More from Books

Thursday

Anne de Courcy

The last of the great salonnières

Lady Pamela Berry (Pam to everyone, so that is what I too shall call her) did many things in her life. She was president of the Incorporated Society of Fashion Designers and chair of the British Museum Society; and she conducted a passionate ten-year affair with the goatish Malcolm Muggeridge. But she was best known as a salonnière. In fact she was the last of the great salonnières of the past century. At her house in Barton Street, Westminster, within the sound of the division bell, she gathered parliamentarians, writers, aristocrats and wits, including the Lloyd Georges, Isaiah Berlin and Nancy Mitford. Across her table, where ‘gen con’ (general conversation) was the rule, flew barbs, ferocious arguments, political secrets and top-level gossip.

Travis Elborough

Doctor, Doctor: the genesis of a national folk hero

John Higgs begins his foray into the long-standing BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who with a personal anecdote about going to the pub with Tom Baker, the notoriously bibulous actor who played the part of the Doctor from 1975 to 1981 – still longer than anyone else. For me, as for Higgs, Baker was ‘my doctor’. He was the one I first watched as a child and who instantly comes to mind whenever I think about the character: sonic screwdriver, long stripy scarf, bags of jelly babies and tin dog companion. At the height of his Who fame, Baker turned, as Higgs doesn’t shirk from saying, into a ‘monster’, behaving appallingly on set and off. And, having become typecast by the role, he clearly struggled, mentally and professionally, in its aftermath.

Alex Burghart

Tony Benn, bogeyman to some, beacon of hope and light to many

Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter. This new collection of speeches and articles assembled by his daughter in the centenary of his birth, combines both the ancient history of his left-wingery and the ongoing relevance of his signposts. Melissa Benn’s intention has been to ‘lay to rest a few myths’ about her father and the left and to inspire a new generation of radicals to maintain the barricades.

Alexander Lee

The Da Vinci world of known unknowns

When Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ was sold in 2017 for $450 million it caused a sensation. Dismissed as an anonymous ‘wreck’ just 12 years before, it had become the single most expensive artwork ever to come to auction. Newspapers – goggle-eyed at the price – hailed the discovery of a ‘lost’ Leonardo. The Louvre wanted to make it the centrepiece of a major exhibition. There was even talk of showing it alongside the Mona Lisa. It seemed almost too good to be true. And it was. Doubts were soon raised about the painting’s attribution. Amid a storm of controversy, it was quietly whisked away to a secret location. It hasn’t been seen since. The ‘Salvator Mundi’ is in many ways a parable of our obsession with Leonardo.

Boyd Tonkin

Murder she imagined: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami reviewed

‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ wrote W.B. Yeats. In the near-future America imagined by Laila Lalami, culpability starts there, too. Charged with the prevention of potential crimes, the Risk Assessment Administration monitors not just every aspect of citizens’ behaviour but, via tiny ‘neuroprosthetics’, the hidden drives revealed in sleep. As an RAA agent insists: ‘Every murder starts with a fantasy.’ If those nocturnal fantasies grow too ‘troublesome’, and your personal ‘risk score’ edges above the key threshold of 500, prepare for at least 21 days of ‘forensic observation’ as an inmate of a ‘retention’ centre. Not quite prison, ‘it’s not not a prison’ either: instead, a ‘kind of a grey area’.

Anthony Cummins

Satire and settled scores: Universality by Natasha Brown reviewed

In 2023 Natasha Brown published an article taking the reader behind the scenes of two interviews that she had given to newspapers in Australia and Spain while promoting her debut novel, Assembly. The point was to expose sleight of hand in the resulting write-ups, to say nothing of shabby conduct more generally. One interviewer, eager for her ‘to admit that I was influenced by two television shows which aired after my novel went to print’, asked, a propos of nothing, if she had a boyfriend. ‘It’s not clear whether this question came from the creased printout he regularly consults,’ wrote Brown, acidly.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

A novel in disguise: Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser, reviewed

Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who one presses upon intelligent acquaintances and whose books reward rereading. One of her regular subjects – she is a novelist of bookish, intelligent lives – is the inability of the Australian intelligentsia ever to read an Australian novel. As the author of The Life to Come, perhaps the best Australian novel since Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, she does well to present this worrying disengagement with amusement.

