More from Books

Thursday

Nicholas Lezard

The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed

There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are. Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Putin’s éminence grise: The Wizard of the Kremlin, by Giuliano da Empoli, reviewed

Occasionally a book is published, perhaps twice in a generation, which is so bad but internationally celebrated that one questions everything one has believed about literature. The Wizard of the Kremlin, written in French by the Italian political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix de Roman in 2022. It narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Booker, and has since been translated into 30 languages. If a novel this inept is so successful then we have truly entered Spenglerian end times. The book is not just poorly constructed, filled with two-dimensional characters, tin-eared dialogue and inauthentic settings. Its very premise is ridiculous.

Alex Burghart

Is the future of democracy in the balance?

At the turn of the century, the ineluctable march of democracy seemed assured. The Cold War extinguished and eastern Europe freed, a Whiggish history of the world continued to be written. A quarter of a century on, the great wave has broken and rolled back. Democracy is not what it was in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Afghanistan. It has not emerged in China. The future looks less democratic than the past. Such concerns bother the big brain of the former Supreme Court judge and medieval historian Jonathan Sumption in his latest brilliant collection of essays.

Philip Marsden

The Coromandel coast under threat

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Based on the Coromandel coast at Chennai in south-eastern India, Yuvan Aves is an active naturalist and an ardent activist. Still in his twenties, he teaches outdoor classes, he campaigns and he notes down the movements and habits of invertebrates, birds and fauna in his local wetlands and littoral. All his observations and the wider thoughts on ecology that make up Intertidal are given added heft and poignancy by the searing account of his childhood which begins the book. His father was a philandering no-hoper whom his mother left for another man. That man was even worse. He took against the young Aves and subjected him to regular beatings, forcing him to scrape the blood from the walls when visitors were coming.

Thursday

Ian Birrell

The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man

Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse Ride, which felt risky and thrilling, stoking a lifelong love of rollercoasters.

Damian Thompson

Inside the Unholy See: the infiltration of the Vatican by foreign powers

Since it became independent in 1929, Vatican City has been the world’s smallest state. Every evening the gates close, leaving behind only 500 permanent residents. I once spent a week behind the walls as a guest in the Santa Marta hostel where the Pope lives; at night the deserted courtyards are thrillingly spooky. But it’s during the day that they echo with the footsteps of secret agents. The Vatican has been teeming with spies since popes started living on this 100-acre plot of land west of the Tiber when they returned from Avignon in 1377. In the 20th century it entered a new era of espionage when the papacy was targeted by Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the United States. By definition, secret agents are supposed to be difficult to identify.

Mark Bostridge

Murder, incest and paedophilia in imperial Rome

I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits was enough to make my younger brother bury his head in a cushion. Graves had spiced up Suetonius’s racy accounts of violent murder, incest and poison. But, in the world before trigger-warnings, the BBC outdid him in bloodlust. The most gruesome scene in the TV drama – of Caligula doing some amateur surgery on his sister’s stomach to remove their unborn incestuous child from the womb – was pure invention by the screenwriter Jack Pulman.

Tuesday

James Bradley

After half a billion years, are sharks heading for extinction?

Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the most part sharks were more an idea than a living presence. Other than an unsettlingly close encounter with a bronze whaler when I was 20, my interactions with the creatures as a young person were mostly confined to observing gentle Port Jackson sharks, wobbegongs and grey nurses while snorkelling and diving. This tendency to see sharks only through the prism of their vastly overestimated threat to human life obscures the many wonders of these remarkable animals.

Helen Brown

A piece of Mars to toy with

Since reading Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites, I keep catching myself in imaginary conversation with an Essex thatcher called Frederick Pratt. On 9 March 1923, he was working in a wheat field at Ashdon Hall Farm, near Saffron Walden, when he heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound and looked up to see ‘the earth fly up like water’. He later dug up, from a depth of two feet beneath the surface of the field, a stone weighing 1.27kg that had fallen from the sky. He took it to the police station, then on to the vicar, who shipped it off to the Natural History Museum. There we know it was classified as a stony chondrite meteorite, composed of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, white specks of nickel iron and other oddments from which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Suzi Feay

The strange potency of cheap perfume

Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find ‘the juice’ somewhat lacking. It might just be scented scaffolding, but fortunately the story underneath is captivating. Dune, CK One and the rest do not trigger madeleine-like waves of memory for Stripe; neither is this a paean to the olfactory art. The perfumes crop up casually rather than crucially: her dairy farmer father’s ancient bottle of Brut; her hairdresser mother’s Rive Gauche; a friend’s cloying Angel, which ‘fills every corner of the room like tear gas’.

Ian Sansom

The plain-speaking bloke from Warrington who painted only for himself

We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow carry on regardless. In The Secret Painter, the scriptwriter Joe Tucker (Parents, Big Bad World) tells the true story of his Uncle Eric, born in 1932 – an ordinary man who never gave up. Let’s be honest, The Secret Painter could have been absolutely terrible.

