More from Books

Tuesday

Olivia Cole

Farewell to the Calloways: See You on the Other Side, by Jay McInerney, reviewed

Many of Jay McInerney’s characters had their glory days in the 1980s and 1990s of his vivid early novels, with all of the excesses and freedoms that he captured, most famously in his 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City. As familiar as New York’s landmarks and favourite haunts remain, the city of 2020 can seem a bewildering landscape for his creations, even before the darkened lights of the pandemic. The Calloways are the literary ‘It couple’ about whom McInerney first wrote in the elegiac Brightness Falls (1992). Now, in See You on the Other Side, friends and acquaintances get hit by #MeToo with the kind of randomness reserved for corked wine or a careless investment.

Peter Parker

An outpouring of jaunty black comedy

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text. Dispensing altogether with conventional punctuation, the book contained not a single comma or quotation mark, using instead ellipses. This was brilliantly imitative of both the clipped speech of its upper-class characters, particularly when facing disasters large and small, and the hell-for-leather pace of lives spent galloping on horseback across the Gloucestershire countryside.

Tuesday

Ariane Bankes

Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved

Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart commissions from wealthy sponsors – a network of Catholic and Jewish banking families that included the Ephrussis (memorialised by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes), Camondos, Rothschilds and Cahen d’Anvers.

Tom Knowles

Unravelling the infinite mysteries of physics

Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind, the London-based AI research firm owned by Google, and its exceptionally clever co-founder and chief executive, Demis Hassabis. The book’s narrative is centred on Hassabis’s hope to make DeepMind the first company to create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in which computers can match or surpass humans at virtually all cognitive tasks, and the morality of such an achievement.

Clare Mulley

Derided as ‘feminists’: the unsung witnesses of the Nuremberg trials

There are several things wrong with James Vanderbilt’s new film Nuremberg, least of all, some might say, the fact that it fails the Bechdel test. This 1985 metric assesses female representation in film by whether two named women have a conversation on screen about anything other than a man. If you are thinking, ‘So what? All the Nuremberg prosecutors were male, as was every defendant’, then you need to get hold of Natalie Livingstone’s revelatory book. While the public face of the trials was resolutely male, as were the indictments (there was no mention of rape, for instance, within the listed war crimes), the truth is that in the trials, as in the war, women played significant though often hidden roles.

Lee Langley

A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his turbulent life.

Anna Aslanyan

The typo that spelled death in the Soviet Union

‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous critic’s downfall, or secretly enjoyed a literary scandal knows, it is possible to love books while delighting in their disasters.’ The sentiment expressed in Rogues, Widows and Orphans is familiar to this reviewer. Rebecca Lee, who has been an editor for two decades, knows very well how words ‘get good’ (to quote the title of her earlier book) and what happens when they go wrong. Her new work ‘offers a lick of every flavour of ick lit’, leaving the reader craving more. Errors and omissions in print have consequences for everyone involved.

Maria Albano

‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what made Modernism? My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Levy’s attempt to answer the question. In this novel, an unnamed narrator from London moves to Paris to write an ‘essay’ on Stein, the American patron of the avant-garde. There she meets Eva, an enigmatic illustrator whose blue eyes make everyone go ‘Awww’, and Fanny, a fashionable finance consultant with a thriving sex life. As the three search for Eva’s missing cat (originally called It and renamed Bob by Fanny), the narrator chases after Stein’s many trails but struggles to bring her into focus.

Horatio Clare

The cormorant – symbol of gluttony and the Devil

Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read Gordon McMullan’s book because I love the birds and looked forward to learning their secrets. But I gathered only a little about the green-glossy, serpentine jewel of a fowl I saw in Hebden Beck recently, hunting in the middle of town where I’d never seen it before. Look elsewhere for the creaturely particulars, such as the spur of bone at the back of the skull from which thick muscles link to the lower mandible, giving the corvus marinus a mighty bitey beak. This book is not concerned with what we know about cormorants but with the cormorants that we ourselves are.

Tuesday

Annie Walton Doyle

Motherless friends: Kin, by Tayari Jones, reviewed

Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’. Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in which they approach their lives differ hugely. As her mother is still somewhere out there, Annie becomes fixated on finding her and ‘trying to climb back in her womb’. She’s unable to move forward until she arrives at a resolution. Tracking her mother down becomes ‘the point of her whole life’ – much to Niecy’s dismay: ‘Finding your mama won’t fix you.

Daniel Rey

Singing of arms and the man: Son of Nobody, by Yann Martel, reviewed

Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the nature of truth. His new novel, Son of Nobody, pursues these themes in a first-person account written by a scholar who discovers a Greek epic. The narrator is a Canadian called Harlow Donne – a PhD student at a middling university. Offered an ‘unbelievable opportunity’ to spend a year at Oxford, he leaves home, his wobbly marriage and his young daughter. His doctoral supervisor repeats his habitual plea: ‘Just find something to say.’ He does. From ‘hints and scraps’ found at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, Donne stitches together and translates 30 fragments of a lost poem of the Trojan War.

