More from Books

Tuesday

Andy Miller

The joy of chucking little wooden blocks around

It cannot have escaped the notice of readers of even this most refined of journals that once again the country is enjoying and enduring a legendary summer of sport. As happens every year, there is a World Cup of this, a grand prix of that and a nail-biting tie breaker of something or other. It takes a brave man, or a foolhardy one, to toss his quoit into this bubbling cauldron of balls, especially when the quoit in question is a stick of sustainable, though not inflammable, Finnish wood. But cometh the hour, cometh the memoir. Neil Squires’s amusing account of his year on the Mölkky circuit offers a salutary reminder that he who dares usually loses. Organised sport is notorious for its financial misdeeds, doping scandals and political usefulness.

Wednesday

John R. MacArthur

Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?

In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster Dulles might seem welcome for hawks and doves alike. Indeed, Dulles’s tenure as secretary of state during the first six years of the Eisenhower administration could be viewed – even by the harshest left-wing critic of American imperialism – as a useful and reassuring point of reference, despite its narrow anti-communist dogma and too cavalier approach to the dangers of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. After all, the Eisenhower administration extricated the United States from President Truman’s stalemated Korean War and started no major new wars before the end of Eisenhower’s second term in January 1961.

Lee Langley

Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed

One critic memorably described Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Twenty Minutes of Silence is a novel in which something happens, repeatedly. Ina luxurious villa in northern France a man lies dead, surrounded by disorder – apparently a robbery gone wrong. When the police arrive, they find he was shot with his own gun and the murder weapon is missing. His wife and 15-year-old son become suspects. What is really going on here? Again and again we are taken through the night’s events, starting afresh each time. The dead man was a multi-millionaire with dubious associates. The marriage relationship seems ambiguous: the wife could have been deceived or unfaithful.

Owen Matthews

Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations

China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing forward their borders rather than by crossing oceans; both have a deep tradition of autocracy that survives to this day; and both (more plausibly in China’s case) believe that their social contract, ideology and system of government is a universal one superior to all others. In Entangled Empires, the German historians Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner explore the convoluted story of Russo-Chinese relations from the moment in the mid-17th century that roving Cossack bands bumped up against Siberian tribes who owed fealty to Beijing up to the latest performative amity between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Susie Mesure

Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed

Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the brightest young minds can’t penetrate the nuance of adult life, which limits their perspective and reliability. That, though, can be a positive in the right hands. Throw them into an unstable family (show me a stable fictional family?) and they really start pulling their weight. Enter Frank Dart, Charlotte Edwardes’s first-person protagonist in Trouble Was, her debut novel. He is nine years old, something Edwardes makes us work out for ourselves, which is a neat taster of everything Frank has to figure out for himself.

Patrick Barkham

Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction

As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already, the high-powered Danish journalist and mother of three Lea Korsgaard decides to track down all Danish butterfly species in a single summer. She knows nothing about butterflies, claims to be unsure about what has sparked her unusual ambition and sets about learning a new language – of nature, lepidoptera and obsession – with a disarming lack of expertise. The nature-quest narrative is an eccentric but surprisingly well-populated subgenre of nature writing. Midway through my own journey to find all British butterfly species in one year, I was devastated to discover that there was an earlier book on the same undertaking by Robin Page.

Andrew Lycett

The imaginative genius behind the Great Exhibition

If you want to understand Victorian Britain, look to the Great Exhibition of 1851. At a time of unprecedented technological change and international rivalries, this event gathered the finest art and the latest manufactured goods from around the globe and displayed them for almost six months to more than six million visitors in the magnificent Crystal Palace on the southern perimeter of London’s Hyde Park. Its success generated a profit of £186,000, or around £20 million today. The aim was not simply spectacle; in the spirit of the age it was also pedagogic. So this sum was used to buy 86 acres of fields and market gardens in the adjacent suburb of Brompton, where new institutions could be built to further the broad objectives of the Royal Commission behind the exercise.

Peter Bradshaw

Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?

With his 2012 book, The A303: Highway to the Sun, the author and psychogeographer Tom Fort pulled on his driving gloves, got behind the wheel and took us on a journey down the royal road to the West Country and to la Grande Bretagne profonde. Now, in this highly entertaining, informative new study – observant and lightly nostalgic in a similar way – he guides us round our lidos, the outdoor swimming pools which sprang up all over Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, designed and bankrolled by confident, imaginative local councils in the hardy fresh-air-and-fun enthusiasm of the time.

Tuesday

Sara Wheeler

The clear and present danger of exploring the Gulag

On 21 February 2022, 35-year-old Charlie Walker flew into Yakutsk in the Russian Far East, ready to ski hundreds of miles up the frozen River Lena, pulling his gear on a sledge. He was heading to the Laptev Sea, a large peripheral bay of the Arctic Ocean. A neighbour at home in London had wished him luck. ‘Frostbite I can handle,’ Walker replied. ‘Let’s just hope Russia doesn’t start a war while I’m there.’ But it did. Walker writes: ‘That Special Military Operation changed everything: for me, for Ukraine and for the world.’ Obliged to change plans, he flew north-east to Batagay over the Verkhoyansk Mountains, and from there set out over the Yana and Omoloy rivers.

Horatio Clare

A trove of avian lore and history

I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window to smoke and think about it, when there among the tumbling spires of the apple trees was a spasm of fluttering and a flurry of notes: two spotted flycatchers! One held the air for a moment, hovering and looking me in the eye, and then darted back to its perch while the other called. It has been years since we have seen them, and straight to my bird books I went. The Book of Birds was no help because it does not include the spotted flycatcher and is not designed as a recognition guide. Instead, Macfarlane writes: ‘Ours is a field guide with a difference... It asks not “What is that bird?” but “Who is that bird?”. The aim is to help readers identify with them.