Toby Young

Why, at 75, does Graydon Carter still feel the need to impress?

When I started working for Vanity Fair in 1995 I remember coming into the office one morning to discover that most of the senior editorial staff had disappeared. They weren’t at their desks, and phone calls went unreturned. Was this a Jewish holiday? It turned out to be the day Graydon Carter had set aside to write the ‘Editor’s Letter’, a monthly column at the beginning of the magazine signed by him but which he almost always asked one of his staff to write at the last minute. None of them wanted to be the poor schmuck saddled with the task. The reason I mention this is because the previous book Carter ‘wrote’, a series of gripes about the George W. Bush administration, was a loosely stitched together collection of those letters.

Christian House

Heroes of the Norwegian resistance

Reading Robert Ferguson’s fascinating history of the experiences of the Norwegians during the five years of German occupation between 1940 and 1945 – a collage of resistance, collaboration and the grey areas in between – I was reminded of the remarks of two Norwegian nonagenarians. In 2011, I interviewed Gunnar Sonsteby, a hero of Norway’s resistance movement, for The Spectator. The country’s most decorated man, Sonsteby told me that he was spurred to acts of sabotage and the ‘liquidation’ of collaborators by sheer outrage at the German presence. Conversely, earlier this year, I wrote the obituary of Olav Thon, the owner of a chain of supermarkets and hotels and one of the richest men in Norway. Thon had been criticised for trading in furs with the occupying forces.

Dylan Neri

A meditation on the beauty of carbon

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One in which a magazine’s advice columnist ‘the Guru Brahmin’ (in fact ‘two gloomy men and a bright young secretary’) receives yet another letter from a compulsive nail-biter: ‘What did we advise her last time?’ Mr Slump, the chain-smoking drunk, asks. ‘Meditation on the Beautiful.’ ‘Well, tell her to go on meditating.’ The opening of Paul Hawken’s Carbon gives the impression that it was dictated by the gloomy Mr Slump in response to a climate activist asking what he should think about the destruction of the planet. Tell him that ‘to better understand the riddles and luminosity of life’ he must ‘go far upstream, and look at the flow of life through the lens of carbon’.

Chloë Ashby

Deep mysteries: Twist, by Colum McCann, reviewed

On the first page of Colum McCann’s compelling novel Twist we meet the two leads: John A. Conway, who has disappeared, and Anthony Fennell, who’s trying to tell his story. They first met when Fennell, an Irish journalist, struggling novelist and occasional playwright, was commissioned by an online magazine to write about the fragile fibre-optic cables that carry information around the world on the ocean floor. Conway, also Irish, an engineer and intrepid freediver, was in joint command of the Georges Lecointe, a ship that spends months at sea repairing the cables when they break. In January 2019 this happened in three places. Fennell hitched a lift with Conway when the ship set sail –and Conway never came back.

Tuesday

David Honigmann

Bringing modernism to the masses in 20th-century Britain

The second world war was won in the cafés of central Europe – the intellectual milieu that produced Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, and before them Albert Einstein. But even though America was an alluring destination, many of the 1930s escapees from Nazism ended up in Britain. There were scientists in their number, too, but Owen Hatherley concentrates on the newcomers’ effect on how post-war Britain looked. He examines their role in photography and film; in the design of printed books; in art, especially public art; and in architecture and town planning. Perry Anderson’s 1968 essay ‘Components of the National Character’ was dismissive of the impact of the diaspora.

Michael Arditti

Escape into fantasy: Stories of Ireland, by Brian Friel, reviewed

Before Brian Friel earned renown as a dramatist, he wrote short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. These were later published in two collections, A Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). Now ten of the stories, selected by Friel before his death in 2015, along with three chosen by his widow, have been brought together in Stories of Ireland. These are deeply rooted in the counties of Tyrone and Donegal. Friel blends actual locations with fictional ones, such as Ballybeg, the setting for several of his plays, and the splendidly named Mullaghduff. They are home to tightly knit rural communities, where an old woman ventures no further than 52 miles in her life, a boy, who has never seen a ‘coloured’ man, asks ‘Will he attack us?

