More from Books

Thursday

Aaron Ross

What are the Chinese up to in Africa?

Few subjects generate as much angst, or puzzlement, among Western policymakers in Africa as China’s presence on the continent. In his new book, China’s Second Continent, the American journalist Howard French recalls meeting US officials in Mali to sound them out on the matter. Instead, he finds himself barraged by questions. ‘It would really be useful for us to know what the Chinese are up to,’ one American official tells him. ‘So far we’ve been limited to speaking with them through translators. We’ve got very little idea about any of this.’ Grasping the range and scale of China’s activities in Africa is indeed a tall order. Commercial deals are cloaked in secrecy. Immigration statistics from African countries are poor.

Thursday

William Leith

Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of course, was Levitt. Dubner made a suggestion: why not write a book together, based on Levitt’s work?

A.N. Wilson

A divine guide to Dante

Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But,  like Dante himself, at large in the frightening wood, you need a companion for the journey, and it is difficult to imagine one more enlightening than Prue Shaw. The Emeritus Reader in Italian at the University of London, she has been lighting up the genius of Dante for us all her professional life, especially his politics. But this book is just as accessible to a general reader as it would be a source of wonder and envy to scholars. It is mainly concerned with the Comedy, but it expounds much of Dante’s other work.

Andrew Taylor

Maigret’s new clothes – this month’s best new crime novel, published 1931

The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the French by Sam Taylor; MacLehose, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16). More than two million copies have already been sold. Its author, Jöel Dicker, is apparently ‘Switzerland’s coolest export since Roger Federer’.The novel, which is billed as a literary thriller, has been garlanded with ecstatic reviews and prizes on the continent. It’s the story of a young, successful but blocked writer who tries to re-energise his muse by visiting Harry Quebert, the Great American Novelist who put him on the road to fame. Harry lives in a beachside house in Maine.

Ben Hamilton

J.K. Rowling is just too nice – and too lucky – to satirise publishing

J.K. Rowling’s second novel under the Robert Galbraith moniker is a whodunit set in the publishing industry. This isn’t a rare set-up for crime fiction. Authors, no matter how grungy and streetwise they pretend to be, spend most of their time doing dreary things with people they dislike in the name of selling books. They are itching to put their agents, publishers and fellow authors on the page so that they can slay them. Thing is, if you’re the most famous author in the world, bearing a grudge against publishing might look a bit ungrateful. Rowling realises this and adjusts her approach accordingly. The Silkworm is a soft, toothless, inept novel with a kind heart. Our private eye Cormoran Strike is back.

Alan Judd

The cold, remote plateau of Vichy France where good was done

It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome or too familiar, or because — in Solzhenitzyn’s memorable phrase — you need only a mouthful of seawater to know the taste of the ocean. No: my reluctance to contemplate that world, even as a distant spectator, is because it was so awful and the detail so compelling that I’ll be unable to put the book down. It will echo inside my skull for as long as I inhabit one. So it is with this vivid account by Caroline Moorehead of remote mountain villagers high up in France’s Massif Central during the second world war.

Tessa Lang

Spoken For

What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without hands down a tree-lined road, weaving in and out of shadow. What I count as treasure is a robin’s nest neatly cached in a corner of my windowbox, a tight squirm of five hatchlings, mum cheeping menaces nearby. What I long for is more than a memory of sharing a skiff tied out of river drift, feeding Pimm’s salad from an   upturned cup to pairs of paddling ducks, with one eye on the fruit and one on   each other.

Ian Thomson

Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’

A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a difficult and withdrawn woman, her life in the Caribbean (apart from the few details she cared to volunteer) could only be guessed at. The Errol Flynn estate, an expanse of ranchland outside Port Antonio, was grazed by tired-looking cattle. ‘Haven’t we met before?’ Wymore said to me as I walked into her office after knocking. ‘You remind me of someone I know.’ I took in the riding crops and spurs hanging on the wall. After eight years of marriage, in 1958 Wymore had divorced Flynn, who died the following year at the age of 50 having more or less boozed himself into the grave.

Jeremy Treglown

The gentle intoxications of Laurie Lee

He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider with Rosie; in the love of some passionate, clever women, whose guidance and support get rather less than their due in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning; and in having survived the Spanish civil war — the subject of A Moment of War — despite seeing action (though on his part this involved more seeing than action) in the terrible last battle of Teruel, and being imprisoned three times as a suspected spy. Behind and beyond all that, he was lucky in his gifts: charm, which included a knack for emotional escapology; artistic skill — he drew, painted and was an agile violinist; and above all verbal fluency.

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon

Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they blend two elements of the genre that are rarely seen together. First, they are grounded in a wholly plausible version of the intelligence community, where decisions evolve in Whitehall committee rooms and the wiles of politicians and bureaucrats are just as important as the machinations of moles. Secondly, their central characters often recall an older tradition of gentlemen patriots that goes back to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. The combination shouldn’t work but in Judd’s novels it does. These elements meet in the character of Charles Thoroughgood, who has already appeared in three earlier books, first as a soldier and later as an MI6 officer.

Caroline Moorehead

The Spanish Civil War hotel that Capa, Hemingway and Gelhorn called home

In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush furnishings, went up on Madrid’s Gran Via. Along with the Ritz in Paris, certainly the most celebrated hotel in the literary world, the Florida became, during the two-year battle for the capital waged between Franco’s nationalists and the republican forces, the meeting place for an eccentric, glamorous and self-important assortment of war tourists, zealots, opportunists, romantics, dreamers, buccaneers and writers who had come to observe the fighting, file dispatches of variable truthfulness and proclaim loyalty to the republic.

