More from Books

Tuesday

Christopher Bray

Abba’s genius was never to write a happy love song

Memories. Good days. Bad days. In 1992, U2 mounted their Zoo TV tour. U2 being U2, the gigs were over-earnest affairs, their showbiz razzmatazz never emulsifying with their agitprop posturing. But disbelief was colloidally suspended the night the show hit Stockholm – and U2 were joined on stage by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulväeus for a cover of ‘Dancing Queen’. In truth, that evening’s take on one of Abba’s meisterwerke was a lumpen affair. Bono had to drop his voice an octave for what ought to be the song’s soaring refrain.

Diana Hendry

A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed

As ghosts go, Maria Vaduva, who haunts Enlightenment, is not a patch on the wild, tormented figure who stalks the pages of Sarah Perry’s previous novel, Melmoth. Where Melmoth, in rage and despair, haunts everyone complicit in history’s horrors, Maria is crossly plaintive. The disappearance of this unrecognised 19th-century Romanian astronomer from Lowlands House, a manor in the fictional small Essex town of Aldleigh (where marriage has brought her), becomes the obsession of Thomas Hart. He is an unlikely columnist of the Essex Chronicle, and Enlightenment’s central character. It could be said that he is at odds with life and that achieving harmony (on Earth and in heaven) is the novel’s underlying theme.

Matthew Lynn

Western economies are failing – but capitalism isn’t the problem

Real wages have barely increased for more than a decade. Banks have had to be bailed out, and many still exist on a form of state life support. Growth has stalled, taxes are at 70-year highs, yet governments are still bankrupt. Unless you happen to be part of a tiny plutocracy made up mostly of tech entrepreneurs and financiers, there has rarely been a point, at least since the nadir of the mid-1970s, when the economic system seemed beset by quite so many challenges as it is today. The left has smartly stepped into the intellectual space that has been created with a series of well-timed polemics, which, while they vary in precise analysis and on solutions, have at least one thing in common. They argue that the system is fundamentally broken, and it will take radical action to fix it.

Anne de Courcy

From Cleopatra to Elizabeth Taylor, women have found jewels irresistible

When workmen demolished an ancient building in Cheapside in 1912 they saw something glinting out of a broken wooden box. They had stumbled on what became known as the Cheapside Hoard – a collection of jewels dating from around 1600, its star, the Cheapside Emerald, a wonderful stone holding a miniature watch. It came from Colombia, still the source of the world’s finest emeralds, probably the world’s most ancient gems. The first recorded instance of them is on an Egyptian papyrus around 2400 BC. Their beauty and rarity made them the favourite of the élite, with Cleopatra probably their most famous fan. The Rockefeller Emerald fetched $5.5 million in 2017.

Anna Aslanyan

A middle-aged man in crisis: How to Make a Bomb, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed

Philip Notman is going through what looks like a midlife crisis. Travelling home from an academic conference, he feels sick and disoriented to the point where he is barely able to function. Back in London, he can’t quite explain to his wife Anya, or indeed to himself, what’s ailing him. Is it just me, he wonders, or is everything unbearably toxic? Instead of working on his next book during a sabbatical, he sets off on a journey in search of a remedy. Rupert Thomson’s new novel has no full stops. In their place are paragraph breaks, with sentences abandoned on the page, increasing the sense of dislocation: Everything sick, he thought Everything in pain Starting from the title, the atmosphere grows increasingly ominous.

Chloë Ashby

Learning the art lingo: the people, periods and -isms

When she first starts working as a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Bianca Bosker is so bored that she prays someone will touch the art. ‘Do it, I urged silently from my spot by the wall. Do it so I can tell you not to.’ She’s to stand for hours on end, staring into space, reporting anything that could pose a threat. On the first day she radios her supervisors to alert them to a stray leaf: ‘Not exactly a suspicious package, but I needed something to interrupt the tedium.’ Wheedling your way into a self-contained world about which you know next to nothing is no mean feat The job is one of several Bosker picks up in her quest to understand why art matters.

Tuesday

Hugh Thomson

The recklessness of George Mallory

George Mallory bookended the 20th century history of Everest with his pioneering attempts in the 1920s to climb the mountain – and with the spectacular discovery, in 1999, of his body high up on the North Face, preserved by the ice for 75 years after he had failed to do so. His flip remark to a journalist that he was climbing Everest ‘because it was there’ became mountaineering’s most celebrated quote, while masking other less noble reasons. Mick Conefrey has become one of our finest gazetteers of the Himalaya, with successive books on K2, Kangchenjunga and later exploits on Everest. Now he turns his attention to a great conundrum of mountaineering history.

