More from Books

Thursday

James Walton

The People’s Songs, by Stuart Maconie – a review

For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues, he’s proved himself a fine writer: sharp, funny, tender and thoughtful — often all at the same time. In his previous book to this, Hope and Glory, he made a creditable if slightly heart-on-sleeve attempt at British social history. And, as anybody who’s listened to his radio shows will know, few people combine such a serious knowledge and love of pop music with such a refreshing lack of snootiness about it. Not only that, but in the introduction here he tells us that he’s always wanted to write ‘a reliable, authoritative one-volume history of British popular music that would avoid rehashing the received wisdom’.

Joanna Kavenna

The Long Shadow, by Mark Mills – a review

Mark Mills is known for his historical and literary crime novels, including The Savage Garden, The Information Officer and House of the Hanged. The Long Shadow is written in a different mode. It is set in a highly recognisable present; it is a clever, teasing hybrid of genres (psychological thriller, dark comedy, Pardoner’s Tale and dystopia); and it is fraught with tensions about money, class and the super-rich. The protagonist, Ben, is a well-nigh washed up screenwriter in his early forties. His wife has fallen in love with a successful businessman; Ben has been forced out into a seedy flat in a demoralising part of London. He passes the time enumerating the opportunities he has squandered and worrying about his relationship with his teenage son.

Thursday

Mark Mason

The Authors XI, by The Authors Cricket Club – review

We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors XI by The Authors Cricket Club, with a foreword by Sebastian Faulks (Bloomsbury, £16.99). Instead there’s ‘Passchendaeleian’ and ‘Ballardian’ (of pitches), ‘burst-sofa torsos’ (of themselves) and the observation that the French revolutionaries’ cry of ‘Aux armes!’ sounds uncannily like ‘howzat?!’ The team of cricketing writers tackle a chapter each, combining match reports from their 2012 season with reflections on different aspects of the game (class, broadcasting, kit, youth and so on).

Clare Mulley

She Landed by Moonlight, by Carole Seymour-Jones – review

The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’. As quickly becomes evident, the real thing was more than a shade superior. Like the fictional Gray, Witherington had determined to serve behind enemy lines in France with the dual aims of fighting the Nazi occupation of her adopted country, and being reunited with the man she loved, in Witherington’s case her fiancé, the escaped French POW Henri Cornioley. Unlike Gray, however, Witherington would quickly achieve both her public and private missions, meeting up with Henri within just days of her arrival.

Honor Clerk

Seaweeds, by Ole G. Mouritsen – review

On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to pay homage to ‘the Mother of the Sea’. There is a shrine and an altar for votive offerings but this is not a religious rite. The mother in question is Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, a Lancashire- born algae researcher who, in 1949, discovered the life-cycle of porphyra umbilicalis.  Not, perhaps, front-page news in the occident, but this was the key to the cultivation of that dark green papery wrapping around the outside of sushi that is consumed in one form or another in every Japanese household: nori. Kathleen Drew-Baker died in 1956, unaware that her research had laid the foundations for the most valuable aqua-culture industry in the world.

Victoria Glendinning

The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, by Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell

The Charleston Bulletin was a family newspaper produced between 1923 and 1927 by the teenaged Quentin Bell and his elder brother Julian — who soon dropped out, leading Quentin to recruit his aunt Virginia Woolf. At that time enjoying her most prolific period as a novelist, she collaborated with him on special issues which they called Supplements, for circulation at Christmas among the family and friends whose foibles and mishaps are chronicled in its pages. Professor David Bradshaw in his preface suggests that ‘it may not be ridiculous’ to link the ‘skittish abandon’ of the Supplements with the sense of liberation that Woolf felt in having found her fictional voice and critical recognition.

A.N. Wilson

The history girl

Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the past’. I thought of this when reading Hunters in the Snow, since the author is so young, and the time-scale of the book so long. This is a truly dazzling first novel. Every paragraph bristles with cleverness and yet it is a warm-hearted book, at times overpoweringly moving. Its theme is nothing less than the past, and how we view it, and how it affects us. The framework of the story is the young narrator’s relationship with a reclusive, unhappily married grandfather, who is a professional historian. The substance of it, however, is the way that every event in the past has in some way led up to the present.

Candy Neubert

how to get a life

just to tell you there is nothing better almost nothing better than getting into bed in the middle of the afternoon when the sun shines down outside and you are perfectly well shedding your clothes one arm under pillow having no sense of ambition beyond this experiment with quiet having learned something from the cat herself curled up under a garden bush.

John Whitworth

Rousseau and the Tiger

This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. This is the picture I painted to show That this is the Tiger, so supple and eager. And this is the customs man, suited and meagre, And what do we wonder and what do we know? This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. I am Rousseau and I painted the Tiger, The Tiger so fierce and the Tiger so free. This is the jungle, the terrible tangle, And these are the teeth that will torture and mangle, And all of it up on the wall as you see. This is the Tiger and this? This is me. This is the man and he works in an office, And this is the beast so unhuman and fine. This is the picture. I painted the picture. With cunning and craft I effected the capture, I conjured the colour, I dreamed the design, And I painted the Tiger. The Tiger is mine.

Eric Christiansen

Building: Letters, 1960–1975, by Isaiah Berlin

This is the third volume of Isaiah Berlin letters; one more to go. Discerning critics have showered the first two with praise, and there is no absence of the laudable here. The plums are unforgettable, especially the brief character studies of Maurice Bowra, Enid Starkie, Randolph Churchill, Golda Meir and Stravinsky, should anyone want to know who and what these people were. Of course, Isaiah himself is the centre of attention, and a growing number of people have never heard of him. Those who met him in this period met an intellectual superstar, a celebrity courted by princes, politicians and plutocrats, thirsting for his company and his approval. Not so many philosophers — but, my! he was a big orange. Many of those taught by him were changed for life.

