More from Books

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

Language lessons: Taipei Story, by Rebecca Kuang, reviewed

Rebecca Kuang was quietly writing cult classics for years before she hit the best-seller lists with Babel, a Victorian fantasy based on colonialism and opium wars, and Yellowface, a deliciously dark story about literary plagiarism and the ego-smashing right hook that social media can administer. Then came Katabasis, skewering academia and the exploitation of naive students. The breadth of Kuang’s knowledge reflects her high-achieving CV, which takes in Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. Taipei Story explores her identity as a Chinese- American. It relates the experience of Lily, a Yale student attending an intensive summer course in Chinese language and culture in Taipei.

Victor Sebestyen

The trouble with communism began with Plato

Immediately after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, during the brief ‘end of history’ period, there were several books, from the right and the left, that covered similar territory to Paul Mason’s surprising and provocative Reds. But there has been almost nothing of the kind – a comprehensive narrative history of the ideology and the politics of communism – for a couple of decades. Communism had seemed so dead, so defeated, so apparently unable to rise again, even to those who once purported to believe in it, that interest became minimal, confined to a few university history departments offering courses on the Cold War. As Mason writes: ‘To everyone born after 1989… communism seems like a distant nightmare.

Oliver Soden

Surviving the Dresden firestorm: Slaughterhouse-Five revisited

I was in my teens and a bathtub when I first read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Published in 1969, the novel is about an American prisoner-of-war, Billy Pilgrim, who is held captive in Dresden during the Allied bombing that destroyed the city. This was an experience shared by the author, who in a postmodern flourish meets his own protagonist in the filthy latrines. I opened my mother’s slim 1970s paperback, began to read – ‘All this happened, more or less’ – and kept on reading until I had finished it, by which time the bath was cold and my fingers were as pulpy as the pages. When I re-read the same copy for this review it fell to pieces. So it goes.

Clive Aslet

From ballrooms to billets – the fate of our country houses and their owners in wartime

Ever since Brideshead Revisited, both the book and two television series, there has been a fascination with what some of us thought of as the last knockings of the country house, as once splendid aristocratic mansions sank beneath Nissen huts, mistreatment by the armed forces and lack of maintenance during the second world war. But what could this new book tell us? John Martin Robinson alone has published twice on the subject in recent years, and when I read that Judith Lewis’s was a gendered account, my heart sank. But I was wrong. Scholars have tended to overlook the tragedy that requisitioning put on the women for whom a country house was not just an ancestral possession, an expression of power or a grand accumulation of works of art, but a home.

Genevieve Gaunt

Sad girl story: Sophie, Standing There, by Meg Mason, reviewed

Sophie Pattison, 37, is not in a good place: heartbroken, childless, mid-divorce from ‘arsehole’ Paul, with her self-esteem and bank balance low. As her best friend Emma says: ‘You have a lot of love and nobody to take it out on.’ This is Meg Mason’s third work of fiction. Her Sorrow and Bliss (2020)propelled her on to the global literary stage. Sophie, Standing There opens as ‘sad girl fiction’ that satirises the contemporary literary festival. But then the book takes a turn and explores something more savage: parasocial relationships and the courage required in the Age of Instagram to be simple but happy. It opens with Sophie in the wings of a theatre, mic’ing up celebrated, often rude, authors before they go on stage.

Nick Bartlett

Emmanuel Carrère’s obsession with his mother’s duplicity borders on fanaticism

In our family histories we all have ghosts, but few of us go in search of them and even fewer of us write about them. The French author Emmanuel Carrère discovered how devastating that search can be with his book My Life as a Russian Novel (2007). For two years he and his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an eminent historian of Russia and the steely secretary of the Académie Française, didn’t speak. Hélène’s aggrieved response to the publication of her son’s inquiry into the suspected status of her father, Georges Zurabishvili, as a collaborator of the Nazis during the second world war, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Tuesday

Leaf Arbuthnot

An excellent spy: Cold Sunset, by William Boyd, reviewed

Gabriel Dax, the hero of William Boyd’s latest spy thriller, is one of literature’s reluctant spies: good, solitary men who would happily continue pursuing their hobbies if only their beastly handlers would let them. In Dax’s case, his day job is as a travel writer – which allows Boyd to regularly indulge his evident affection for the florid turn of phrase. On the very first page of Cold Sunset, the third novel in the series, Dax describes the Pacific, admired from 1960s Santa Monica, as ‘slate-grey, mouse-grey, dirty dishwater-grey’, and even ‘zinc, ash, pewter’. To Boyd’s credit, the novel can be read as a standalone, but it’s probably best enjoyed after books one and two.