Chloë Ashby

Women on a wind-swept island: Hagstone, by Sinéad Gleeson, reviewed

This absorbing and wild debut feels at once muzzily folkloric and sharply contemporary. It follows Nell, an artist who lives on a wind-whipped island without ties or commitments – until, that is, a group of women living an even quieter life commission her to make an artwork that will tell their story. The Inions, as they’re known, have come from all over the world to Rathglas, a crumbling old convent overlooking the sea. Naturally, rumours abound about them being a cult or a coven, but really they’re ‘ordinary women wanting a different kind of life’, who have rejected hatred and inequality in favour of seclusion and simplicity.

Scott Bradfield

Reading pulp fiction taught me how to write, said S.J. Perelman

This volume of short essays – originally written for the New Yorker in the 1940s and 1950s but never before assembled – provides ample evidence that the great S.J. Perelman could misspend his youth with the best of them. It’s also the closest thing to an autobiography he ever completed: a series of comic reflections on the awful, absorbing books and movies which entertained him when he should have been attending his classes at Brown University (from which he eventually dropped out), or keeping a steady job.

Ian Birrell

Why are the German authorities so reluctant to believe in neo-Nazi attacks?

Enver Simsek’s life story was one familiar to many migrants. He moved from Turkey to a small town in Germany, then worked hard in a factory during the week and as a cleaner at weekends before starting his own business as a florist. By the turn of this century, he employed almost a dozen people selling his blooms from stalls and stands across Bavaria. So in the summer of 2000, he took his wife and two teenage children back to his native land for a break. Soon after returning, the 38-year-old was shot eight times in the head and shoulder, left dying in a pool of blood amid the bouquets of baby’s breath, daisies and roses in his van parked in Nuremberg. As Simsek’s life ebbed away in hospital, his distraught family faced a barrage of questions from police.

Artemis Cooper

Between the Iron Lady and the Wedding Cake: conflict in Belle Époque Paris

Between 1789 and 1871 Paris went through five kings, two Bonapartist empires, two republics, several revolutions and a Commune. Each had been an attempt to accommodate or neutralise one of two visions of France. The oldest was traditional and conventional; it mourned the ancien régime, and preferred the safety of autocracy over the chaos of democracy and God over science. The younger was progressive and eager for change, building on the ideas of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary ideals of 1789. We are taken through slums, cafés, law courts, theatres, brothels, strikes and demonstrations For Mike Rapport, ‘the friction between change and tradition is perhaps the defining characteristic of the modern condition’.

Brian Martin

Fools rush in: Mania, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

Pearson Converse teaches literature at Verlaine University, Pennsylvania. She exists in an alternative universe to our own in which the Mental Parity Movement holds sway.  There is intellectual levelling, and no ‘cognitive discrimination’. This is high satire, exaggerated, crude, inviting ridicule of the social system portrayed, close to the great satirists of the 18th century in tone if not in style.   Yet Lionel Shriver’s Mania is more than just a satire. It is a study of Pearson’s family life and her ‘unbalanced’ relationship with her best friend from childhood, Emory. Pearson has three children: an intellectually gifted girl and boy by a high-IQ sperm donor, and an averagely intelligent girl conceived with her tree-surgeon partner, Wade.

Peter Parker

More Mr Pooter than Joe Orton: George Lucas’s gay life in London

In January 1948, George Lucas, an unremarkable 21-year-old Roman Catholic who had just been demobbed from the Pay Corps, was living unhappily in Romford with his ill-matched parents, who relentlessly taunted him about his homosexuality. He would shortly get a job at the War Office and so embark on a lifetime’s career as a civil servant, commuting to central London every day to work at his desk and spend his evenings in search of sex and companionship, largely among the servicemen who hung around Marble Arch. In later life Lucas would trawl the pubs, streets and urinals of central London, more often than not paying for sex, and always keeping a detailed account of his exploits and expenses in his diaries.

Caroline Moorehead

Agent Zo: the Polish blonde with nerves of steel

In recent years, far from diminishing, the number of books on the Nazis, Occupied Europe and the Holocaust – events that now lie three quarters of a century in the past – seem only to grow. New archives are opened and attics are raided for forgotten diaries and letters. One historian who has mined them with great skill is Clare Mulley, the author of books on spies and Hitler’s pilots. She has now unearthed a story about a bold and resolute Polish agent, Elzbieta Zawacka, who went by the name of Zo. Her adventures are extraordinary, and their background is no less fascinating.

