More from Books

Tuesday

Tibor Fischer

Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers

I have to be honest: I’ve never been much concerned with what happened in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387. I suspect that may even be true for many Lithuanians. In Silence of the Gods, Francis Young pinpoints this year – of the conversion of the duchy to Christianity – as the official triumph of Christianity in Europe over paganism and idolatry. But he then goes on to examine the debris – and the survivors of paganism and their traditions in the northern regions of Europe. The first difficulty is defining and identifying paganism. The book is published by Cambridge University Press, so there is an unmistakably academic, seminar-ready, conference-hardened edge to the text.

Diana Hendry

Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed

As a poet, Ocean Vuong has won every prize going. Now here’s The Emperor of Gladness, his second novel. His first, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a coming-of-age story, is currently being filmed. This latest oneis wild, unwieldy and too long. It is fiction/autofiction mixed with 19th- and 20th-century warfare, plus contemporary angst and craziness. It has one preposterous scene that you wish were true, and never has a title been so misleading. It’s a book of moral, imaginative ideas with gripping stories, wonderful characters and writing that’s poetic and witty. I loved it. It opens with an introduction to the rural town of East Gladness, Connecticut, its citizens ‘not ambivalent to hope’.

Simon Heffer

Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history

Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I. His book – a guide to the nature of British intellectual curiosity since the mid-16th century – begins there, just as England had undergone a liberation from a dominant European authority: the shaking off of the influence of the Roman Catholic church and the advent of the Reformation, and the new opportunities that offered for the people. He describes how a culture based largely on poetry and on the court of Elizabeth then redirected the prevailing intellectual forces of the time.

Susie Mesure

The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

Sarah Moss is a prolific and vital novelist whose books encompass an array of subjects from Victorian social reform and 19th-century Japan to broken Brexit Britain and eating disorders. She combines teaching at University College, Dublin with writing in real time: The Fell, set during the second lockdown, came out in the summer of 2021, while My Good Bright Wolf, an experimental memoir about her anorexic breakdown in late 2020, was published last year. A forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Summerwater, which explored national identity and isolation against the backdrop of a soggy Scottish holiday park, may catapult her into the sort of gold-foil territory enjoyed by Maggie O’Farrell or Ali Smith. If not, then perhaps Ripeness, her ninth novel, will.

Marcus Berkmann

The titans who shaped Test cricket

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major’s weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before I would willingly start another. But Wigmore has written a splendid, comprehensive book full of good stories and droll asides.

Owen Matthews

Who started the Cold War?

Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the ‘valiant Russians’ who had fought alongside Britain and America had ‘transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation’. So begins Vladislav Zubok’s thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides’s formulation – are now very contemporary questions. ‘The world has become perilous again,’ writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West: Diplomacy ceases to work; treaties are broken. International institutions, courts and norms cannot prevent conflicts.

Sarah Moorhouse

The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability

As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens’s essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the ‘stunning complexity’ of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, ‘we are always living on the verge of catastrophe’.

Philip Hensher

A.C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists

All great diarists have something intensely silly about them: Boswell’s and Pepys’s periodic bursts of lechery and panic; Chips Channon’s unrealistic dreams of political greatness leavened with breathless excitement over royal dukes and handsome boys; Alan Clark’s fits of romantic, almost Jacobite, dreaming; James Lees-Milne’s absurd flights of rage. I dare say the mania that drove the Duc de Saint-Simon in his demented campaign against Louis XIV’s attempts to create a place in court hierarchy for his bastards seemed ridiculous to his more sober contemporaries. Often the silliness comes from a mad overestimation of the writer’s ability. There is no more fascinating diary than Benjamin Haydon’s. He was an indifferent painter who never achieved the success he dreamt of.

Thursday

Rupert Shortt

Church teaching on homosexuality can be revised

Studies of Christianity’s problems and prospects often entail a distinction between the singer and the song. At an institutional level, the world’s largest faith is in deep trouble throughout much of western Europe – and increasingly in North America, too. Widely rehearsed elsewhere, the reasons for this steep decline include the spread of individualism along with an allied flouting of deference, mistrust of agencies said to lie beyond the tangible, and self-inflicted wounds such as the abuse crisis. Yet many who mourn the spread of secularisation remind us that for all its flaws, the Church has a good story to tell overall. How so? Two answers stand out. First, Christian outreach still forms the largest single source of social capital on Earth.

Andrew Rosenheim

A searching question: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige, reviewed

The Appalachian Trail is America’s secular version of the Camino de Santiago but more than twice as long. In Amity Gaige’s Heartwood, Valerie Gillis is a 42-year-old nurse and experienced trail-walker who nonetheless vanishes one day in the northern stretch, in Maine, the wildest of the New England states. Heading the search for her is Beverly Miller, a senior game warden, who stands out among her colleagues because she is 6ft, female and not a native Mainer. As the days go by, and despite the impressive number of volunteers looking for Gillis, the chances of finding her alive diminish. Miller, a veteran of similar searches, has to continue to motivate her teams, even as her own appraisal of the situation grows gloomy.

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

Nunc est bibendum – to Horace, the lusty rebel

Horace suffers from a reputation as an old man’s poet. Classicists often joke that Catullus and Martial are for the young, and Horace for those of a certain vintage – wine being a favourite Horatian theme. Many lose their thirst for his Odes at school, only to realise their brilliance decades later. Classroom Horace is just a bit too bombastic and patriotic to be cool. The Horace of Peter Stothard’s beautifully written new biography surprises with his sexiness. Not many pages in we find him poring over scurrilous papyri in the libraries of Athens. A verse by the Archaic-era poet Archilochus has caught his eye. It describes a woman with a man, ‘head-down, as she did her work like a Thracian drinking beer through a straw’. Golly.