Jianan Qian

A grandmother’s twisted mind: The Passage of Roses, by Tie Ning, reviewed

At first glance, Tie Ning’s The Passage of Roses appears to be yet another Chinese novel set during the Cultural Revolution in which bourgeois families and pre-1949 intellectuals are purged and banished. But the unnerving characters of Si Yiwen and her granddaughter Mei, whom Si cares for, influences and later harms, soon promise something different. Born into wealth in Old China, Si survives under the new regime as a marginal housewife, insignificant enough to avoid persecution. Yet it is precisely this insignificance that piques her desire for recognition. From an early age, she was denied love with a young revolutionary and was then ignored by her husband and in-laws. Now she finds herself drawn to the political fervour like a moth to a flame.

Anne Sebba

There will be blood – the vital work of field transfusion units

Most conventional second world war military histories focus on weapons, materiel and even the manpower needed for a decisive victory over Hitler and the Axis powers. Little has been written about blood as a strategic resource. However, a pioneering service of specially trained medics who worked dangerously close to the front lines, pumping blood into the veins of battle casualties, saved not only lives but contributed significantly to winning the war. They did this by returning men to the front line and boosting morale by persuading them that, if wounded, they had the maximum chance of life.

Piers Torday

No fairytale: The Children, by Melissa Albert, reviewed

Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in the ‘Pooh’ books, became a global celebrity and was remorselessly bullied at school for the privilege. Alastair, the spoilt offspring who inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, felt moved to step in front of a train at university in return. And it is perhaps best for Alice Liddell that she never lived to read contemporary concerns about Lewis Carroll’s true motives for immortalising her in his Wonderland. This cost to children for enabling, even fuelling, an adult’s artistic ambition, is the starting point for the American YA author Melissa Albert’s first novel for adults, The Children.

Bryan Appleyard

Alien fever shows no signs of abating

These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan is a distinguished lawyer and believer; Danny Lavelle is a journalist and sceptic. Aliens have always been with us. For at least 4,000 years there have been reports of strange visitations assumed to come from heaven, hell or simply the universe. Angels and demons were commonplace, but they were eventually replaced by technology-based visions, most often flying saucers. These could be quietly ignored until 1947, when postwar alien fever was sparked in Roswell, New Mexico. Metal and rubber debris were found which the US army initially claimed were parts of a ‘flying disc’.

Boyd Tonkin

Vigilante justice: Pure Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, reviewed

Like the Booker, the Prix Goncourt’s laureates now tend to veer between diamonds and duds. One of the strongest recent novels to take France’s premier book award was, in 2021, The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, from Senegal. Almost a West African Possession, it sent its narrator on a quest for a cult writer named T.C. Elimane – inspired by the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem – who had vanished after claims of plagiarism shredded his reputation. A combination of mystery, satire and cultural inquiry, it spotlit the fate of African authors who are lionised and then forsaken by the Parisian literary elite. The Goncourt coup has prompted English-language publishers to revisit Sarr’s backlist.

Tuesday

Henry Hitchings

Nothing works: The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison, reviewed

For more than half a century, M. John Harrison has been writing about decay and dispossession in a style that is at once restless and exacting. Often an audacious weaver of science fictions, he has also operated in a ruggedly realistic vein – though the distinction would probably strike him as bogus, a marketing position rather than useful framing. The End of Everything occupies typical Harrison terrain, with notes of J.G. Ballard and David Lynch as well as more than a hint of Stanley Spencer’s paintings (think compost heaps and clutter).

Clemmie Read

Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed

The comic novelist Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less, a chronicle of the longings and humiliations of modern life. But now, he suspects, we’d all like an escape. ‘Whatever happened to the charm novel?’ he asks in his new outing, thinking of the lighter works of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. Since they are apparently out of fashion, he has decided to write his own. Villa Coco follows a young American archivist, hired to catalogue the antiques in Tuscany of an aged baronessa, known to her friends as ‘Coco’, only to find himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures instead. He arrives in late summer, with all the American fantasies of Italy in tow: ‘A confection of movies and food... pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.

Mark Cocker

Symbol of wisdom or harbinger of death – the owl preserves its mystery

As the author of this engaging book makes plain, it is with good reason that owls are such cherished birds. They possess the most acute sense of hearing not just of any avian group but possibly of any creature. In experimental conditions of total darkness, barn owls were able to catch mice merely by hearing their rustling as they moved. The owls’ own flight is soundless because of special comb-like structures on the leading edges of their wings. Almost all owl species are adapted to see acutely at night and the largest are able to catch deer or pluck young eagles from the nest. But it is not merely these definable physical attributes that set owls apart. They also have a psychological aura. Their forward-facing eyes in a rather flat-faced configuration mimic our own arrangement.

Charlotte Stroud

The agonies of an abandoned wife: Mrs Dickens, by Emily Howes, reviewed

For every smog-spitting chimney in Victorian London there was a woman tasked with keeping the hearth clean, both physically and morally. This ‘angel in the house’, as Coventry Patmore dubbed her, lived entirely for her family, but above all for her husband. With her organs tightly compressed beneath a whalebone corset, she ministered to his every need and forgave him all his worldly sins. She was, in short, not a real woman but an ideal. In Mrs Dickens, Emily Howes exercises the novelist’s prerogative to flesh out an ideal, to show how the real woman beneath her halo of thorns suffered.

Philip Hensher

The banality of Hélène von Bismarck’s view of Britain is astounding

Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.