Lewis Jones

The Unwinding, by George Packer – review

The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be found online in Jim Kunstler’s The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto, which runs to a few thousand words, but over hundreds of pages George Packer gives it the full literary treatment. He signals his ambition by taking as his model the USA trilogy of John Dos Passos, which spliced mash-ups of newspaper cuttings and pop lyrics, brief lives of public figures and longer episodic biographies of obscure ones, into an indignant portrait of America in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Thursday

Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam on Barbara Comyns – essay

The Vet’s Daughter is Barbara Comyns’s fourth and most startling novel. Written in 1959 when she was 50 it is the first in which she shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition. It was received with excitement, widely reviewed, praised by Graham Greene, reprinted, made into a play, serialised by the BBC, and adapted as a musical (called The Clapham Wonder) by Sandy Wilson of The Boyfriend. But although the book has been kept in print by Virago since 1981 its reputation has faded, probably because the shock of the magical realism of its final chapter has been swamped by the tsunami of fantasy and magic that has almost engulfed the later reading world in the past 20 years.

Tom Switzer

Foreign Policy Begins at Home, by Richard N. Haass – review

A year or so after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, an unnamed senior Bush administration official (later revealed to be Karl Rove) boasted: ‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’ Yet a decade later, America’s power and influence has diminished considerably and the American people are suffering from foreign policy fatigue. The greenback is weak, the debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions, the credit rating is downgraded and economic growth is exceptionally sluggish for a nation that is four years out of a recession. The Chinese own more and more of the US debt and they show no inclination to heed Washington’s demands to revalue the yuan or end their cyber-espionage or prevent North Korea from using nuclear weapons.

Stephen Bayley

Adhocism, by Charles Jencks – review

Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some exculpatory, older and wiser material fore and aft). Adhocism (re)captures with magical realism the boldness and silliness of its day.  This was the day when ‘new media’ meant colour television. Younger readers may need more instruction on the nature of this spirit. Students in Paris hurled St Germain cobblestones at gendarmes in clouds of teargas and students at Hornsey College of Art sat in to protest I cannot quite remember what in clouds of pot smoke. The Parisians read Guy Debord on situationism, the Hornseyites drooled over nudes in the International Times.

Harry Mount

Horace and Me, by Harry Eyres – review

After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel Alan Bates from his cage of repressed Englishness. Now it’s Horace, the Augustan lyric poet, releasing another repressed Englishman: Harry Eyres, Old Etonian scholar, Cambridge graduate, poet and author of the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times. This charming, moving book calls itself ‘Life Lessons’, as if it were a general teaching guide for the reader. Really, though, it’s a personal guide for Eyres — who realises that the poet he first struggled to appreciate at school has valuable lessons to teach about love, wine and friendship.

Ian Shircore

Dark Actors, by Robert Lewis – review

No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a wood near his Oxfordshire home. A public inquiry, headed by Lord Hutton, concludes that Britain’s leading germ warfare expert has committed suicide. Those who question the procedure or the verdict are scorned as conspiracy theorists. Four years later, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the police reveal that there are ‘no fingerprints whatsoever’ on Kelly’s knife, on the tablet packets in his coat pocket or on the water bottle found nearby. This single stark fact — which was simply not mentioned at the public inquiry — seriously undermines the suicide verdict. There are countless other odd and perplexing aspects to the story.

Jonathan Mirsky

Against Their Will, by Allen M. Hornblum – review

After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what about 70-odd years of harming children in ‘care’ homes, and prisoners, with toxin injections, -radioactive blasts, electro-shocks to the brain and frontal lobotomies — all done in the interests of medical advance by leading American doctors and scientists, one of whom was -awarded a Nobel Prize? Furthermore, what if the CIA sponsored such work in the interest of defending the US against Soviet threats?

Allan Massie

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney – review

Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic it has survived the passage of time. William McIlvanney did for Glasgow what Chandler had done for Los Angeles, giving the city its fictional identity. Hemingway used to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn; all Scottish crime writing — ‘tartan noir’ — comes out of Laidlaw. Two years before Laidlaw McIlvanney had won the Whitbread Prize for fiction with Docherty, a novel set in a mining community. This established him as the best Scottish novelist of his generation, and some of his admirers were dismayed when he followed it with a crime novel.

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

The Professor of Poetry, by Grace McCleen – review

Elizabeth Stone, English professor at UCL,  has long lived on ‘paper and words and thin air’. Single, friendless, dessicated, respected, she passes out during a faculty meeting and wakes to find herself ‘attached by a chain of spit to her own cardigan’. A brain tumour is diagnosed, and removed. Expecting death, Elizabeth receives the news that her treatment was apparently successful as a gift: ‘Time had been returned to her.’ She takes her bravest decision in 30 years and goes back to ‘the city of books’ where, as an undergraduate, she had the only profound emotional experience of her adult life.

Miles Johnson

An Englishman in Madrid, by Eduardo Mendoza – review

To Spaniards, the English must appear a highly contradictory people. The stereotype of the restrained, well-dressed gentleman (Spain’s largest department store is El Corte Inglés, ‘the English cut’) must contend with the binge-drinking phalanxes of tourists occupying Spain’s beaches every summer. Though generally thought to be fairly law-abiding, the English are still, mostly affectionately, referred to as pirates in Spain — a term dating back to Drake’s raids against Philip II. This dissonant, slippery persona is central to Eduardo Mendoza’s novel (winner of the prestigious Planeta prize), set on the eve of the Spanish civil war.