George Cochrane

An ill wind: Poppyland, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed

As the term refers to the stretch of the north Norfolk coastline between Sheringham and Mundesley, only one of the stories in D.J. Taylor’s engrossing new collection strictly takes place in ‘Poppyland’. However, the others seldom stray far. In ‘At Mr McAllister’s’, one of two stories set in and around Norwich market, the feckless employee of a down-at-heel toyshop decides to change his life, starting with talking to the pretty girl on the fruit and vegetable stall. In ‘Those Big Houses up Newmarket Road’, set nearby, social embarrassment inspires a class-conscious schoolboy to dream big. Such ambitions are unusual in these carefully worked stories of broken homes and precarious employment.

Anthony Seldon

With many despairing academics packing it in, who will solve the problem of the universities?

Whatever happened to universities, beacons of the liberal enlightenment? Well, according to both these authors, they are in deep trouble. Cary Nelson is a distinguished literature academic who for six years was president of the American Association of University Professors, set up in 1915 by John Dewey to advance standards of excellence and academic freedom. His book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Anti-Semitic Assault on Basic Principles, published last year, has now been supplemented by this powerful thesis published by the Jewish Quarterly. Even before the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he argues, campus anti-Semitism was rife across the West.

Emily Rhodes

No place is safe: The Brittle Age, by Donatella di Pietrantonio, reviewed

This slim, unsettling novel opens with Lucia trying to navigate the ‘mess’ of her daughter Amanda’s return home to their apartment near Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo. Pieces of torn bread, a heaped-up blanket and other strange ‘traces’ are indications of Amanda’s emotional disarray after hastily leaving Milan on the eve of lockdown. But she’d already abandoned her university studies by the time she’d been violently mugged. Lucia attempts to achieve the difficult balance of caring for, but not suffocating, her daughter, resigning herself to Amanda’s ‘unpredictable comings and goings’ while leaving her ‘something nourishing in the fridge in case she skips breakfast’. But she has already spectacularly misjudged this.

Mark Piesing

Remembering Hiroshima 80 years on

In October 1945, towns and cities across the United States celebrated ‘A Tribute to Victory Day’ in celebration of the United States’s military victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The biggest event was held in Los Angeles and broadcast live across the country. In scenes ‘reminiscent of the pre-war Nazi rallies at Nuremberg’, Iain MacGregor writes, more than 100,000 people crammed into the Memorial Coliseum to watch the ‘cinematic legend’ Edward G. Robinson lead a massive cast on giant stage sets recreating key moments of the defeat of the Axis powers. For the evening finale, in the glare of searchlights, three Boeing B-29 Superfortresses flew low over the stadium and, as the audience gasped, a huge mushroom cloud rose behind the stage.

Alan Judd

Everyone who was anyone in Russia was spied on – including Stalin

Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB colonel smuggled out of Russia by MI6 in the early 1990s with a treasure trove of notes from the KGB’s archive. The resulting 3,500 CI reports (CI meaning counter-intelligence – information about hostile spies) identified 1,000 KGB agents around the world and were shared with 36 countries. The CIA rated it ‘the biggest CI bonanza of the post-war period’, while the FBI described as ‘the most detailed and extensive pool of CI ever received’. The story behind it was as remarkable as the haul itself. Gordon Corera’s fluent narrative draws on many sources, including the magisterial two-volume Mitrokhin Archive compiled by the historian Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin himself.

Philip Hensher

What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens

You know Mark Twain’s story. You’ve got no excuse not to; there have been so many biographies. Starting in the American South as Samuel Clemens, he took his pen name from the call of the Mississippi boatmen on reaching two fathoms. His lectures, followed by his travel pieces and novels, enchanted America and then the world. As a southerner, his principled stance against slavery gave him moral authority. The famous ‘Notice’ to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished’ – was swept aside, so that persons like H.L. Mencken could straightfacedly describe it as ‘the greatest novel ever written in English’.

Tuesday

Susie Mesure

Repetitive strain: On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II, by Solvej Balle, reviewed

I have counted the days. It is my 122nd eighteenth of November. I have come a long way from the seventeenth and I do not know whether I will ever see the nineteenth. But the eighteenth arrives again and again. This is life for Tara Selter, the protagonist of On the Calculation of Volume, a mesmerising projected septology by the Danish writer Solvej Balle that will make anyone who has ever longed to pause time rethink their wish list. Book I, published in Denmark in 2020 and on this year’s International Booker Prize longlist, opens on Day 121. Tara, an antiquarian bookseller, is hiding from her husband Thomas in the spare room of their cottage in Clairon-sous-Bois, a fictional town in northern France.

Andrew Lambirth

Douglas Cooper – a complex character with a passion for Cubism

The collector, art historian and critic Douglas Cooper (1911-84) relished conflict. He was a formidable man, loud in speech and dress, with forceful views and a taste for ridicule. He could also be very funny. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, who knew Cooper better than most, said it was as though an angel and a demon child were perpetually fighting for control of his personality. Physically robust, Cooper survived being stabbed in the stomach when he was 50 after unwisely propositioning a French soldier. He is remembered today, if at all, for his legendary collection of Cubist art, focusing on the four greats of the movement: Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris.

Simon Ings

How the US military became world experts on the environment

In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year. Men froze half to death, even as their digging equipment foundered in winter mud. Sand, Snow and Stardust is the story of how the US military shed its ignorance and, by harnessing logistical intelligence and environmental knowledge, turned America into a global superpower. Before the second world war the US operated just 14 overseas military bases.