More from Books

The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina. Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white, is precisely evoked by Lawrence Hill, himself a Canadian of mixed-race background.

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’: I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love.

In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing.

Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade, by Siân Rees The narratives of slavery have, it’s safe to say, replaced the narratives of imperial adventure in our reading lives, and our moral compasses are orientated by indignation at suffering and exploitation rather than by the contemplation of our ancestors’ achievements. The slave trade, considered ‘relevant’ as well as a gruesome spectacle of human suffering on a colossal scale, is taught in schools and familiar to millions to whom ‘Nelson’ suggests only Mandela. And yet the abolition of the slave trade, over long, difficult decades, was one of the bravest and most serious endeavours of the British in the 19th century.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel In 1858, on the brink of publishing his theory of evolution, which I discussed here three weeks ago, Charles Darwin took a hydropathic rest cure at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. While walking on the sandy heath, he caught a glimpse of ‘the rare Slave-making Ant & saw the little black niggers in their Master’s nests’. A certain species of red ant kidnaps the young of a smaller black ant and rears them as unwitting slave workers in the service of the red queen. Darwin had heard about this phenomenon but had not till then seen it. Darwin’s upbringing had been steeped in the anti-slavery movement.

The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, by Robert Crawford Robert Burns: A Biography, by Patrick Scott Hogg How to account for the phenomenon of Robert Burns? Not the man or his poetry, but the national icon, a Caledonian amalgam of Alexander Pushkin and Bob Marley? The process of idolisation began with the instant acclaim that greeted the publication of Burns’ first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786. That it continues today in this the 250th anniversary of his birth is demonstrated by the publication of two new biographies. But to explain why is harder than it might seem. Logically Scotland and Burns should have been incompatible.