Mark Cocker

We must stop treating soil like dirt

There is a delightful moment at the end of this book when Frank Ashwood is out looking for soil-dwelling invertebrates in his adopted New Zealand home. Suddenly he proclaims: ‘I notice something and my heart skips a beat. A velvet worm.’ He goes on to tell us that the discovery of two of these rare organisms in one day is ‘a thing of dreams’. Far from scoffing at his excitement, the reader has long come to share his enthusiasm for the extraordinariness of velvet worms. They are, after all, lozenges of blue and orange stripes rolled in tiny sequins. That we have also come to see the full beauty, abundance and sheer weirdness of the whole subsoil realm is a measure of Ashwood’s wider achievement.

Harry Mount

The wonder of ancient English parish churches

John Betjeman, the patron saint of the English parish church, invented the term ‘church-crawler’ in 1948. Rachel Morley acknowledges his genius in this charming guide. But by her own admission she stands at one remove from similar church addicts. Yes, she’s fully qualified, as the director of the marvellous organisation Friends of Friendless Churches, founded in 1957. But she is in fact Irish, born and bred in Cork. She’s learnt about England through its parish churches and makes a convincing argument that they are the key to English art, architecture, the national character and even the language. The name of the 7th-century Ely nun St Etheldreda mutated into St Audrey, which gave us the word ‘tawdry’ to describe the cheap fripperies sold on St Etheldreda’s feast days.

Leyla Sanai

A world full of artifice: Life of M, by Rachel Cusk, reviewed

The twin themes of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel are truth and fame. In fact it’s not quite accurate to call it a ‘novel’: there are two main characters, but there is no plot; and although you start to understand each woman, it’s through observation of their behaviour in a series of vignettes rather than a conventional story. The titular ‘M’ is an actress of beauty and renown, reportedly based on Natalie Portman. Her friend, the unnamed narrator, wants to write her biography. ‘Would you just make it up?’ M suggests airily, giving us a notion of how fabrication is sewn into her life.

Ian Thomson

How black music changed the world

In the boiling August of 1919, a 27-piece African-American jazz outfit called the Southern Syncopated Orchestra was summoned to play at Buckingham Palace as part of a royal command concert. The orchestra was Britain’s first introduction to black music. Their hothouse syncopations and Mississippi washboard rhythms were a balm after the first world war, and they went down a storm on the concert circuit. A decade or so later, in the swing era of the 1930s, the clarinettist Benny Goodman adapted jazz for white tastes, toning it down and cleaning it up – much as Elvis Presley would do for the postwar generation with black rock ’n’ roll. By the time Miles Davis arrived in the 1950s, jazz was an increasingly white enthusiasm.

Derek Turner

Could we bring back the Great Auk?

In 2023, the State of Nature Report announced that Britain was one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries. This can have been scarcely surprising to anyone conscious of the ever-emptier countryside, and perhaps even expected for a small island that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. But Lee Raye’s many sources reveal that the process has long predated the steam engine, with far-reaching effects not just on the natural world but on national psychology. The 14 species featured in this book once bulked large in the British consciousness – as living beings and also as metaphors, morals, similes and symbols.

Emily Hill

Would Eve Babitz really have wanted her unsent letters published?

‘I regard Too L.A. as Eve’s second masterpiece – her first being, of course, Slow Days, Fast Company – and her most consequential work,’ is how the editor Lili Anolik introduces the book she concocted out of the late Eve Babitz’s sent and unsent letters. ‘It’s a West Coast, late 20th-century Room of One’s Own, a feminist cri de coeur.’ This is Anolik’s third book all about Eve. She is Babitz’s Boswell. But Too L.A. reminds me of Helen Fielding more than Virginia Woolf. I can’t say I didn’t relish this book, but by the midpoint I started to feel downright uncomfortable reading it In masterpieces of her own devising, Eve Babitz (persona) is a bona fide sex goddess with Jim Morrison between her thighs.

