More from Books

Thursday

Christopher Booker

‘The Age of Global Warming’, by Rupert Darwall – review

We scarcely need our fifth freezing winter in a row to remind us of the probability that future generations may look back on the panic over global warming which suddenly gripped the world in the late 1980s as one of the oddest scientific and political aberrations in history. Why did such an unprecedented scare blow up when it did, thanks to a moderate rise of just 0.5 degrees C in global temperatures, when earlier in the 20th century a similar temperature rise between 1910 and 1940 had been accepted as perfectly natural: as simply another phase in the general warming trend which had begun 200 years earlier, after four centuries of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when the world had cooled?

Cecilia Grayson

‘Life after Life’, by Kate Atkinson – review

Das also war des Pudels Kern! Everybody thought, ‘Oh, Groundhog Day,’ but they were wrong. Not that the pest-control man couldn’t have coped with a few marmots — he’d seen worse in his time. He’d been summoned because of an infestation of black bats. * Meriel’s confusion lay in the fact that she knew she had known a lot, yet suspected she also knew nothing. Her family couldn’t help with the contradictions surrounding her birth, nor with her multiple deaths. ‘It’s just déjà vu,’ her mother Emily said, or was it déjà lu? She hopped about from year to year, forwards and backwards (if only she’d keep still, the reader thought), gathering redundant adjectives.

Michael Howard

‘The British Dream’, by David Goodhart – review

David Goodhart’s new book, The British Dream, is an important study of postwar immigration into the UK, its successes and failures. He explores the tension between growing diversity and national solidarity and examines the meaning and significance of national identity. In his introduction he quotes a conversation he had over dinner at an Oxford college in the spring of 2011. He told his neighbour that he intended to write a book arguing that liberals should be less sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale immigration. His neighbour, described as one of the country’s most senior civil servants, said: ‘I disagree. When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration.

Selina Hastings

‘The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder’, by Andrew Rose – review

In April 1917 Edward, Prince of Wales, at a luncheon at the Crillon Hotel in Paris, had the misfortune to meet the very sexy and utterly loathsome Marguerite Alibert. A successful demimondaine, Marguerite could be amusing company, sophisticated in manner and extremely chic. Expert in bed, she was also expert at manipulating men and parting them from very large sums of money; and as all her lovers soon discovered, when crossed she proved spoilt, vindictive and possessed of a terrifying temper. The Prince fell for her at once and began an affair which lasted just over a year.

Sara Maitland

‘Silence: A Christian History’, by Diarmaid MacCulloch – review

This is a specialist book for non-specialist readers — by which I mean in part that it is made highly accessible to anyone seriously interested by excellent and lively writing rather than by any dumbing down. It may be an odd thing to say about a history of the intersection of platonic philosophy and Christian and Judaic spiritual theologies, but actually it is great fun. A good read. Nonetheless it is also odd and unexpected. One of the oddities is the curious balance of silence and confessional in the authorial voice. It is a sign of the times, I think, when a book of this substance tells the reader more about the author’s sexuality than about his relationship to the faith he is discussing.

Sam Leith

‘Levels of Life’, by Julian Barnes – review

‘You put together two things that have not been put together before and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.’ In this slim book Julian Barnes puts not two but three things together: nonfiction, fiction and memoir. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The first section is an elegant and breezy account of the early days of ballooning and the development of aerial photography. Here are the adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the photographer Félix Tournachon (otherwise known as Nadar): ‘The enthusiastic English amateur, the most famous actress of her era, making a celebrity flight, and the professional balloonist’.

