More from Books

Thursday

Justin Cartwright

The bonkers (and not-so-bonkers) theories of what the pre-historic people of Cornwall believed

Philip Marsden’s book is about place. He makes a distinction between place and space. In his mind ‘place’ is something resonant, evoking a connection with the land and its meaning. Marsden is obsessed with pre-history and the beliefs and practices of the earliest inhabitants of Cornwall. He cites with approval someone’s judgment that written history is a palimpsest and he is demonstrably eager to see what was written over. Although his area of special interest is Cornwall, he describes expeditions to other European countries in search of a kind of kinship of belief and practice among them.

Tom Hodgkinson

Tolstoy’s favourite novel is a guide to being idle

Oblomov, first published in 1859, is the charming tale of a lazy but lovable aristocrat in 19th-century Russia. The novel’s eponymous hero cannot see the point of doing anything at all, and spends his time lying in bed or wandering around his St Petersburg flat in his beloved oriental dressing gown, bickering about the dusting with his manservant. The newspaper on the desk is a year old; flies buzz from the inkwell. Oblomov broods; he worries; he thinks. The book’s author, Ivan Goncharov, is perhaps little-known now, but in its time Oblomov was hugely popular in Russia. Tolstoy, that venerable, saintly moralist, was deeply in love with it, writing: ‘Oblomov is a truly great work, the likes of which one has not seen for a long, long time.

Justin Marozzi

Is it boring being the god of the sea?

Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink of an eye, to address the great immortal deities? The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, now entering his ninth decade and never knowingly lacking in chutzpah, is not one to be deterred by such considerations. Nooteboom is an immensely civilised and civilising writer, rich in curiosity and armed with a dazzling literary style. Those who already know his writing will not be surprised to discover that on the page, if not in the briny, he is more than a match for the trident-bearing earth-shaker, god of the sea.

Richard Davenporthines

How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions

There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is the history of European ultra-reactionary repression and police espionage in the half-century after the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789-93. The instability of popular opinion, the destructiveness of angry, ignorant populism and the wretchedness of timid, suppliant leadership are laid bare by him. Yet his deadliest strictures are against the rigid, fear-driven, authoritarian reaction of the propertied classes, which he demonstrates was lethally counter-productive as well as often absurd.

Elaine Feinstein

The Irony of Wislava Szymborska

In London, I remember the indignation.    Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we loved    – dissident, charismatic, much translated – not some woman we had barely heard of? I thought Polish poems should resemble films of Wajda,    charged with the electricity of war. Szymborska’s poetry held no such glamour.    She had not played a part in the Resistance. The poems were almost English in their texture, a bit like Larkin – though serene    where he was glum – never expecting to fill a football stadium.    Her voice was quieter than Cassandra’s – but equally we did not listen to her.

James Walton

From working-class heroes to Disney World mascots: the sad fate of the Chilean miners

On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour shift. They came out again 69 days later, to be greeted by the country’s president in front of a worldwide TV audience of around 1.2 billion. A group of workers who, in many cases, had never left the local area in their lives were now global heroes. At the time, it was embarrassingly easy to see their rescue as simply the sort of good news that makes us all aware of our shared humanity. Héctor Tobar’s book, though, is a sharp reminder that the truth was a lot more complicated — and sombre — than that. As their shift started, many of the men were already worried by the rumbling sounds coming from the mine, but were ordered to carry on anyway. Then, at around 2 p.m.

Thursday

James Howardjohnston

The Guru of Late Antiquity speaks again

Nearly 50 years ago we made our way into an inner place, a semi-subterranean room, in a peculiar college. A smallish, round-faced man was beginning to give tongue. Each week he drew multi-coloured patterns in the air, words flitting about like luminous bats in a night sky. We sat bewitched. There was suspense too, since from time to time a stammer threatened to stop all speech. He took us back to a world far removed from our own — there was more than a touch of Pullman magic as he made an incision and we crossed into his world. First we found ourselves in the Middle East in an era of war on fronts stretching from the Red Sea to the Caucasus. Key characteristics of the two great powers involved, Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, were identified.