James Mcnamara

The Australian literary icon who fooled her family

There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western Australia, is one of them. As an undergraduate, I’d pitch up there for work on Saturday mornings with as much song in the heart as a hangover allowed. Because for me the Lane wasn’t just a shop, it was a salon. The young staff, all writers, were encouraged (and fed, when cash was scarce) by the kind owners. Debates sparked between the shelves. And great Australian novelists came in to buy the books. The late Elizabeth Jolley was one of these. She must have been 80 when I last saw her, bird-thin with fiery eyes. Whenever she walked down the stairs, an awed hush descended.

Ted Hodgkinson

The man who loathed emoticons – especially :)) as it reminded him of his double chin

Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky recesses of his patients’ mouths. Despite encouraging them to floss, he is himself a man of curiously ingrained habits. Averse to the digital age and oddly superstitious, he stockpiles VHS recorders and watches the Boston Red Sox with a plate of bland chicken and rice, always careful to avert his eyes from the sixth innings. His small Park Avenue staff implore him to get with the times and develop a website for the practice; but Paul is a Luddite with no interest in kowtowing to a culture of smartphones and over-sharing. So when a well-produced website mysteriously appears and tweets under his name, he is understandably perturbed.

Matthew Sweeney

Ice Sculpture

If I begged you to, would you hitchhike to the ice-sculpture factory, where the drunken cow was just presented, and the sleeping horse was celebrated? Ah, those caught animals, where else would they be paraded? I visualise you sitting on a black camel, wearing a red fedora, and a maroon, velvet dress. It would be sunset, rosé wine would be flowing, the monkey would be dancing to zither music. I picture you laughing, then directing the singing to include a hymn to a snail, that small fellow who brings his home with him — easily shown in ice. And maybe an encore to a frog who sits on a plate, waiting to dance.

Michael Bywater

Stephen King – return of the great storyteller

Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ — a phrase so closely approaching 100 per cent semantic redundancy (a non-riveting thriller? A thriller entirely free of suspense?) that it tells us precisely nothing. All it does is declare that the reader will keep turning the pages. Which we will. That’s what King makes us do. Except Mr Mercedes isn’t, on the surface, a thriller; and you can bet that the consensus will be that King is writing what will be called ‘off-piste’. It’s a slender book, by his standards — only 400 pages — you can get it in your briefcase. There’s nothing particularly weird.

John McEwen

No special pleading needed for this disabled Dutch master

To discover an ‘unknown’ is the dream of anyone connected with the arts and in Johannes Thopas (c.1626-1688/95) we have just that. This book catalogues the exhibition now transfering from Aachen to the Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam (12 July–5 October). The curator is Rudi Ekkart, who discovered Thopas’s meticulous lead-pencil (plumbago) drawings on parchment as an art-history student in the early 1970s, when he had unlimited access to the University of Leiden’s famous drawing collection. After that he kept a record of everything to do with the artist, which now finds formal acknowledgment. Other recognised Dutch artists who were deaf and dumb have shown that a normal life could be profitably pursued.

Matthew Walther

Hillary Clinton’s autobiography seems destined to join her husband’s – in a bin marked ‘Free’

Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists are terrible people. Leibovich’s book exemplified a trend among self-described Beltway insiders who decry as venial and insipid the trivialities they spend their lives reporting. Sounds a bit precious, I know, not to mention suicidal. But it’s supposed to be waggish and endearing and ironical. The latest victim of this coprophagic tendency is Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton’s third book. Barely a week after its publication, with over a million copies in print, it has already been written off by the hacks who spent months doing potted F.R.

Melanie McDonagh

Recipe for a modern baker: first, move to Hoxton

If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very evening — and you’ve got to watch it in London, where people are inclined to draw themselves up to their full height, even by email, to ask what sort of sad case you think they are to imagine they’re free right now as opposed to in six weeks’ time — well, I’d reach for the Morito cookbook (Ebury, £26, Spectator Bookshop, £20).

Ian Thomson

The punk who inspired a generation of British woman to pick up a guitar

Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album, Cut, released in 1979, combined jangly Captain Beefheart-style guitarwork with reggae rhythms and sardonic social commentary. Ariane ‘Ari Up’ Forster, the vocalist, added an element of wild-child abandon to Tessa Pollitt’s infectiously heavy bass lines. The album is a masterpiece. Albertine’s memoir takes its title from her mother’s routine complaint to her: ‘Clothes, clothes, clothes, music, music, music, boys, boys, boys — that’s all you ever think about!’ Albertine came to Britain from her native Australia in 1958, aged four.

Connie Bensley

The breasts that launched Les Fleurs du Mal

This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with his Haiti-born mistress, his Black Venus, Jeanne Duval. We first see him in 1842, a young poet of 20, making his dandyish way through the slums of Paris to meet his friends at a cabaret theatre for an evening of wine and hashish. Here he will encounter for the first time his future muse. She is voluptuous, in a long red dress, singing risqué songs. In no time he is unlacing her boots and preparing to squander the legacy which he is shortly expecting. However, there are, as the author shows us, three people in this relationship, and the third one is Baudelaire’s mother.