Mark Bostridge

Landscapes of longing in illuminated Books of Hours

Christopher de Hamel is an outstanding salesman. At Sotheby’s, back in the 1990s, he brokered the sale of the 15th-century Sherborne Missal to the British Library for £15 million, a record-breaking sum. Over the past decade, his reputation as a salesman has fitted a much less conventional mould. In two dazzlingly illustrated books he has set out to sell to the ordinary reader the power and pleasure of medieval manuscripts. His approach combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated. Conscious that most of us will never encounter these closely guarded treasures at first hand, de Hamel is more than happy to settle down in a library and turn the pages for us.

Ariane Bankes

Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning

I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world, breaking records with the sale at Christie’s of a tiny but key early work for more than £4 million. Her prices have risen an astonishing sevenfold in the past year, as collectors cotton on to her significance as a Surrealist; and while she may still be trailing on Leonora Carrington’s coat-tails, she looks to be steadily catching up.   Born in America to Swedish parents, Tanning was the very model of a fiercely independent artist, and her works are singular and disquieting like few others. She was largely self-taught as a painter and developed a virtuoso technique.

Mark Nayler

How the paralysed Franz Rosenzweig continued to translate the Bible

In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith. He thus became one of the pioneers of a Renaissance in German Jewry that occurred during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33). This short, dense biography by Paul Mendes-Flohr, an expert on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, who died in 2024, aged 83, also highlights Rosenzweig’s existentialism (which saw him break from the western philosophical tradition by elevating subjective experience over abstract theorising) and his influence as an educator.

Mathew Lyons

Self-betterment through contemplation of the Seven Deadly Sins

What mistake did Narcissus make when he looked into the water? To fall in love with his own ravishing self, we might think. But to the medieval mind, that wasn’t his problem at all. In John Gower’s 14th-century poem ‘Confessio Amantis’, Narcissus falls in love all right – but with someone else entirely. His fault isn’t that he loves himself; it’s that he doesn’t even recognise himself. Then, as now, as Peter Jones argues in this revelatory exploration of late medieval psychology, the path to self-betterment went through self-knowledge. Like our own, it was ‘a civilisation geared towards understanding the human mind’.

D.J. Taylor

Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed

Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like ‘cheery-bye’ and whose decrepit bathroom has ‘a Miss Havisham aspect’; or Chris, the lairy Irish stand-up, by whom, as a besotted teenager, the heroine Laura Miller is cheerlessly seduced.

Leyla Sanai

The harm of dwelling on a traumatic past

Back in the 1970s, people in Britain were mystified by the enthusiasm of Americans – especially New Yorkers – for shrinks. Since then, the vogue for therapy has spread and advice from non-experts on surviving divorce, bereavement and bankruptcy is now commonplace and not always insightful. By contrast, Gwen Adshead, a psychiatrist who has specialised in trauma, is invariably rewarding. Her previous book, The Devil You Know (2021), on the minds of violent criminals, was written with Eileen Horne, a former drama producer – as is Unspeakable. I wasn’t entirely sure why Adshead needed a collaborator here, being so obviously well-read. There are references to Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Keats and Yeats, along with C.S. Lewis, T.S.

Richard Walker

Is private equity secretly running your life?

Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 per cent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you out on all that. Private equity is one of those things that you either know about or don’t. If you are in the finance business you know, because it is the story of the past quarter century. If you are not in that world, if leveraged buyouts and limited partners and debt pushdowns are all just so much business-page noise, then you are in the majority. And it turns out that means you may not know who is really running your life.

Caroline Moorehead

Living in the shadow of Etna

The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its ‘impenetrable darkness’ reminded Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land where Lemons Grow (2014) won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring, yet respectful, eye. Unpicking its geological and human history and a landscape ‘cobbled together from the expressions of the Earth’s unrest’ became for her a way of returning to the very beginnings of life. Mount Etna, almost 3,500 metres in height, is Europe’s biggest volcano and one of the most active in the world, grumbling and spewing for many months at a time.

Monday

Simon Heffer

Why the General Strike of 1926 could never succeed

Although it may be in bad taste to have a favourite story about the General Strike of May 1926, one served up by David Torrance in his superb The Edge of Revolution is probably unbeatable. He quotes an anecdote told by Walter Citrine, the 39-year-old acting secretary of the TUC, who recalled a man ‘with rather sharp, hawk-like features’ turning up at the Congress’s London headquarters in Eccleston Square, near Victoria Station, and offering, in return for £1,000, to solve the unions’ problems.  He announced: I want 100 trusted men and if you cannot find them, I can. I will arm them, take them along to Downing Street, shoot the members of the cabinet and hold Princess Mary’s children as hostages.