Harry Cochrane

Home to mother: Long Island, by Colm Toibín, reviewed

Colm Toibin’s new novel starts with a bang – or rather, the results of one. It is only on the second page that an Irishman arrives at Eilis Fiorello’s house and threatens to leave his wife’s love child on her doorstep, it being also the doorstep of the father, Tony. ‘If anyone thinks I am keeping an Italian plumber’s brat in my house and have my own children believe that it came into the world as decently as they did, they can have another think.’ As a sequel to Brooklyn, it makes sense that Long Island is quick out of the blocks. Which is exactly what Eilis and Tony are out of, having moved with the entire Fiorello family to the sweeping developmentia of Lindenhurst. There is no privacy. Patriarchy governs.

Rachel Johnson

It’s hard work having fun: Wives Like Us, by Plum Sykes, reviewed

Just when you thought the Cotswolds must have peaked as a fictional setting, a new rom-com from the author of Bergdorf Blondes floats like cherry blossom onto a chalk stream. Plum Sykes has chosen a rich (as in minted) target, and she is well-equipped to take aim. As a former contributing editor of American Vogue, she might be considered part of the trans-atlantic glossy posse, but at heart she’s still an Oxford-educated Sykes – with a certain diplomatic heritage. The family seat is the magnificent Sledmere in Yorkshire, which has its own blue-tiled Turkish Room. So Plum is not your common-or-garden mag hag. But she now lives in the ’wolds, and when it comes to the lifestyles of the UHNWs (ultra-high-net-worths) of Poshtershire, she knows. And she certainly can write.

Simon Heffer

Edwin Lutyens: the nation’s remembrancer-in-chief

In unduly modest remarks at the opening of this immaculate book, Clive Aslet, one of our most distinguished architectural historians, notes that there have been substantial biographies of Sir Edwin Lutyens, and he does not pretend to emulate them. His achievement, however, is considerable. Aslet has spent more than 45 years in intense and enthusiastic study of ‘Ned’ and his works, and has not merely an encyclopedic knowledge of what Lutyens built, but two other invaluable qualities. First, he appreciates the sort of man Lutyens was, the influences upon him, and how he interacted with his family (especially his wife Lady Emily) and his clients.

Tuesday

Ian Sansom

The endless fascination of volcanoes

Volcanoes, volcanoes, volcanoes. You wait years for a good book or a film about volcanoes to come along and then they blow up all at once. In 2022, Sara Dosa’s incredible, unmissable – incroyable! incontournable! – documentary about the eccentric French filmmakers and volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, Fire of Love, was nominated for an Oscar. It should have won. Then, last year, volcanology’s own Brian Cox, Clive Oppenheimer – professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge and Werner Herzog’s companion and guide in his documentary film about volcanoes, Into the Inferno (2016) – published Mountains of Fire: The Secret Lives of Volcanoes. Now erupting on to the scene is Tamsin Mather with Adventures in Volcanoland.

Peter Carty

Kindness backfires: Sufferance, by Charles Palliser, reviewed

Charles Palliser’s Sufferance tells us what happens to one family in an occupied country during wartime. What sets it apart is that all the characters are unnamed. The country, region and historical period also remain unspecified. This indeterminacy lends the novel enormous power. The father of the family decides to take in a young girl from a minority ethnic group who has become separated from her own family. ‘I felt for her as if she was my own child,’ he says. Yet his motives are not entirely altruistic, since he believes he will be financially rewarded for looking after the girl. He is a lowly accountant working in the public sector and knows the girl’s father is the wealthy owner of a large department store.

Maggie Fergusson

The traditional British hedge is fast vanishing

Five years ago, a documentary about the Duchy of Cornwall featured the then Prince of Wales in tweeds and jaunty red gauntlets laying a hawthorn hedge. It was a brilliant piece of PR. If Charles was a safe pair of hands with a hedge – something as quintessentially English as a hay meadow or a millpond – he was surely a safe pair of hands full stop. A cuckoo in one breeding season needs to eat about 22,500 hairy caterpillars Focusing on a hedge in south-west Wiltshire, Hedgelands combines history, celebration, lament and warning. Christopher Hart is a companionable writer, and makes a powerful case that, at a time of ecological hazard, well-nurtured hedges can play an astonishing role in buttressing the future. First, though, the past.