More from Books

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

A family affair: Love Lane, by Patrick Gale, reviewed

The title of Patrick Gale’s latest lyrical novel alludes both to its central theme of the hidden, winding paths of love and also to the street by Wakefield prison where two characters, Mike and Pip, live. They are fictional renderings of the author’s grandparents – the names and address are real. In Love Lane, just as he did in his 2015 novel A Place Called Winter, Gale draws on his own history to frame a question about a family secret and then uses fiction to create a rendering of a possible truth. He develops the story of Harry Cane, who, in the earlier novel, we discovered was a gay man, blackmailed out of a privileged life in England and banished to the Canadian Prairies at the start of the 20th century.

Andrew Roberts

The vexed relationship of Winston Churchill and George V

It is ironic that although Winston Churchill revered the concept of monarchy – his wife Clementine joked that he was the last believer in the Divine Right of Kings – half of the six monarchs under whom he served had anything but reverence for him.  He never met Queen Victoria, who signed his officer’s commission but died when Churchill was 26. He had a complicated relationship with Edward VII. As Prince of Wales, in 1876 Edward had been blackmailed by Winston’s father Lord Randolph Churchill, and had later slept with Winston’s mother, Jennie Jerome, after Lord Randolph’s death.

Daisy Dunn

Why should it be shameful to study the Classics?

Mary Beard opens this book with a recollection of her first meaningful encounter with the ancient world. It was 1960, and she was five years old, visiting the British Museum with her mother. Peering into one of the glass cases, she spotted an unassuming, oddly triangular loaf of bread from ancient Egypt. Seeing her struggle to obtain a better view, a curator lifted the object out. ‘Never under-estimate how powerful the simple act of unlocking a museum case can be,’ Beard reflects 66 years on. She describes Talking Classics as ‘more a memoir than a thesis’, but it is also a thought-provoking meditation on wonder. It was thauma, she reflects, that Aristotle held responsible for sparking philosophical thought to begin with.

Alexandra Coghlan

The indomitable spirit of the Wigmore Hall

If you’ve ever strolled to the Wallace Collection or hurried to an appointment in Harley Street, fled an overcrowded Selfridges or sat on a sunny bench in Cavendish Square Gardens, you’ll probably have walked past the Wigmore Hall. It’s easy to miss – a wrought-iron canopy and a small mosaic embedded in the pavement the only signage. But this ‘modest building tucked away behind a busy London shopping street’ contains multitudes. Now celebrating its 125th birthday, it has been variously described as ‘London’s most sumptuous temple of music’ and the symptom of a ‘faded, bombed-out world’; ‘a place where it was possible to experience the exotic, unfamiliar and bizarre’ and one filled with ‘too many dull concerts and too many indifferent debut pianists’.

Wednesday

Hugh Thomson

Another heroic freethinker is wiped from Russian history

It sometimes seems that those people chosen to be subjects for biographies are drawn from a strictly limited cast. Every few years, another book about Tolstoy, Dickens or some other great literary figure comes along to make library shelves groan further. At a recent talk given for a new biography of George Orwell, I asked the author why he had felt a need to add to the pile, given the plethora of perfectly good existing ones. ‘Because OUP commissioned me,’ was the answer. I didn’t buy the book. So how refreshing that Miranda Seymour should choose an absolute unknown to write about, whose life was genuinely interesting and surprising.

Boyd Tonkin

Macbeth in Swahili? There might even be improvements

Let’s start with some low-hanging fruit. When, in Henry V, the king inspires his army before Agincourt, the Danish translator – here, Niels Brunse – can hope for a relatively easy win: ‘Vi fa, vi muntre fa, vi flok af brodre.’ Or, in the classic Schlegel-Tieck version of Macbeth, now rooted in German literature, the cursed usurper finds that tomorrow and tomorrow ‘Kriecht so mit kleinem Schritt von Tag zu Tag’. Linguistic kinship, comparable speech rhythms, shared verse forms: sometimes the happy not-so-few, the global band of brothers (and sisters) who translate Shakespeare out of English, face a stiff but still feasible task. Even in familiar languages, though, pitfalls await in every line. Surely, Richard III’s opening soliloquy will slip smoothly into French?

Annie Gray

The punishing gluttony of Georgian high living

Georgian dining, if you were wealthy, was an incredible experience. Everything, from the location to the furniture, was carefully planned and meticulously executed to really hammer home the taste, status and impeccable education of the host. This was of course regardless of the actual likings, wealth and intellectual leanings of the party-giver. One of the delights of Amy Boyington’s book is the descriptions of the many, frequently ghastly, aristocrats whose country pads feature. There are murderers, adulterers, gluttons and spendthrifts. They did eat well, though. The Country House Dining Room is a Yale publication and, as such, can be expected to err toward the academic and the artistic.

