More from Books

Sunday

Bryan Appleyard

‘The wickedest man in Europe’ was just an intellectual provocateur

In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Bernard Mandeville, popularly known as the Man-Devil. After Mandeville’s death in 1733, Samuel Johnson, perhaps the wisest Englishman who ever drew breath, admitted that the book had ‘opened my views into real life very much’. And David Hume, the great British philosopher, said the Man-Devil was, in fact, one of the most important figures in the development of ‘the science of man’.

Sam Leith

The intensity of female friendship explored

‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the late Carmen Callil – seeks to redress that. It was, as Cooke reports in her introduction, more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. Every other popular novel these days may be about female friendship (‘The result,’ Cooke semi-grumbles, ‘both of feminism and, I think, of capitalism’), but before Jane Austen, ‘fully realised and articulated friendships between women in literature’ were as rare as full stops in Henry James.

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

When will Ronald Reagan get the recognition he deserves?

The talented military historian Max Boot has published a well-researched life of Ronald Reagan that is fundamentally wrong. First the good parts: he has combed through lots of archives finding new information and has interviewed countless people who worked with or knew Reagan. His style also bears the reader effortlessly along. Yet his claim that Reagan was merely a lightweight pragmatist who had little effect on reviving the American economy, resuscitating the country’s self-esteem or winning the Cold War is absurdly revisionist. It says more about the author’s own rejection of the Republican party than it does about Reagan’s world-historical achievements.

Emma Smith

Thomas Kyd wasn’t a patch on Shakespeare

The biggest blockbuster hit of the Elizabethan theatre was not by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson. In fact it wasn’t by anyone. The Spanish Tragedy, a sturdy play of rhetoric, blood and revenge, was published in multiple editions without any attribution at all. Its central figure, Hieronimo, was a cultural phenomenon, but the drama was widely quoted, imitated and parodied without mention of its author. Its impact was huge. We wouldn’t have Hamlet without it. BBC Radio 4’s invitation to celebrities to try experiences they have unaccountably missed is called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. Without a doubt, the Elizabethan equivalent would have been I’ve Never Seen The Spanish Tragedy.

Lionel Barber

The rotten core of Credit Suisse

The tale of Credit Suisse ought to be Buddenbrooks on steroids. A staid Swiss lender enters marriage with a racy Wall Street investment bank and gives birth to a monster. Scandal follows scandal. CEOs come and go. In March 2023, the bank ends up being flogged to its arch rival UBS for a miserly $3 billion. Inside Credit Suisse, the backstabbing and treachery were more suited to a medieval court Duncan Mavin is well placed to tell this corporate horror story, having written a book about one of Credit Suisse’s most notorious clients, Lex Greensill, an Australian melon farmer turned fintech champion. Greensill Capital, which employed David Cameron as a Whitehall lobbyist and international frontman, turned out to be a house of cards.

James Campbell

Why does James Baldwin matter so much now?

James Baldwin matters. To veteran Baldwin admirers, his renewed prominence comes as a surprise after decades of indifference. This year, in the centenary of his birth in Harlem, Baldwin has seemed to matter more than at any time since his heyday, when he combined the roles of writer and civil rights spokesman. Between 1961 and 1964 he produced three bestselling books – two collections of essays and the novel Another Country – as well as a stylish collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon and a Broadway play. In May 1963, Time put him on its cover (Martin Luther King had to wait until the following January). Life called him ‘the monarch of the current literary jungle’.

Julie Burchill

Modern-day ghosts: Haunted Tales, by Adam Macqueen, reviewed

I don’t approve of ghosts, from the sublime (I generally just mouth the words ‘Holy Ghost’ in church, as I don’t want to pledge allegiance to something I can’t help but envision looking like the traditional sheet-based model) to the ridiculous (I would charge all ‘mediums’ with fraud). If ghosts were invariably like poltergeists (the Mrs Thatchers of the spirit world), I might have more time for them. But as it is, I just want to shake them and tell them to sort themselves out. Having said that, Adam Macqueen’s Haunted Tales is a cracking little book. As befits a writer who went to Private Eye for work experience and never left, it’s knowing and waspish; nonetheless, the stories read like a labour of love.

Harry Wallop

Nostalgia for the bustling high street is misplaced

Every Christmas the proportion of money we spend online escalates. This year probably more than a third of all our festive gifts and food will be sourced via the internet. With this will go the usual hand-wringing about consumerism causing neighbourhoods to become clogged up with delivery vans and the death of our high street. If you think calls to boycott Amazon and entreaties to shop local are a new phenomenon, think again. In 1888, a Tunbridge Wells vicar implored his flock to support the town’s shopkeepers, for ‘the weight of goods arriving at our local stations for private people far exceeds that for the tradesmen’. He was bemoaning the boom in mail order, which flourished in late Victorian Britain thanks to the emergence of the railways and clever retailers.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The dreadful fate of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters

‘Cela me revolte,’ wrote Queen Victoria in her diary in 1894 when her adored granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse announced her engagement to the Tsarevich Nicholas, ‘to feel that she has been taken possession of and carried away by those Russians.’ The sisters all look alike in the photos: uncomfortable dress, priceless jewellery, grimace, hair in bun  The queen was proprietorial about the four surviving daughters of her late daughter Alice, who had died of diphtheria, aged 35, when little Alix was only six. To lose one of those granddaughters to the Russians had been bad enough.

