More from Books

Thursday

Simon Kuper

The secret of Gary Lineker’s success

In his closing pages, Chris Evans delivers his verdict on his subject: That’s what Gary Lineker is: human. As his story shows, it’s possible to accomplish seemingly impossible things while staying grounded and true to your roots. I hate to be cruel about a diligently researched book by a freelance journalist. But unthinking writing cannot capture a man who managed to think himself into two great careers, first as a footballer and then as a TV presenter. Lineker was born in Leicester in 1960. His parents were market traders who worked brutal hours, then relaxed over card games that could run all weekend, with participants (including the local crooner Engelbert Humperdinck) taking turns to retire for naps.

Michela Wrong

Never underestimate the complexities of African history

What does it take to bury an outdated argument? The thought occurred while reading Motherland, one of a series of recent books seemingly haunted by the ghost of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Back in 1964, Trevor-Roper, an expert on the English Civil War and the Third Reich, made the mistake of opining on African history. There was nothing much to teach, he said, other than the history of Europeans in Africa. ‘The rest is largely darkness... And darkness is not a subject for history.’ He then added insult to injury with a snitty reference to the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’. These were silly remarks; but Trevor-Roper was the man who later authenticated the Hitler diaries, so not above the odd clanger.

Peter Stothard

The crude tirades of Cicero the demagogue

It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes, argues Josiah Osgood, an American historian, whose book persuasively analyses a range of Cicero’s murder, fraud and extortion cases. Other men of the time were often no better, he writes, but, echoing Michelle Obama on Donald Trump: ‘Fortunately for Cicero, if his opponents went low, he knew how to go even lower.

Tuesday

Chloë Ashby

The splatter of green and yellow that caused uproar in the Victorian art world

London, June 1877. Beneath a cloudy sky, the celebrated art critic John Ruskin strode along Bond Street towards the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery. Inside, he viewed a smash-hit show of beautiful and progressive art. At least that was the popular opinion. With a few exceptions, Ruskin dismissed the works on display as eccentric, impertinent and indulgent. Worst of all? James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket’, a deliciously wispy painting that captures sparks fizzing and flaring in a dark night sky. Ruskin fired the first shot; then Whistler sued him for libel, firing straight back At least that’s how I would describe it.

Alexander Larman

The self-serving delusions of the ‘Swastika Kaiser’

Whenever a new study of the Nazi regime appears, it is taken as a given that after Adolf Hitler seized power and became dictator of Germany in 1933 an egalitarian society emerged, very different to previous decadent, backward-looking generations. In this modern era, it is assumed, the concerns of the Kaiser and the German elite were at best ignored and at worst made another target of the Führer’s purges. In 1933, Wilhelm called Hitler a ‘torchbearer with unparalleled force of conviction and self-sacrifice’ It’s a tempting summation, but an over-simplistic one. As a biographer of the Duke of Windsor, I drew on documents that suggested that Hitler was in fact deeply impressed by the former Edward VIII.

Rose George

Why do we assume smell is our weakest sense?

My cat can smell depression. Another family cat could smell my stepfather’s dementia. They both became more affectionate and tactile: the dementia-smelling cat would gently paw my stepfather, when he hadn’t even liked her when he had been well. My cat comes in close when my mood is darker. Perhaps both cats were using other cues, but I’m convinced it was smell. Up until the 18th century, doctors relied for diagnoses on smell as much as anything else For something that Jonas Olofsson calls ‘the easiest and most natural thing in the world’, smell is satisfyingly complicated. When it comes to humans’ ability to smell, as Olofsson persuades us in this captivating book, it has also been profoundly neglected. This wasn’t always the case.

Andrew Roberts

The ghost of his father haunts Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’  Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.

Diana Hendry

A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became. Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir. The Visitor, her only novella, written in her late twenties when she was working as a journalist in Manhattan, remained unpublished in her lifetime.

Franklin Nelson

This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed

When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might have been taking his cue from the man he considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. While serving as a diplomat in Britain, Cuba and France, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) savaged clerical hypocrisy and national backwardness in what are now considered canonical realist doorstoppers. And a century before Saramago, he caused a similar ruckus with Adam and Eve in Paradise.