Nick Spencer

The story of Noah’s flood will never go out of fashion

‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river. As Philip C. Almond shows in this impressively erudite book, the tale courses through two millennia of western thought with similar power. The story, found early in the book of Genesis, lurks in the half-remembered shadows of our biblically illiterate age. Fed up with human wickedness, God promises to wash everything away in a universal flood.

Andy Miller

Across the universe – John and Paul are in each other’s songs forever

The world’s love affair with the Beatles began, arguably, with the release in October 1962 of the group’s first single ‘Love Me Do’, full-blown Beatlemania following hard on its Cuban heels. Will we still need them, will we still feed them, when they’re 64? The answer appears to be a resounding and remunerative yes. Beatlemania is for life, not just for Christmas. Beatles books increasingly obtain to the condition of poetry, in that more people want to write them than read them. Yet still they keep appearing in bookshops. And every time a new volume about the group is published – like all those of sound mind, I have loved their music, films and minutiae since childhood – I ask myself: what is different about this one? Will it be in the style or the substance?

Tuesday

Alice Jolly

Fight or flight?: 33 Place Brugmann, by Alice Austen, reviewed

In May 1940, as the Nazis invade Belgium, the residents of a sedate apartment block in Place Brugmann, Brussels, wake to find that their longtime neighbours, the Raphaëls, have disappeared. Alice Austen uses this moment as the starting point for her subtle debut novel about how a diverse group of Belgians react to the Nazi occupation. She tells her story in snapshots, writing in the multiple first-person voices of those who remain at 33 Place Brugmann and those who flee. Charlotte is a young artist who may not see colours, but has ‘vision’. Miss Hobert is a gossip with ‘a rabid imagination’. The courageous and pragmatic Colonel Warlemont resists the occupation with the assistance of his dog Zipper.

Olivia Potts

Why are we routinely buying disgusting bread in Britain?

‘Bread is simple. Or is it?’ That is the question David Wright poses about a keystone food that spans the globe and the whole of history. Breaking Bread examines the science behind the ur-loaf, the development of the Chorleywood method, the economics of selling the stuff, the role that it has played in religion and politics – and what its future might look like. The author is a third-generation baker. After a childhood spent in the Suffolk bakery his father owned and ran (Wright’s birth was announced in the bakery shop window: ‘I smelled bread, played with the dough, tasted it even before I have memory’), he left it all behind for university and a career in the theatre. But he returned to the family business in 2012 to try to save it as it floundered financially.

Michela Wrong

The danger of becoming a ‘professional survivor’

It was a relatively minor episode in a period marked by the killing of two African presidents, months of massacres in churches, schools and sports stadiums, a biblical exodus by much of the Hutu population, a cholera outbreak in refugee camps established in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a rebel takeover of the country. But it mattered a great deal to Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, the author of this book, as she was one of the children evacuated in June 1994. At 15, she did not meet the criteria stipulated by the convoy’s organisers, so she and her mother hid under a tarpaulin sat upon by the smaller children as the trucks worked their painstaking way through a series of road blocks manned by Hutu militiamen hungry for fresh victims.

Mike Jakeman

The sickness at the heart of boxing

There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for 30 years. But when he reimmerses himself in boxing he does not like what he sees. He finds a sport where bouts are controlled by gangsters; where famous boxers dope and lie about it; where fights still have inadequate safety protocols; and where the centre of power has shifted from Las Vegas to Riyadh, lured by Mohammed bin Salman’s money. Each of these trends, McRae believes, knits boxing and death closer together. ‘I want boxing to sweep me away from real life,’ he confesses.

Sara Wheeler

Who will care for the carers themselves?

When her brother Lionel was born in 1949, ‘the concept of neurodiversity didn’t exist’, writes Caroline Elton. The subtitle of her profoundly moving memoir, ‘A Portrait of My Autistic Brother’, is misleading. The book is really about the experience of being the sibling of a person who is not like you. Lionel was nine years Elton’s senior, so she draws on their mother’s testimony to relate his infancy and childhood, turning to her own recollections for the later years. He learnt to read before he could speak, played the piano faultlessly by ear (his mother taught him), and could tell you what day of the week a date would fall on in any year.