More from Books

Tuesday

Oliver Soden

A geriatric Lord of the Flies: Killing Time, by Alan Bennett, reviewed

Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with Thora Hird, one-time presenter of Songs of Praise, saying: ‘I saw this feller’s what-do-you-call-it today.’ It takes three pages for a what-do-you-call-it to appear in Killing Time, Bennett’s new novella, which is set in Hill Topp House old people’s home. Mr Woodruff, a resident, is indefatigable, his self-exposure a running motif as ‘not for the first time, he tried to show Audrey his willy’.

Harry Mount

All human life – and death – is here: the British parish church

In ‘Church Going’, the poem that gives this charming book its title, Philip Larkin talks about ‘one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were... Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’. Well, Andrew Ziminski is king of the ruin-bibbers, randy for antique churches. He doesn’t just know what a rood-loft is; he’s also repaired loads of them. For 35 years, he has been a church conservator. In his first book, The Stonemason, he brilliantly explained his job. In this sequel, he takes us all round the church, from gravestones to altar cloths, and explains every conceivable aspect of the great parish church. Guides like this have been done before, but not by someone who actually repairs churches.

Richard Davenport-Hines

‘I like it when my pupils run the world’: a celebration of Jeremy Catto

Jeremy Catto’s first sexual experiences were with a greengrocer’s son, but he lost interest in the boy after discovering that his family used tea bags rather than tea leaves. As a youth he marched with the Oxford branch of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, but bearing aloft a banner calling for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France. In middle age, he caused consternation by changing into his pyjamas on an overnight flight to Singapore: ‘But it’s my bedtime!’ he cried when there were complaints. Catto, evidently, was a fine example of that quick-witted type, with a dauntless and uncompromising way of making arbitrary choices, known as the English eccentric. ‘The best bankers are historians, not economists,’ said Catto.

Daisy Dunn

They weren’t all scheming poisoners: the maligned women of imperial Rome

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac must be one of the most eye-catching book titles of the year. I assumed it was just a riff on John Ford’s 17th-century tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but apparently it came directly from the mouth of a modern tour guide in a museum in Rome. The man was describing Julia, the daughter of the first Roman emperor Augustus, when Joan Smith stepped in. ‘Julia,’ she corrected him, ‘was not a nymphomaniac.’ The rattled guide, who conceded that he was merely following the (biased) ancient sources, may be relieved to learn that he has not been singled out. Smith, the author of the barnstorming Misogynies, takes many others to task for insensitivity in her new history of 23 women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Anne de Courcy

Wondrous treasure troves: the Jewish country houses of Europe

The words ‘country houses’ immediately make one think of England, yet only five of the 15 featured in this hefty, impressively illustrated book are in Britain. It is a compilation of essays: part histories of various Jewish families, part architectural descriptions and part stories of the chateaux, mansions, villas and, of course, country houses all over Europe, owned and sometimes built by these families. Each chapter is by a different author. The swimming pool was surrounded by such a profusion of lilies that the scent at night was overpowering  These homes had different functions. Some, like that of the German-born painter Max Liebermann, were built as traditional country retreats – his palatial town house was next to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

Wednesday

James Ball

Conspiracy theories are as old as witch hunts 

To millions of people across America, Hillary Clinton sits atop a global network of satanic child-traffickers and is battling an underground resistance led by Donald Trump to maintain her malign influence. That is the core tenet of the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that originated in obscure corners of the internet before being seized upon by members of the Republican elite for their political advantage. Did the Clintons get rich while undertaking a life of public service? Absolutely QAnon is at the heart of Gabriel Gatehouse’s The Coming Storm. But the book begins with a conspiracy theory from centuries earlier, about witches in medieval Europe.

Nat Segnit

From street urchin to superstar: the unlikely career of Al Pacino

Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It’s a questionable claim, especially given that in Pacino Barkin had perhaps the least naturalistic co-star imaginable. He is forever searching for the off-beat, the syncopation that will spring the line open Pacino is – albeit in his own highly idiosyncratic way – no less theatrical an actor than John Gielgud, more invested in the musicality of his line readings than in fidelity to the real.

Suzi Feay

An otherworldly London: The Great When, by Alan Moore, reviewed

Is occult knowledge even possible in the age of the internet? If a recondite author obsessed you back in the day, it took hours of fossicking in far-flung dusty bookshops to feed your hunger. Oh, the joys of hunting down a shabby collection of Arthur Machen weirdiana! Now a few keystrokes will do the job. The magic has been lost. Magic is Alan Moore’s business, and he’s also a Machen devotee. The graphic novelist is well known for issuing his illustrators with exceptionally detailed written instructions for series such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell, which perhaps accounts for the throbbing prose style of this fantasy novel.

