More from Books

Wednesday

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.

Graham Boynton

And still the colonial memoirs keep coming…

Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a poetic, guilt-stricken Afrikaner confessional published on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Two others of note were by Rhodesian/Zimbabwean writers: Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Both were beautifully written, funny and full of original insights. Peter Godwin, another Rhodesian/Zimbabwean, is the most prolific of all, and Exit Wounds is now his third memoir. These writers, all beneficiaries of an excellent British-supervised education system, can really tell a tale.

Wednesday

Christopher Bray

Three great minds explore the enigmas of the universe

It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and persiflage. But while his book is as demanding a read as anything published this year, it still leaves you smiling. Over and over again the author reminds you of the shimmering weirdness beneath the experiential surface of what we are pleased to call the real world. There is no shortage of books that pit one thinker against another to tell the history of an argument.

Lee Langley

Panning for music gold: The Catchers, by Xan Brooks, reviewed

They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar. Their territory was the far beyond, where ‘people played banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers… Songs poured through the hills like migrating salmon.

Andrew Rosenheim

Small-town mysteries: A Case of Matricide, by Graeme MacRae Burnet, reviewed

The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of two ostensibly literary novels (both longlisted for the Booker prize), Burnet has also written a trilogy of self-declared thrillers. Yet the concluding volume, A Case of Matricide, demonstrates literary talent of the highest order. It features the same protagonist as in the two earlier volumes – Inspector Georges Gorski, chef de police in Saint-Louis, a provincial French town near the Swiss border. Divorced from his wealthy wife, whose father is the corrupt and powerful mayor of Saint-Louis, Gorski lives rather sadly with his mother, who suffers from increasing dementia.

Olivia Potts

Potato crisps and the British character

Pickled fish. Lemon tea. Cucumber. Doner kebab. Stewed beef noodles. Salted egg. Soft shell crab. Coney island mustard. Smoked gouda. Hamburger seasoning. Honey butter. Roasted garlic oyster. Spicy crayfish. Finger-licking braised pork. Sesame sauce hotpot. Rose petal. Numb and spicy hotpot. Roasted fish. Blueberry. The world of crisps has changed almost unrecognisably since the snack was first commercially produced in the early 20th century. Now the possibilities are enough to make the head spin. In Crunch, Natalie Whittle takes us on a whistlestop tour of the flavours we can now find across the world. The mind-boggling list gives an idea of the scope of this seemingly simple snack that goes far beyond the humble cheese and onion.

Francesca Peacock

Familiar scenarios: Our Evenings, by Alan Hollinghurst, reviewed

There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and riddled with suburban self-consciousness – a kind of complicated awareness of his non-posh failings and resulting subtle superiority. He meets another young man – possibly gay – who is posh. An intricate dance ensues of social slip-ups and huge townhouses in Notting Hill, bags of money and country piles. It’s a formula which can be transposed between Edwardian drawing rooms and 1980s parties with only the slightest changes. Sometimes our protagonist is the aristocrat himself; sometimes he even went to Cambridge. He’s always cultured – interested in poetry, theatre and Henry James. Hollinghurst’s fiction was, for a period, radical.

Ian Birrell

What do we mean when we talk about freedom?

When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country lauded for its conservation of natural resources that is rated freer and happier than the United States. He recalls feeling liberated and unfettered as he hiked in cloud forests with his brothers, seeing monkeys, sloths and spectacular birds. One day, a local friend led the boys on a mysterious quest to view something special; after walking for three hours through a maze of paths, they arrived at a cascade hiding a cave, where they could gaze out at the green world through curtains of falling water.

Melanie McDonagh

The Christian view of sex contains multitudes

Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy, feminism and gender. Diarmaid MacCulloch is primarily a historian of the Reformation but, as his A History of Christianity (2009) demonstrates, he’s up for the bigger picture. This history takes us from early Jewish concepts of God and sex (I was startled to find the God of Abraham was once assigned a spouse, Asherah) right up to current Anglican rows about homosexuality.

Roy Foster

How can Ireland survive the seismic changes of the past three decades?

Historians in Ireland occupy a public role – unlike in Britain, where those with an inclination towards the commentariat usually migrate to America. This is perhaps not surprising in a country where public intellectuals are exemplified by Stephen Fry and philosophers by Alain de Botton. Ireland presents a more demanding prospect, where, ever since the days of Conor Cruise O’Brien, historians have colonised the public sphere with influential newspaper columns and regular debates on television. Indeed, when the national TV station began broadcasting in the early 1960s, it featured a discussion programme called The Professors, all of them historians (and one or two usually a bit the worse for wear).

Simon Ings

What rats can teach us about the dangers of overcrowding

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags. He studied how rodents adapted to different environments and specifically how the density of a population affects an individual’s behaviour. He collected reams of data but published little, and rarely in the mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw from his studies of rats and mice apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

The heart-rending story of a child’s heart transplant

Max Johnson’s life while he waited for a heart transplant had become so miserable and traumatic that he didn’t care whether he carried on or not. Indeed, the colourless, almost lifeless nine-year-old recorded a video saying he wanted to die. His parents felt as though they were on ‘death row’ as they waited for a donor. They knew, too, that the call announcing there was a heart for their son would mean that somewhere else in Britain a family was mourning. They would benefit from the sudden death of someone they were initially only told was an ‘age-appropriate donor’. Max’s mother read between the lines: her son was getting the heart of another nine-year-old.

Tessa Dunlop

How ballet lessons transformed Princess Diana

There is something undeniably sweet about this book. On one level, in line with the cover’s pretty pink text, it is a simple, unpretentious story about a girl who loved to dance. But on another level, the unfolding tragedy is Shakespearian – an effect amplified by the unfussy prose of Anne Allan, a long-time professional dancer and choreographer. Years after everyone else cashed in their Diana chips, the Scottish-born author has finally decided to tell her story. The book opens in 1981. Allan is a dancer and ballet mistress with the London City Ballet, and the performance is Swan Lake; but the drama happens offstage when she receives a call from Anne Beckwith-Smith, lady-in-waiting to Diana, Princess of Wales.