Nicky Haslam

‘Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty’, by Michèle Fitoussi – review

In New York, in the 1960s, in a sleek, silvery elevator, I rose from the marble halls of Helena Rubinstein’s gleaming emporium up towards the top floor office of a new friend who worked for that legendary beautician. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the lift stopped, the doors slid open and a tiny, squat figure with oily, inky hair scraped back and livid carmine cheeks above violently purple tweed capes stabbed with a jagged, surreal brooch, stood peering up at what I hoped was my youthful, English-rose complexion. A short, intense scrutiny. Then, imperiously: ‘Oy vey! But I sink ve can help. Tell Patrick he needs gif you our XXX recipe.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005-2008’, by Lawrence Goldman – review

Where else would you possibly find George Painter, Jackie Pallo and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in immediate successive proximity? The incunabulist of the British Museum who emerged from scholarly obscurity with his biography of Proust, the curly-blond wrestler in kinky trunks, and the son of an Edinburgh-Italian confectioner who became an avant-garde sculptor, have nothing whatever in common except that they died within the same four-year period, and they have all been accounted British worthies, deserving places in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In September 2004, I wrote here about the astonishing new Oxford DNB, edited by H. C. G.

Jeremy Treglown

‘Saul Bellow’s Heart’, by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow, a retired child psychotherapist in his late sixties, is the eldest of the novelist Saul Bellow’s offspring. Bellow Sr (pictured above in 1984), as we already knew from his part-autobiographical fictions and a readable, well-sourced critical biography by James Atlas published in 2000, was a fairly dutiful, not unaffectionate father but didn’t see affection as an impediment to truthfulness and always put his writing before anything else. He claimed that he had never heard of ‘an honest working man’ on either side of his Lithuanian Jewish family: ‘My forefathers were Talmudists. My maternal grandfather had 12 children and never worked a day in his life.

Thursday

Mark Mason

‘A Slow Passion’, by Ruth Brooks – review

Snails are supposed to hate eggshells. Not the ones in Ruth Brooks’s garden. They clamber over the barrier as though it’s ‘a new extreme sport’. Ditto hair. And grit. She tries beer, but her young son drinks it. As for coffee grounds (normally a failsafe), the pests just eat them, then attack the flowers with even more vigour, off their snaily little boxes on caffeine. But A Slow Passion (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is more than just an account of Brooks’s battles to save her delphiniums. Her relationship with snails is love-hate, has been ever since she discovered a colony of them in the air-raid shelter in her childhood garden.

Ian Thomson

‘Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson’, edited by Jonathan Coe – review

B.S. Johnson railed intemperately at life, but in his fiction at least he found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in a bath while drunk. Today, in spite of his former high reputation as Britain’s ‘most subversive novelist’, Johnson is pretty well forgotten. On the evidence of the prose and plays collected in Well Done God!, however, it would be a mistake to consign him to the frivolous pastures of the literary bagatelle. Samuel Beckett, for one, enjoyed the irreverent boisterousness of his writing, and the admiration was mutual.

Tom Rosenthal

‘The Birth of an Opera’, by Michael Rose – review

When, more than half a century ago, I was a student, deriving much of my education from the Third Programme, I was given, between 1955 and 1971, a crash course on opera by Hans Hammelmann and Michael Rose. The two of them were major opera historians and both were natural broadcasters, able to pass their enthusiasm on to the public; and more or less immediately I became a devoted operaphile. But, as the radio programmes grew fainter in the memory and one’s tastes were moulded by countless actual performances, so one craved the book of the series.Now at last Michael Rose (Hammelmann is dead) has written that book, and it is not only as scholarly, authoritative and entertaining as the broadcasts; it has also benefited by another 50 years of Rose’s study and mastery of the subject.

Candy Neubert

long back yard

This must be how we die, a Sunday train, late afternoon, November, Basingstoke. This must be how the heart falls out of reach where it won’t be warmed, too many faces at the window getting on, getting off, while we are all always between stations staring out at hedges in case a fox saves us. Here’s a row of blue trampolines in the long back yards, someone’s bath cleaner on an inside sill; here against this glass in front of each of us the self’s own shape delivers a skull. Then out through the town; an odd stark tree illuminates the dark, the smell of leaf on stone, a reprimand.

William Skidelsky

‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’, by Mohsin Hamid – review

In the classic rags-to-riches narrative, a boy born into poverty attains respectability by dint of hard work, clean living and moral courage. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel — his eagerly awaited follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — updates the genre for the 21st century, transplanting it to ‘rising Asia’ but stripping it of all sense of uplift. We first encounter Hamid’s unnamed protagonist in his filthy village compound, ‘huddled, shivering on the packed earth’, wracked by hepatitis E.