Andrew Taylor

Hercule Poirot returns – and yes, he’s as irritating as ever

First, a confession. I have never cared much for Hercule Poirot. In this I am not alone, for his creator felt much the same way, describing him as a ‘detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’, albeit a creep with remarkable commercial staying power. Fortunately, my prejudice doesn’t affect enjoyment of the brilliantly constructed plots and the unobtrusively effective storytelling. But I find it far easier to warm to Miss Marple. Poirot is, after Sherlock Holmes, the most celebrated fictional detective in the world. It was only a matter of time before the Agatha Christie estate allowed him to be brought back to life. Continuations have become big business in recent years — marriages of convenience between a prominent, dead author and a well-established living one.

Amanda Craig

James Ellroy’s latest attempt to unseat the Great American Novel

Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that, as P.D. James observed, it seems stretching a definition to place both groups in the same category. Over here we have, or used to have, a comforting story concerned with restoring order to the mythical village of Mayhem Parva; across the Atlantic, the detective novel is expected to tackle the rotten, usually urban, underbelly of the American Dream. Violent, cynical and disquieting, it has also become a significant challenge to the more refined attempts at the Great American Novel. James Ellroy’s detectives are not only inured to confronting vice but are often the perpetrators of it too.

Ian Thomson

Wave goodbye to the weight-gaining, drunk-driving Inspector Wallander

Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was staying. A waitress came up to our table. ‘I think, Belinda,’ Mankell said to her suavely, ‘that I would like a glass or two of your red wine!’ Momentarily confused, Belinda asked Mankell to repeat his order. After she had gone, Mankell commented peevishly to me: ‘What’s the matter with her? Was there anybody at home? Hello?’ Clearly, the hoped-for flirtation with Belinda had not come off. More than just the top button of Mankell’s black shirt was undone. Mankell could not have imagined how successful the Inspector Wallander mysteries would be when, 23 years ago, he published the first in the series.

Matthew Walther

Secretive, arrogant and reckless: the young T.E. Lawrence began life as he meant to go on

The Lawrence books are piling up, aren’t they? I don’t mean the author of The Rainbow, though as I write this the eremites at Cambridge are plugging away at a definitive edition of his works. (Their most recent yield, the Poems in two volumes, runs to over 1,400 pages and costs £130.) The English leader of the Arab Revolt, who also went professionally by his initials and shared the other Lawrence’s penchant for travel, has fewer admirers in the academy but an uncanny ability to move copies. A few years ago there was a hulking 800-plus-page biography, and since then everything from a brilliant study of Lawrence’s relationship with the intelligence community to an unwieldy life of Faisal — who, alas, didn’t look much like Alec Guinness — have crossed reviewers’ desk.

David Crane

Narrative history at its best – and bloodiest

Anyone thinking of bringing out a book on Waterloo at the moment must be very confident, very brave or just plain daft. Over the last month there have been at least five new books on the battle, and so unless a writer is in a position to bring the equivalent of whole divisions of loyal Sharpe readers with him, he’d better have some new line to take. Nick Foulkes showed how it might be done with his terrifically entertaining Dancing into Battle, and Paul O’Keeffe has taken it a step further by quite simply giving the battle a miss. From the opening pages one is always aware that something pretty major is happening a mile or two over the next hill.

Zenga Longmore

Imagine Eastenders directed by David Lynch

Ghostly doings are afoot in Edwardian London. Choking fog rolls over the treacle- black Thames. Braziers cast eerie shadows in grimy alleyways. Two sinister doctors hunch beside a dying fire in the appropriately-named Printer’s Devil Court, ‘a dark house, with steep, narrow stairs’. Having supped on a hearty repast of lamb stew and treacle pudding, the ‘shadowy’ Dr Walter reveals his dastardly scheme. ‘We are proposing... to bring the dead back to life.’ Our hero young Dr Meredith is appalled. This is diabolical! Derivative of Frankenstein! Not quite. The experiment results in a phantom rather than a monster. No gothic element is spared in this tale. The author has surpassed herself.

Anthony Cummins

A jaunty romp of rape and pillage through the 16th century

The Brethren, by Robert Merle, who died at the age of 95 ten years ago, was originally published in 1977, the first in a sequence of historical novels that sold millions in their native France but have gone untranslated until now. Set in a plague-ridden, conflict-ravaged 16th century, rife with beheadings, hangings, abductions and rape, it’s a visceral yet strangely jaunty chronicle of provincial life after the Reformation. The title refers to a partnership between war veterans Jean de Siorac and Jean de Sauveterre. One is a libidinous medical graduate, the other a more dour Protestant with a dim view of his pal’s bastard-fathering ways. Together they hang up their swords and use their accumulated plunder to hoover up land in southwest France and build a dynasty.