Thursday

Rupert Shortt

We are all people of faith, whether we realise it or not

A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers. Yet Ayer’s ideas survive today in mutated form and influence other subjects besides philosophy. Though partly infected by relativism, the humanities have witnessed a growing impulse to redescribe everything in material and supposedly objective terms. The move is reductive. It involves restricting us to a world of causes rather than reasons, sounds rather than music.

Philip Hensher

The beauty and tedium of the works of Adalbert Stifter

A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, Sebald had a career in the academic proponency of German literature. Silent Catastrophes is the first English translation of two essay collections from 1985 and 1991, The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland. (‘Uncanny’ would be a better translation than ‘strange’, but neither title goes easily into English.

Tuesday

Mathew Lyons

The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover

At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died of a heart attack in his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. Prokofiev’s death wasn’t so much forgotten as ignored. The leading music magazine Sovetskaya muzyka devoted the first 115 pages of its new issue to Stalin; only then did it mention Prokofiev. A million people thronged the streets to see Stalin lie in state; only 15 attended Prokofiev’s funeral. A string quartet played beside Stalin’s bier. Its violinist, Veronika Rostropovich, cried inconsolably. ‘Leave me in peace,’ she told her colleagues.

Nicholas Lezard

The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York

I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’ A self-described radical feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, Vivian Gornick says that that flame has died down a bit now (she was 79 when this book was first published ten years ago). Her perspective in this meandering, delightful memoir-cum-essay is still, obviously, feminine – yet there is a kind of detachment; and from what she says about her past life, and her experiences with men, and with love, there always was, in a way. Hence the ‘odd’ in the title.

Mitchell Reiss

Time is running out to tackle the dangers posed by AI

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would have for humanity.  We are broadly familiar with AI’s current and future benefits.

Anne Margaret Daniel

The golden days of Greenwich Village

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories stemming from jazz, blues, folk, folk-rock and all the complementing, competing musical genres that could define what’s been played in the basement nightclubs and coffee houses in this small area of New York City since the early 20th century. He takes his title from the talkin’ blues, the direct ancestor of rap, and he is, like the writers of those blues, a born storyteller.

Tibor Fischer

The horror of Hungary in the second world war

I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, from the harsh measures of the 1920 Trianon treaty to the devastating arrival of the Soviet army in Budapest in 1944. LeBor switches between an Olympian view of European geopolitics, trawling diplomatic archives and political memoirs and focusing on individuals – Hungarian aristocrats, Zionists and nightclub singers – to show how history felt on the ground. He is particularly concerned with the fate of Hungarian Jewry.

Andrew Rosenheim

A mole in the CIA: The Seventh Floor, by David McCloskey, reviewed

David McCloskey, whose Damascus Station was a brilliant debut, has followed it in quick succession with a Russian-based story, Moscow X, and now The Seventh Floor. The pace of all three books is matched by the speed with which they have been produced; and for all The Seventh Floor’s strengths,the haste is beginning to show. Like the earlier two thrillers, it starts with a bang – or rather a crunch, when a Russian spy, called home peremptorily from Greece by his superiors, bites into a disguised cyanide capsule before the State security apparatus can question him. Almost simultaneously, another Russian spook, named Golikov, has a clandestine meeting in Singapore with Sam Joseph, a CIA officer known to us from Moscow X.

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Norman Lewis – a restless adventurer with a passion for broken-down places

The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic). Enfield is not a likely pocket of the paranormal, but the Enfield Beacon of Light is still going strong. During its table-rapping and other spook-dabbling sessions no one is allowed to make jokes about striking a happy medium. Spiritualism is dead serious. Lewis’s humdrum upbringing in Edwardian Enfield – aspidistras, astral-planing – was far removed from the social privilege of most literary travellers.

Mia Levitin

Bad vibrations: Lazarus Man, by Richard Price, reviewed

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has cost him his job and relationship with his wife and stepdaughter.

Francesca Peacock

Outlandish epic: Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, reviewed

In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’. The book that produced such praise – Italo Calvino called it ‘a serious novel, full of living human beings’ – has gone by different names in English: House of Liars or, in this new edition published by Penguin Classics and NYRB Books, Lies and Sorcery.