Caroline Moore

‘The City of Devi’, by Manil Suri – review

Manil Suri’s novel is like a ‘masala movie’ — a Bombay mix of genres, spicy, often subtle, often corny, and distinctly addictive. It is difficult to pin down its overriding flavour. A reviewer on the back cover notes that ‘Manil Suri has been likened to Narayan, Coetzee, Chekhov and Flaubert’; but there are twinkly sprinklings of Armistead Maupin and Frank L. Baum, and a strong dash of apocalyptic thriller. The City of Devi is the third and most flamboyant of a trilogy, each volume named after a Hindu deity. After The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva, readers who know the Hindu trimurti might have expected Brahma the Creator to complete the trinity.

Marcus Berkmann

Penguin Underground Lines – review

You don’t have to live in London to be faintly obsessed by the Tube, but it probably helps. At this point I should state my bona fides: born in Great Ormond Street Hospital (nearest station: Russell Square), babyhood in Marylebone (Bakerloo line, originally to be called ‘Lisson Grove’), grew up in Hampstead (deepest station on the network with 320 steps down to the platform), and now live on the scabby side of Highgate, yards away from the disused overground line that once went to Finsbury Park. I am not a train-spotter as such, or even at all, but I do know to sit in the final carriage if I am getting out at Warren Street (that’s where the exit is) and that ‘Pimlico’ is the only station name that contains no letters from the word ‘badger’.

Jane Ridley

‘Holland House: A History of London’s Most Celebrated Salon’, by Linda Kelly – review

Holland House, which was bombed in 1940, was a large, rambling Jacobean mansion off Kensington High Street. In 1800 it was still in the country, surrounded by leafy woods and fields. Here Lord Holland and his wife Lady Holland created a glittering and influential salon. For over 30 years before the 1832 Reform Act, Holland House was the headquarters of the Whig party. Lord Holland was the nephew of Charles James Fox, and at Holland House the Whig aristocracy — ‘they are all cousins’, as someone said — dined and talked and plotted. An intellectual nerve centre, Holland House was the place where the new men with the new thinking from Scotland met and influenced the Whigs. Byron was a favourite, and it was at Holland House that he first met Lady Caroline Lamb.

Anthony Howell

Grumarí

The leaves  hardly breathe   and snakes  loop round the branches,  soaking up heat   from cars parked  nose to tail outside  the seafood   kiosk by  this savage southern   beach where  the leaves hardly breathe  and snakes   loop round  the branches, soaking up heat  from cars parked   nose to tail  outside the seafood  kiosk by   this savage  southern beach.

Philip Ziegler

‘The Undivided Past’, by David Cannadine – review

David Cannadine detests generalisations and looks disapprovingly on any attempt to divide humanity into precise categories. The Undivided Past provides a resoundingly dusty answer to any historian rash enough to seek for certainties in this our life. It is highly intelligent, stimulating, occasionally provocative and enormous fun to read. Cannadine considers the six ways in which humanity is traditionally deemed to split into distinct and usually hostile groups — religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilisation — and demonstrates that these groups are neither distinct nor hostile — indeed, can hardly be said to be groups at all. ‘When I was coming up,’ said President George W. Bush regretfully, ‘you knew exactly who they were.

Thursday

Zenga Longmore

The Quickening, by Julie Myerson — review

The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister husband, Dan. Rachel’s ghostly journey begins when Dan suggests a holiday in Antigua. Even though Rachel has a creepy premonition when she sees a photograph of her Caribbean destination, she’s not deterred. Of course, strange things happen when they arrive. Psychic taxi- drivers mumble cryptic warnings. A clairvoyant waitress tearfully begs Rachel to leave the island. Light-fittings fly off the walls. Shadowy figures lumber along sunlit beaches. Locals are murdered in mysterious circumstances.