Joanna Kavenna

Flawed, unproductive and heroic: the real Ernest Shackleton

Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and, besides, the urge to dwell on a frozen ocean or forbidding glacier is maverick in itself. In the so-called Heroic Age (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) both Poles remained ‘unconquered’ and the margin between glory and opprobrium was slender. Frederick Cook and Robert Peary claimed that they reached the North Pole in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Their accounts were later discredited. When Roald Amundsen beat Captain Robert Scott to the South Pole in 1911, he was accused (unfairly) of concealing his plans and was summarily shunned by the British establishment. Scott meanwhile forced his expedition on, but in doing so condemned it to disaster.

Mark Mason

A compendium to match Radio 4: boring, but somehow gripping

When you think about it, Radio 4 is mostly a pile of old toss. Money Box qualifies as an anaesthetic, the dramas couldn’t act their way to the nearest street corner and Sheila Dillon from The Food Programme just needs a slap. That’s even before we reach the five most depressing words in the English language: ‘And now, You and Yours.’ Yet we love it. The bits of the station’s output we do like, we worship. Forget Magna Carta and the NHS, when the barricades go up then I, along with all the other Four Whores, will be fighting myself to a bloody stump in defence of Corrie Corfield and Today. This book, a lists-and-break-out-boxes tribute to the station, is very like Radio 4 itself: much of it I found boring, yet I couldn’t resist sticking with it.

John McEwen

To be astonished by nature, look no further than Claxton

Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People, was a tour de force, taking the birds of the entire world as its subject. Craig Brown described it as ‘the sort of masterpiece that comes along only once or twice a decade’. Expectations could not be higher. Claxton is a selection from his journalism for the Guardian and other publications, written since he moved to Claxton village, southeast of Norwich, 12 years ago. The 140 entries are arranged in 12 chronological chapters to form a naturalist’s journal of a Claxton year. Many have been radically revised so that of his eight books this ‘has taken the longest to write’.

Sydney Giffard

History Parade

We left the Scout hut shortly after dark, to ambush regulars acting as invaders. Later, there was to be a demonstration of the use of a primitive stun grenade, designed dramatically to improve morale in the under-gunned Home Guard. A Dunkirk veteran CSM from Caterham had been driven down in a staff car to show us the correct application of this novel weapon, bakelite casing, with one small metal pin. After patrolling in the silent dark, failing to intercept our good-humoured opponents, we assembled among the prostrate sarsen stones beyond the Lacket, for a quiet smoke. Then we fell in to watch the CSM, who threw the stun grenade, followed it in and, as it exploded, fell, killed by the pin. He lay there, still, between two sarsen stones. It was absolutely stunning. No one spoke.

Rachel Redford

An epic performance that brings a lost novelist back to life

Hugh Walpole, now almost forgotten, was a literary giant. Descended from the younger brother of the 18th-century prime minister Robert Walpole, he was a prodigiously fast writer who seldom revised his work, producing at least a book a year between 1909 and his death in 1941. But who reads him these days? His books sold in vast numbers, including in America, where on his lecture tours in the 1920s he was more lionised than Dickens had been 80 years earlier. With his accumulated wealth he became a discerning art collector and left a fabulous legacy of paintings to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam.

Thursday

Rory Dunlop

David Nicholls’ Us: Alan Partridge’s Grand Tour

Us, David Nicholls’s first novel since the hugely successful One Day, is about a couple who have been married for 20 years. Douglas Petersen, the anally retentive middle-aged narrator, never feels like an equal to Connie, his attractive and witty wife. On the opening page, Connie tells him that she thinks she wants to leave him when their son Albie goes off to university. But first they are to take a long-planned family holiday — a Grand Tour of the great cities of Europe. Douglas sees this as his last chance to save his marriage, and also to rebuild his broken relationship with Albie. In an introduction, Nicholls explains that the inspiration for the book came when he was travelling round continental Europe publicising One Day.