More from Books

Wednesday

Ian Thomson

A weary trek in the steps of Garibaldi and his Redshirts

By the time he died in 1882 at the age of 74, Giuseppe Garibaldi had freed the Italian peninsula from its abhorred Habsburg and Bourbon rulers and united all Italy under the liberally inclined House of Savoy. With his whiskery good looks and wardrobe of red blouses, he was the ideal vehicle for romantic notions of free nationality. When he visited London in 1864, crowds flocked to greet the Risorgimento liberator as he got off the train at Nine Elms. A new football club, Nottingham Forest, adopted Garibaldi red as its colour and a ‘squashed fly’ biscuit was named after him. In Queen Victoria’s estimation, though, Garibaldi was an outlaw figure who threatened to subvert the established order. ‘Garibaldi – thank God – is gone!’ she declared on his departure.

Nicholas Lezard

It’s grim up north: Malc’s Boy, by Shaun Wilson, reviewed

Shaun Wilson’s latest novel gets going with a childhood recalled like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it is one marred by violence. Oh here we go again, I thought, as the young Shaun is thumped repeatedly by his enraged father Malc. Every novel I review these days seems to be about a working-class lad with a violent father from, say, north of Birmingham. I braced myself and thought of the immortal Bacon parents in the comic magazine Viz whose main purpose in life is to thrash their young son half to death in every issue. (Auberon Waugh, late of this parish, once said that it was impossible fully to understand Britain without reading Viz, and he was right.

David Honigmann

What does it say about Britain that the Palace of Westminster is crumbling?

Many political scientists are oddly uninterested in politics. Their fascination is at a level of theory; but the means through which decisions are made in practice, through specific conversations and arguments and accommodations between actual people, strike them as so much gossip – or, worse, journalism. Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, best known to general readers for his trenchant, well-timed and comfortingly short What Is Populism?, here wanders like a niche flȃneur through the territory in between the personal and the theoretical: the ways in which people and politicians are variously welcomed, channelled, liberated and constrained by their concrete environments.

Rupert Hawksley

How Rupert Murdoch destroyed the innocent enjoyment of watching sport

In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via their remote. And why not? After all, as the Sky Bet tagline reminded viewers: ‘It matters more when there’s money on it.’ For football fans, nothing was ever quite the same again. ‘It’s difficult to overstate what the slogan did for the normalisation of gambling in football,’ writes Darragh McGee in his impressive study of how our national sport, seduced by profit, surrendered to the gambling industry.

Julie Bindel

The global revolution sparked by a vegetarian schoolteacher in Helsinki

At the turn of the 20th century, no woman was in government anywhere in the world. Change began with Finland in 1907, which elected 19 women to its parliament. Hilda Kakikoski was one of those women. She was a conservative candidate – a nationalist who was also a lesbian and a vegetarian. Paula Bartley’s Trailblazers spans the century, following the story of female politicians as they emerged. From Finland we move to Russia, where the revolution provided opportunities for the likes of the socialist feminist Alexandra Kolontai, the first woman to join a government cabinet and become a global diplomat. Constance Markievicz was the first woman to be elected to the British parliament, during her imprisonment for her role in the Easter Rising, but did not take her seat.

Joanna Kavenna

Stay within the lines to realise your full creative energy

The title of this book takes the adage about ‘thinking outside the box’ and inverts it. Instead of thinking outside the box, we should think inside the box, David Epstein argues. Which box? How big is this box? Whose box? He discusses these questions as well. The phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ emerges from the nine dots puzzle devised by psychologists before the first world war. There are nine dots on a page, evenly spaced, three on each line. You must connect all nine using four lines without removing your pen from the paper. A common response is to imagine that the dots form a box and to confine your work accordingly. This makes the puzzle impossible to solve; you have to think outside the box. Or not think of a box in the first place.

Lynn Barber

Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?

This slim volume has only one fault. It has no illustrations. So you’ll have to do some Googling or visit the current Duchamp exhibition at MoMA (until 22 August) if you want to know what ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ looks like. Otherwise it’s perfect – wittily written and packed with many fascinating characters besides the ever intriguing Marcel Duchamp. He didn’t actually arrive in New York until 1915, but when he did he found himself already famous. His ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ had been included in the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, alongside works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Braque, and completely stole the show. Duchamp didn’t even know the painting was being exhibited.

