More from Books

Tuesday

Jonathan Sumption

Falsifying history can only increase racial tension

For many years the academic sociologist Frank Furedi has been among the strongest conservative voices in the front line of the culture wars. The target of his latest book is the systematic campaign to discredit the history of the West in the interest of a modern political agenda. The vandalising of statues, the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions and curricula, the recasting of museums and the rearrangement of libraries are all symptoms of something more fundamental. Furedi argues that historical memory is the foundation of western identity and culture. The object of the campaigners is to discredit the West’s ideals and achievements.

James Walton

An accidental spy: Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd, reviewed

When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the answer is never, I suspect you’re not a novelist, and definitely not one of the William Boyd, old-school kind. In 1983 Boyd was among the 20 writers on Granta’s famously influential list of Best Young British Novelists, along with the generation-defining likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In the decades since, however, he’s increasingly moved away from more obviously literary fiction towards the sort that’s earned him the routine (and accurate) label of ‘master storyteller’.

Amanda Craig

Rather in the lurch: Small Bomb at Dimperley, by Lissa Evans, reviewed

Stories and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster? All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.

Christopher Harding

India radiates kindly light across the East

‘Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it.’ So said India’s great national poet Rabindranath Tagore of South-East Asia, after travelling there in 1927. Tagore was fascinated by how elements of ancient Indian culture had found their way eastwards: gods, temple architecture, the Sanskrit language and the great epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. A nationalist but also a universalist, Tagore welcomed the reshaping of these ideas by the people who received them, a process whose fruits he encountered in Malay literature and Balinese dance. He even hoped that one day a ‘regenerated Asia’, making creative use of its shared cultural heritage, might heal the world of the wounds he believed had been inflicted on it by the modern West.

Tuesday

Caspar Henderson

The song of the bearded seal and other marvels

In his satirical Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined the ocean as ‘a body of water occupying about two thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills’. Bierce may have been right to poke fun at human arrogance, but he underestimated the importance of the seas. Averaging almost 3,700 metres (12,000ft) deep, the ocean constitutes around nine tenths of the habitable space on our planet. It plays a commensurate role in the Earth system, not least as an engine – a ‘blue machine’ in the phrase that also titles an excellent book by the physicist and science presenter Helen Czerski – that moves heat around the planet.

Jonathan Boff

A romantic obsession: Precipice, by Robert Harris, reviewed

London in the long hot summer of 1914. A city of gold sovereigns, chaperones and muffin men, but also a place where war looms, paranoia breeds and secret papers mysteriously disappear. The world that Robert Harris brings to life in Precipice is both close to that of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and simultaneously very far away. In place of rugged heroes giving dastardly spies what for, he offers a subtle drama about the distasteful and ultimately destructive love affair between a young aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, and a man 35 years her senior who, not coincidentally, happens to be the prime minister H.H. Asquith.

Philip Womack

More curious canine incidents: Dogs and Monsters, by Mark Haddon, reviewed

Mark Haddon’s latest collection of short stories, Dogs and Monsters, uses myth and history as springboards into mesmerising accounts of isolation, tragedy and, of course, dogs, which are a motif throughout, from the hounds who mistakenly tear apart their owner Actaeon, to one who befriends St Antony at his lowest point. Haddon monitors the borderlines between man and beast, divine and mortal, and what’s real and what isn’t. In ‘The Mother’s Story’, a reimagining of the Minotaur myth, the action is transported to quasi-medieval England. The first-person narrator is Pasiphae (though unnamed), whose ruthless husband has locked up her son Paul, born ‘a moon calf’.

Andrew Rosenheim

A choice of thrillers for end of summer escapism

Publishing has never much distinguished between fame and notoriety, and it’s hardly Charlotte Philby’s fault that her grand-father was the double agent Kim. Still, it seems an odd credential to extol. Philby is a good enough writer to be lauded for her work alone, and her latest book, The End of Summer (Borough Press, £16.99), is spy-free and her best so far. It’s 1985 and Judy McVee is an attractive teenage hustler who leaves her unsympathetic mother in London and moves to New York. There she supports herself by pilfering wallets from men in bars who mistake her friendliness for availability.

Marcus Nevitt

How weird was Oliver Cromwell?