Caroline Moorehead

Why Mussolini still fascinates Italians

You do not have to travel far in Italy to encounter the remains of Mussolini’s dreams of architectural splendour. From the sparkling marble and travertine palaces of the Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR) district, to the immense statues of athletes in Rome’s sports forum and the new town of Laterina in the south, the Duce’s creations are clearly visible. When the Allies had finished liberating Italy in the spring of 1945, they thought to erase all traces of fascism, but there were simply too many. So they settled on removing only the most ‘unaesthetic’.

Philip Hensher

Will this century see the end of books?

Anyone proposing to publish a polemic between hard covers about the decline of literacy and reading will, of course, find themselves preaching to the choir. If you read books, you will agree with this one; if you don’t, your negligence will not be touched by its fervour. I won’t say that it is a useless object; merely how unhelpful it would be simply to agree with its main point. The decline of reading practices is quite convincingly demonstrated in surveys. Fewer and fewer people in the US and Britain read habitually, by their own admission. In one celebrated case, an entire cohort of English literature academics in America was unable to make anything at all of the first page of Bleak House.

Tuesday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The enigma of Juba II, ‘the most fortunate captive ever taken’

What a fantastic subject this would be for a film. Born a prince of Numidia, in northern Africa, the hero of Andrew Kenrick’s book saw his life capsized when he was barely more than a baby. His father, Juba I, was defeated by Julius Caesar and arranged his own death. Little Juba was paraded through Rome in chains, then brought up in Caesar’s household. The biographer Plutarch summed up the tension in his circumstances when he called him ‘the most fortunate captive ever taken’. Juba grew up to be a soldier, scholar and explorer. Having personally led an expedition to the Atlas mountains in search of the source of the Nile, he claimed to have found it. It sounds strange now, but there was then a widespread belief that the Nile might originate somewhere in western Africa.

Alice Jolly

From housemaid to monster: The Mare, by Angharad Hampshire, reviewed

In 1957, Russell Ryan, an American is holidaying alone in Austria. There he meets a young woman called Hermine Braunsteiner. They fall in love and Russell takes Hermine back to America where they marry and set up home in the suburbs. All goes well until 1964, when a New York Times journalist knocks on the door and tells Russell that Hermine is a former concentration camp guard. In writing this novel, Angharad Hampshire is drawing on the couple’s real-life story, and the reader is captivated from the outset. What exactly did Hermine do? How will Russell react to the accusations against her, and can he ever forgive her? Hampshire writes in short chapters, weaving together scenes from past and present, moving fluently between Austria, Germany and the US.

Sarah Ditum

How have we allowed star ratings to take over our lives?

Sometimes I like to imagine who I’d be without the internet. A better person, for sure. A person who has read more novels, possibly written one, and spent considerably less time bickering with strangers. But what if there are other, more profound, ways in which going online has changed me? That’s the question addressed by both Benji Wilson and Kathryn Jezer-Morton in these books, which look at how the commodifying grammar of the internet has insinuated itself deep into our personalities. One explores the way we behave as consumers, and the other examines the way we shape ourselves for consumption: together, they offer a depressing insight into the way we live now.

Alan Judd

‘I always had a good life’: the boast of the 1970s’ most notorious terrorist

If you remember the 1970s you might also remember Carlos the Jackal, an international terrorist notorious for taking the Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He also murdered two French policemen in Paris, later claiming to have personally murdered 83 people, plus another thousand killed on his orders during his terrorist career. But that may be wishful thinking. His name is not Carlos and he didn’t award himself the ‘Jackal’ sobriquet. That came about through the discovery of an arms cache he had hidden in a girlfriend’s flat in London. The Guardian reporter who broke the story noted that a briefcase full of weapons was placed next to a bookshelf displaying Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller, The Day of the Jackal.

James Walton

Always second but actually invincible: Agrippa, by Robert Harris, reviewed

Any readers of Robert Harris’s new novel who aren’t ancient historians might be surprised to discover what an important figure Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was: Caesar Augustus’s right-hand man since they were at school together; the builder of some of Rome’s most significant buildings; the winning commander in several battles that changed history; even, as Harris puts it in an afterword, ‘the effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years’. Happily, that same afterword also suggests that such ignorance of Agrippa’s achievements isn’t necessarily our fault – because Augustus ‘all but effaced his closest comrade from the official record’. This, of course, leaves a handy gap for the novelist to fill. But how to fill it?