Tuesday

Rose George

The tragedy of Sir Walter Ralegh’s impossible quest

I remember little of my two years at boarding school, where I arrived aged eight, apart from the cloaks. Red, green, blue and yellow, for the houses of Ralegh, Nicholson, Gordon and Wellesley. They were called after generals, we were told, and of the four, Ralegh’s name is the best known. But why? I take a short survey of my colleagues. They all know the name but not why they know it. It is a curious fame to have, and perhaps David Gibbins’s book will do something to give it substance. Sir Walter Ralegh (Gibbins’s choice of spelling, as opposed to Raleigh, Rawleigh, Ralley and other versions in the elastic Elizabethan way with names) was more than a military commander.

Michael Arditti

Love and loneliness in the Outer Hebrides: John of John, by Douglas Stuart, reviewed

For his third novel, Douglas Stuart moves north from the Glasgow tenements of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. John-Callum, known as Cal, returns to his family croft after spending four years at a mainland textile college, following a call from his father, John, to tell him that his grandmother is dying. John is the precentor of his local church, a congregation of Free Presbyterians, who adhere to an extreme biblical morality. The 26 remaining members attend four services each Sabbath and believe that fathers have authority over children and husbands over wives, since women ‘rarely know what is best for themselves’. Stuart treats this faith, which will be inimical to the majority of his readers, with great respect.

Sinclair McKay

Were the lies we told to combat communism so shameful?

This, we might imagine, is the Age of the Fake. AI videos; TikTok fascists; the Joycean mind-fragments of a US president for whom truth itself is an ever shifting quantum concept. Surely no other generation has had to navigate such a disorientating landscape of deceit. Or perhaps they have. Our old friends the Russians gave the world The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century – a lethal, widely circulated (and still circulating) hoax outlining the world-dominating plots of Jewish people. Meanwhile, a still unidentified forger composed the Zinoviev Letter, which was published by the Daily Mail a few days before the 1924 general election.

Frances Wilson

Mourning becomes Siri Hustvedt

At 6.58 p.m. on 30 April 2024, Siri Hustvedt’s husband of 43 years, the novelist Paul Auster, died of cancer in the library of their Brooklyn home. He was surrounded by family, including his adored daughter Sophie, who three months earlier had given birth to his first grandson, Miles. Hustvedt and Auster met at a poetry reading in 1981 and married later that year. It was she who proposed to him. Auster, aged 34, was not yet famous and Hustvedt, aged 26, was still a graduate student. By the 1990s, when she too became a novelist, they were New York literary royalty. In the 1970s, Auster had been married to the translator and short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had a son called Daniel. If Sophie was a summer’s day, Daniel was darkness.

Christopher Bray

The movie brats who changed popular cinema

For some people it’s Star Wars; for others it’s Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For me not a year goes by without watching Chinatown and the first two parts of The Godfather. This urge to repeatedly live through familiar narratives surely starts with bedtime stories; and though it diminishes in early adulthood as we push ourselves out into the world, the habit returns before long. So, although The Last Kings of Hollywood, Paul Fischer’s partial history of American movie-making focusing on Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, tells a familiar story, it will be read by the same people who have already worked their way through the holy scriptures on the period.

Elisa Segrave

Paw prints through the ages: a stunning visual history of man’s best friend

Inspiring, educational, moving, sometimes distressing, this is a riveting visual history of man’s best friend. Thomas Laqueur, from a German Jewish family, whose mother owned boxers, introduces us to many hitherto unexplored facts. Who knew that in 1938 guard dogs, using Bedouin herding dogs, were specially bred for ‘the new Zion’? Or that Darwin thought that dogs have a conscience?   We are encouraged to scrutinise master- pieces of art with a fresh eye. In ‘The Wedding at Cana’ (1563), Paolo Veronese includes one white dog, who is ‘looking up at Jesus’s white shining face and invites us to join it’. Five dogs feature in this painting, and I took some time to spot each.