One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned. We know that this is true because, in addition to the corroborating evidence, Cromwell wrote a 1,500-word letter about the events back to the House of Commons on 17 September 1649, exulting that he had even heard one of the trapped men screaming: ‘God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn.’ That telling sadistic detail reveals much about both the writer and the addressee of the letter.

Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and it’s seldom explicitly referenced in the verse. But in Jenkins’s version he’s a war poet.

Nicholas Lezard

Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed

Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer Franz Kafka woke up to find his mouth full of blood.’ (The echo of the opening line of Metamorphosis is surely deliberate.) Here, in isolation, he recuperated, or tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: ‘I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself... by digging holes, I would dig holes.’ Josipovici quotes this, and adds that there is a photograph of Samuel Beckett ‘doing just that’ in the second volume of his Collected Letters.

Anne de Courcy

Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze

This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed illustrations, patterns of fabric and family photographs, interspersed with chunks of prose or aphorisms. In short, it is an expression of its author’s philosophy, threaded through rather disjointedly with the story of her life. Iris Apfel is the only woman I can think of – with the possible exceptions of Diana Vreeland and Helena Rubinstein – who turned extreme plainness into an aspect of personal style.

Harry Ritchie

Celebrating Sequoyah and his Cherokee alphabet

There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken on this planet. By the end of this century, all but 600 will have disappeared – the inevitable result of an unstoppable process as the last speakers of the world’s little languages die out, usually leaving no trace, for the vast majority are spoken only, with no written record. But even languages which have had the good fortune to be written down face their own extinction as their individual writing systems struggle to survive. Hundreds and hundreds of unique alphabets, as much as 90 per cent, face oblivion.

Tuesday

Pen Vogler

The juicy history of the apple

In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).

Patrick Graney

The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president

A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in his detail of the underground union gatherings, abject poverty and family tragedy which formed Lula. He brings São Paulo’s working-class culture to life throughout, with popular car brands, pop songs and sessions of cachaça and gin rummy ever present. Lula’s upbringing was marred by hardship.

Elisa Segrave

Is it wrong to try to ‘cure’ autism?

Is autism the worst thing that can happen to a person? Is ABA – Applied Behaviour Analysis – the right treatment for an autistic child? Should an autistic person get away with being rude? Do autistic individuals not feel empathy? If, as exists for unborn Downs Syndrome babies, a precise test is found to diagnose foetal autism, should the mother abort? Is it wrong, as some high-functioning autistic people claim, to try to ‘cure’ autism? Surely it is important to offer intervention to less able autistic children and adults, to help make their lives more bearable? These are some of the questions discussed in this passionate and informative memoir.   Virginia Bovell’s son Danny, now 31, was diagnosed with autism in 1996, aged three.

Honor Clerk

Tales with a twist: Safe Enough and Other Stories, by Lee Child, reviewed

Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. ‘Fabergé eggs they ain’t,’ he says, in the introduction to this collection of 20 stories, but they are real gems nonetheless. With no global readership to worry about and no commercial interests involved, Child was free to have fun. And fun he has with the short story form, shooting from the hip – ‘no need’, as he says, ‘to save anything for Chapter 17’. The trademark economy of style is faultless, each cop, hitman, fixer or judge fully fleshed out in just a few words; the scaffolding for each narrative constructed with the absolute minimum of material.

Nigel Jones

How could Hitler have had so many willing henchmen?

Eight decades after the second world war ended, for how much longer will we produce massive books about Hitler and the Nazis? Richard J. Evans, the former regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the senior gardeners in this noxious orchard, having devoted a lifetime’s study to the subject. As a minor under-gardener in the same field, I believe that we now know all we need to about the Führer and the crimes of his vile regime, and, barring the unlikely discovery of something new, it is time that historians moved on. The damning facts can be briefly stated, and are cogently summed up by Evans in his conclusion: Hitler was a fanatic, brought to power by a German middle class traumatised by defeat in the first world war and the economic woes that followed.

Helen Barrett

Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and ‘rock’s most committed iconoclast’, as his New York Times obituary described him, for 27 years, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, aged 52. A year after that first, snot-filled seduction, the Zappas were married, a week before Gail gave birth to Moon Unit, the first of four children. Moon’s name is not a compound noun: Unit is her middle name, given to reflect how her arrival turned two people into a single family – Frank’s idea.

Philip Marsden

Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it. In her previous book, Timefulness, she wrote for the general reader and with persuasive lyricism about readjusting our focus to thinking in geological time.