Michael Arditti

Doctor in trouble: Time of the Child, by Niall Williams, reviewed

In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy of Edna O’Brien’s banned The Country Girls is read surreptitiously by the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie Troy; a photograph of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the USA, hangs proudly on the postmistress’s wall. But in the main the rhythm of life persists much as it has for generations. Like Ronnie, Niall Williams clearly feels that Faha represents ‘the full of humanity, in its ordinary clothes’, since Time of the Child is his third visit to the fictitious County Clare village, following History of the Rain and This is Happiness. Indeed, Noel Crowe, the protagonist of the latter, remains a potent, albeit unseen, presence here.

Eleanor Myerson

Why must medieval mysticism be treated as a malady?

Medieval women – they were ‘just like us’. Except that they weren’t. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife is the first popular book by the academic and New Generation thinker Hetta Howes. It is a history of medieval women in relation to four celebrated figures – Marie de France (poet), Julian of Norwich (mystic), Christine de Pizan (widow) and Margery Kempe (wife) – whose lives have been retold recently in excellent studies by Anthony Bale, Marion Turner and Janina Ramirez. Howes’s book is highly readable and informative, placing the works of this quartet within a broad range of cultural documents – treatises, guidebooks, wills, court records and folklore. There are some great details, such as the theological debate about the Virgin Mary’s orgasm.

Alexander Lee

The enduring mystery of Goethe’s Faust

A.N. Wilson has never been afraid of big subjects. His previous books have tackled the Victorians, Charles Dickens, Dante, Jesus and Hitler, to name just a few. So it’s hardly a surprise that he’s now decided to have a crack at Goethe’s Faust. How do all the intellectual fireworks fit together? What, in short, does it all mean? As literary whales go, they don’t get much bigger. In fact, apart from the Bible and the Divine Comedy, there aren’t many works which have had such a decisive impact on western literature. It has so deeply marked the popular imagination that most of us probably know the story, even if we haven’t read it. It is, nevertheless, something of a puzzle.

Honor Clerk

The stark, frugal world of Piet Mondrian

In September 1940 the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian arrived in New York, a refugee from war and the London Blitz. He was 68, a well known figure in modern art circles in Europe but as yet little appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic. His visas, his travel and his accommodation had been sorted out for him by well-wishers in Britain and he was welcomed in America by Harry Holtzman, an artist some 40 years his junior. On the evening of his arrival, Holtzman entertained the stiff, fastidious, well-dressed Mondrian to dinner in his apartment and introduced him, via the phonograph, to boogie-woogie. He recalled: Mondrian’s response was immediate, he clapped his hands together with obvious pleasure. He sat in complete absorption to the music, saying, ‘Enormous! Enormous!

Oliver Soden

‘I had once been a cat’ – the feline fantasies of Caleb Carr

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’ I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated.

Tuesday

John R. MacArthur

The journalist’s journalist: the irrepressible Claud Cockburn

No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career. By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Marx was right Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career.

Lisa Hilton

The court favourite who became the most hated man in England

The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive... to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in Europe extinguished his star.

James Bradley

A scorched Earth: Juice, by Tim Winton, reviewed

Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look the climate crisis in the eye. Quoting Amitav Ghosh’s observation about the ‘patterns of evasion’ that continue to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, he argued that writers must overcome the habits of mind that treat the natural world as an inert externality. Instead, they must find ways to recognise that we are part of nature, and our fate is inseparable from the world around us. ‘We have difficult work to do,’ he declared. ‘And we’re late to the bushfire.’ Of course, Winton is not someone who could ever be accused of treating the natural world as mere window-dressing.

Henry Hitchings

The rollercoaster ride of the world’s most reckless investor

For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid ‘salaryman’ business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight – but only for a while. A techno-optimist, the now 67-year-old has repeatedly reinvented himself, urging doubters to see beyond the immediate: ‘You’re limiting your field of vision to 30 years... Start bold and think 300 years ahead.

Erica Wagner

The magic of carefully crafted words

Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner knows time; time knows Alan Garner. Powsels and Thrums is a collection of essays – and poems and a little bit of remarkable fiction – published in Garner’s 90th year.

Charlotte Hobson

Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials

If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat them ‘as if they were ice cream or something’, in Damien Hirst’s phrase, then Martin Gayford’s latest book will be a banquet. In part, this is thanks to the illustrations – luscious close-ups of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes like buttercream icing, and a double-page spread of a golden Rothko large enough to tumble into. But mainly it’s due to his intention to understand the medium of painting from the inside out: from the artists’ viewpoint rather than the art historian’s. He is well placed to do this, having interviewed almost every well-known artist (many of them for this magazine) during his past 30 years as a critic.

Emily Rhodes

Mounting suspicion: The Fate of Mary Rose, by Caroline Blackwood, reviewed

‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is not about the title’s Mary Rose but about another six-year-old girl, Margaret Sutton, who has been abducted, raped and murdered in the Kent woods. The story is told from the perspective of Mary Rose’s father, Rowan Anderson, who spends most of his time in London, writing a biography of the scientist Hertha Ayrton and feuding with his possessive girlfriend, Gloria. He periodically visits his daughter and his wife, Cressida, in their country cottage.