Miriam Balanescu

The good old bad old days: Prestige Drama, by Seamas O’Reilly, reviewed

Set in present-day Derry, Seamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama centres on the filming of a television series set in the 1980s. Monica Logue, a glamorous American actress and crime drama regular, has been cast as the lead, and residents are divided between apprehension and hoping she ‘would do for Troubles-era Derry what she’d already done for shops that sold satin gloves’. When Monica vanishes, the community is left to deal with the fallout and their feelings about the Troubles, known as ‘the bad old good old days’. Each section is narrated by a different townsperson – from the show’s historical adviser to a mural painter, the local witch to a clairvoyant taxi driver – all with their own ideas about what has become of ‘the woman always catching sex pests on TV’.

Bryan Appleyard

Does a propensity for crime depend on one’s DNA?

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

Tuesday

Simon Kuper

Would W.G. Grace recognise the game of cricket today?

There’s a fascinating thought that the authors of Full Circle pursue for just a couple of pages, then leave hanging: ‘Association football offers an alternative history by which to consider the course cricket might have taken.’ In fact, the book demonstrates that cricket has followed football’s course, albeit about a century late. In cricket, too, professionals ousted amateurs, embraced the market, saw economic power shift east and chose a short format that allowed games to be played in an evening. Like it or loathe it, cricket has effectively become football. Reading this serious and competent work, you wonder at times why the journalists Richard Heller and Peter Oborne bothered to write it. There are already countless cricket histories.

Lynn Barber

Lean and mean: Mick Jagger was always a tightwad

This book got glowing reviews when it was published in the US a few months ago: ‘Irresistible’ (New York Times); ‘Riveting’ (Boston Globe); ‘Energetic and engaging’ (Washington Post). I kept wondering if I was reading the same book. You wouldn’t have thought it possible to make the Rolling Stones boring, but Bob Spitz somehow manages to. Let me count the ways. By giving his own programme notes on every Stones record; by paying far too much attention to the actual recording process and crediting every new sound engineer; and by totally missing the point that it is the Stones themselves we are interested in. I’m fairly typical of diehard Stones fans in that I got hooked in the 1960s and have stayed with them ever since. I am now 82.

Kate Chisholm

Marvels of the masked ball: dressing up in Georgian London

In the satirical print ‘Remarkable Characters at Mrs Cornely’s Masquerade’ from February 1771, the Georgian craze for dressing up as fantastical characters is shown in all its theatricality and wild invention. The harlequin was always popular, as was the domino, but here we also have a ‘Savoyard’ (supposedly from Savoy) playing a hurdy-gurdy with his dancing bear in tow, a nun in full habit, ‘Mad Tom’ with wild hair and ragged clothes, and, perhaps weirdest of all, a coffin, decorated with a skull and crossbones. Peeping out from beneath its sombre frame are the two ridiculously dainty feet of the masquerader.

Jonathan Boff

Accelerating the ‘kill chain’ – a terrifying glimpse of future warfare

America possesses the most powerful military in history, but since 1945 it has not won a war against anyone other than Saddam Hussein. It appears not to understand why. In fact the only thing the US seems worse at than winning wars is learning lessons from its defeats. People such as the secretary of war Pete Hegseth think it’s all about woke. Lily-livered longhairs stateside stabbed the army in the back over Vietnam; then ‘stupid rules of engagement’ tied the military’s hands in Iraq and Afghanistan and caused the disasters there. The solution is to fight harder, if necessary even at the expense of ethics and the law. Another answer might be to get US forces fighting smarter.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

From pike-and-pitchfork brigade to crack militia: ‘Dad’s Army’ wasn’t so ludicrous after all

Ever since the BBC’s Dad’s Army (which ran from 1968 to 1977), it’s been hard to keep a straight face when talking about the Home Guard. Just thinking about Corporal Jones one beat out from the rest of the platoon during drill makes us go weak. Sinclair McKay’s book on the subject, actually called Dad’s Army, does not shirk from the hilarious aspects of this domestic front line of two million volunteers at its peak, many of whom did a full day’s work before turning out to practise defending their country all evening and sometimes all night.