Justin Marozzi

For God or Allah

I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather than the wider public, the grand narrative history is something which general readers will applaud and enjoy. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, to give him the full honours, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldiers and is steeped in the history of the Middle East. There is no doubting the pivotal nature of the ten military encounters he has summoned between Christendom and the caliphate over the past 1,300 years.

Stephen Bayley

The must-have novelties nobody needed

Many reviewers start work with a peek at the book’s index. Here you find Gladys Goose Lamp, Choo Choo Chain and Dynamite Candles – novelty gifts (the ‘executive toys’ of the title) that made a small fortune for their creators. You might therefore think this a very slight book – so slight that its value could be dispersed by the mildest of zephyrs. But no. With unhesitating commitment it reveals the frailty and vanity of the long-gone culture it describes. Thus, fascinating.  Can anything better illustrate the sense of doom gathering in the 1980s than an executive toy created for bored Concorde passengers? They say an era is at its end when its illusions are exhausted: BA001 LHR-JFK, playing with a fluid puzzle after several glasses of the Chateau Palmer ’70 at Mach 2.

Craig Raine

4,000 pages of T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism is not enough

This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein: I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead [the mathematician]. Defiantly, flagrantly clairvoyant. Daring us to dispute the claim, the Big Lie flourishes. Size matters. Think George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Big Whoppers both, tirelessly fibbing.  Towards the end of his life, in 1963, T.S.

Tuesday

Stuart Kelly

Out of this world: The Suicides, by Antonio di Benedetto, reviewed

The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of – and was imprisoned and tortured in 1976-77, during Argentina’s Dirty War. His eerie fables of paranoia, impending threat and incomprehension pre-empted his experience of them. Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I foundthe wait for The Suicides excruciating. But it was worth it.

Richard Bradford

Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved unreservedly by her children and comes across in My Family as a kindly eccentric.

Alex Burghart

Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?

The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’ After 27 years in the Commons, 14 of them as Chair of the 1922 Committee, the commodore has swapped his deck garb for ermine and written a kiss-and-tell about his political encounters with five Tory prime ministers. The 1922 Committee – the fabled men in grey suits who represent the parliamentary party’s backbenchers – is ‘the closest thing the Conservative party has to its own trade union’.

Martin Gayford

‘Teaching someone to draw is teaching them to look’: the year’s best art books

Colour, the painter Patrick Heron once proclaimed, is a continent that artists have yet to explore. The mammoth two-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen, £150) catalogues numerous attempts to map this mysterious chromatic domain, from the late 17th century to the mid 20th. It quickly becomes clear that this area is infinitely vast. One only has to glance at the plates of the ‘Viennese Colour Cabinet’ (1794) – a whole column of blue-greens – to realise that. The effect of these technical diagrams is beautiful in the manner of abstract art.

Mathew Lyons

A rare combination of humour and pathos: the sublimely talented Neil Innes

Fans of that beloved British cultural institution Doctor Who are wont to talk about ‘their’ doctor – that is, which iteration of the character was their entry point to the franchise. The same might be said of fans of Neil Innes, the much loved songwriter, musician and comedian who died in 2019, aged 75. Creating happiness seems to have been one of Innes’s gifts, in public as well as private In the 1960s, Innes was a key member of the exhilaratingly unpredictable Bonzo Dog Band, whose blend of verbal, musical and visual humour remains matchless in its absurdity, breadth and daring.

Brian Martin

Learning difficulties: The University of Bliss, by Julian Stannard, reviewed

You have been warned. First, David Butterfield has excoriated Cambridge University in these pages, leaving its standing devalued. Now Julian Stannard, a poet and novelist, delivers in fiction a devastating evisceration of other current universities. The University of Bliss belies its title. This is a work of high satire and Stannard vents his frustration with more than a touch of Swiftian saeva indignatio. His ridicule is extreme and addictively readable. The novel follows the career of the newly appointed vice chancellor Gladys Nirvana, partial to foot massages which transport her to regions signalled by her surname and give her acute sexual gratification.

Allan Mallinson

The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed

Who could forget the Polish squadrons in RAF Fighter Command when, in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, a British squadron leader, frustrated by the excited radio chatter on being allowed into action at last, orders ‘Silence! In Polish!’ Or the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, whose commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, played by Gene Hackman in A Bridge Too Far (1977), thinking the venture disastrous, growls ‘God Bless Field Marshal Montgomery’ as he jumps from his Dakota? Commander Eugeniusz Plawski, the captain of the Polish destroyer Piorun which first spotted the Bismarck and charged at her to draw fire, might be better known if he had featured in the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! – but that wasn’t expedient, with the honours going instead to a Royal Navy officer.