Thursday

Charles Parton

Xi Jinping’s alarming blueprint for the future

I don’t know what books Rachel Reeves keeps at her bedside, but, since the Treasury still seems to be setting the UK’s China policy, I heartily recommend that she read the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s magnificent On Xi Jinping. Ideology and -isms may or may not be Reeves’s thing, but while the book is primarily a dissection of Xi’s Marxist, Leninist and nationalist ideas – ‘a form of intellectual biography’, in Rudd’s words – it is of practical value to policy-makers. In laying out how Xi is applying his ideology to China, Rudd provides not only a guide to understanding the Chinese Communist party’s path over the past decade but also a convincing look into the future.

Sarah Moorhouse

The need to feel seen: Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico, reviewed

I probably won’t be the only one to say this of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection: it made me feel seen, and not in a good way. The novel takes aim at aspects of modern life, from social media to remote working and interior design trends, that aren’t obvious subjects for serious literary attention. Latronico, a philosopher who writes in Italian (this is his first novel to appear in English), suggests that our online profiles and material possessions have taken the place of integrity and community in society. He makes you question whether there can still be such a thing as an authentic personality. The narrative follows a couple whose existence is, to all appearances, very pleasant.

Salley Vickers

Visionary tales: Mrs Calder and the Hyena, by Marjorie Ann Watts, reviewed

One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are undistinguished – from the hinterlands of society, whether by virtue of status, wealth or age; yet they reveal some irrepressible glint of antinomianism, a rejection of conventional judgments and standards, a certain anarchic glee. In the title story, elderly Mrs Calder insists she is being accompanied by a hyena – ‘always a little on the edge of my vision, but definitely getting closer’.

Guy Stagg

The shards of heaven beneath our feet

In the early 20th century, the world went ‘raving mad on the subject of radium’, according to George Bernard Shaw. The newly discovered element was considered a miracle cure, used to treat about 150 medical complaints. And it was fashionable: society ladies drank afternoon tea in rooms filled with radium vapours, and cosmetic companies developed hair tonics, face lotions and anti-wrinkle creams, all claiming to contain the element. Doramad toothpaste even boasted: ‘Your teeth will shine with radioactive brilliance.’ Of course, the discovery had its down sides. One American tycoon drank so much of the tonic Radithor that his bones began to disintegrate.

Tuesday

Peter Parker

The queer traditions of King’s College, Cambridge

Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In this svelte and sprightly book, Simon Goldhill (himself a Fellow of King’s) traces this tradition over some 140 years, and describes the part it played in the creation of a remarkable, ever evolving community of gay men. He begins his story in 1885 when J.K. Stephen, the future tutor to Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, became a Fellow of the college.

Camilla Cassidy

A macabre quest for immortality: Old Soul, by Susan Barker, reviewed

Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there, walking towards a sun that never sets. When T says that sounds lonely, E is adamant it wouldn’t be. This strange fragment sets the tone for a sinister horror story in which one woman – who goes by many names but is often simply ‘the woman’ – has an unnaturally prolonged life, serving an entity she calls the Tyrant, who has an appetite for human sacrifice and a taste for lost souls.

Sarah Crompton

The pioneering women of modern dance

Arms outstretched, head thrown back, flounced skirt rippling over a raised leg. The 1942 photograph of Sophie Maslow dancing in her own creation Folksay makes her look as if she is performing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or some MGM musical spectacular. Yet Maslow was a radical artist, who asserted that modern dance was a transformational power for good, and devoted her 50-year career to the belief that it belonged to everyone. In Folksay, she danced to the Dust Bowl ballads of Woody Guthrie, conjuring an inclusive version of America by reshaping the view of its pioneer spirit. Loie Fuller’s groundbreaking serpentine dance transformed her into a flame, or an orchid, or a cloud She told Dance Magazine in 1946: This is the Age of the Common Man.

Philip Womack

Finding your other half in ancient Athens

Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party? Plato answered that question centuries ago with his sublime Symposium, a gripping, novel-like account of a gathering of Athenian notables, which is also a powerful philosophical exploration of the force of Eros, or love. We know that the feast is supposed to have taken place in 416 BC since its host, Agathon, has just won a prize for one of his tragedies. We also know that the setting is, alas, imaginary, since Plato makes sure to distance himself from the account by having Apollodorus tell the story to his friends some 16 years later, having heard it from an acquaintance.

Michela Wrong

The psychological toll of being constantly tracked and harassed

In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is a million miles away from the Cold War binary world of John le Carré The DHL invitation was fake digital bait. By clicking on it, Abdulaziz had enabled Pegasus, a spyware program designed by a now infamous Israeli company, NSO Group.