman’s Cromwell doesn’t have beliefs so much as qualities: ones that will appeal to fans of the fictional Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. Borman’s Cromwell likes women, and is nice to the poor. True he fits up Anne Boleyn on treason charges, and has the illiterate nun Elizabeth Barton executed without a trial. But then he is a ‘pragmatist’, and much of his killing, torturing and bullying is ‘self-defence’.

Candy Neubert

80 sq yds per gallon

Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this morning to seal a stump, it scents my hands beyond washing. No warning on the tin, no list of toxins, just a metal lid scummed with rust. Eleven and thruppence. My father walks into his garage and puts it away on the back of the bench, next to the spare.