David Profumo

Highland noir: The Grey Coast; The Serpent; Blood Hunt, by Neil M. Gunn, reviewed

Before he died in 1973 at the age of 81, Neil Gunn was arguably Scotland’s greatest living novelist, a leading figure in its literary Renaissance and the author of 28 books (most famously his bestselling 1941 maritime epic The Silver Darlings). Now, to mark the centenary of his first novel, The Grey Coast, the independent Sutherland-based publisher North House Press is reissuing three of his works in nice clothbound editions. Taken together, they give an impression of his versatility and shortcomings.

Ian Thomson

A weary trek in the steps of Garibaldi and his Redshirts

By the time he died in 1882 at the age of 74, Giuseppe Garibaldi had freed the Italian peninsula from its abhorred Habsburg and Bourbon rulers and united all Italy under the liberally inclined House of Savoy. With his whiskery good looks and wardrobe of red blouses, he was the ideal vehicle for romantic notions of free nationality. When he visited London in 1864, crowds flocked to greet the Risorgimento liberator as he got off the train at Nine Elms. A new football club, Nottingham Forest, adopted Garibaldi red as its colour and a ‘squashed fly’ biscuit was named after him. In Queen Victoria’s estimation, though, Garibaldi was an outlaw figure who threatened to subvert the established order. ‘Garibaldi – thank God – is gone!’ she declared on his departure.

Nicholas Lezard

It’s grim up north: Malc’s Boy, by Shaun Wilson, reviewed

Shaun Wilson’s latest novel gets going with a childhood recalled like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it is one marred by violence. Oh here we go again, I thought, as the young Shaun is thumped repeatedly by his enraged father Malc. Every novel I review these days seems to be about a working-class lad with a violent father from, say, north of Birmingham. I braced myself and thought of the immortal Bacon parents in the comic magazine Viz whose main purpose in life is to thrash their young son half to death in every issue. (Auberon Waugh, late of this parish, once said that it was impossible fully to understand Britain without reading Viz, and he was right.

David Honigmann

What does it say about Britain that the Palace of Westminster is crumbling?

Many political scientists are oddly uninterested in politics. Their fascination is at a level of theory; but the means through which decisions are made in practice, through specific conversations and arguments and accommodations between actual people, strike them as so much gossip – or, worse, journalism. Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, best known to general readers for his trenchant, well-timed and comfortingly short What Is Populism?, here wanders like a niche flȃneur through the territory in between the personal and the theoretical: the ways in which people and politicians are variously welcomed, channelled, liberated and constrained by their concrete environments.

Rupert Hawksley

How Rupert Murdoch destroyed the innocent enjoyment of watching sport

In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via their remote. And why not? After all, as the Sky Bet tagline reminded viewers: ‘It matters more when there’s money on it.’ For football fans, nothing was ever quite the same again. ‘It’s difficult to overstate what the slogan did for the normalisation of gambling in football,’ writes Darragh McGee in his impressive study of how our national sport, seduced by profit, surrendered to the gambling industry.

Julie Bindel

The global revolution sparked by a vegetarian schoolteacher in Helsinki

At the turn of the 20th century, no woman was in government anywhere in the world. Change began with Finland in 1907, which elected 19 women to its parliament. Hilda Kakikoski was one of those women. She was a conservative candidate – a nationalist who was also a lesbian and a vegetarian. Paula Bartley’s Trailblazers spans the century, following the story of female politicians as they emerged. From Finland we move to Russia, where the revolution provided opportunities for the likes of the socialist feminist Alexandra Kolontai, the first woman to join a government cabinet and become a global diplomat. Constance Markievicz was the first woman to be elected to the British parliament, during her imprisonment for her role in the Easter Rising, but did not take her seat.

Joanna Kavenna

Stay within the lines to realise your full creative energy

The title of this book takes the adage about ‘thinking outside the box’ and inverts it. Instead of thinking outside the box, we should think inside the box, David Epstein argues. Which box? How big is this box? Whose box? He discusses these questions as well. The phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ emerges from the nine dots puzzle devised by psychologists before the first world war. There are nine dots on a page, evenly spaced, three on each line. You must connect all nine using four lines without removing your pen from the paper. A common response is to imagine that the dots form a box and to confine your work accordingly. This makes the puzzle impossible to solve; you have to think outside the box. Or not think of a box in the first place.

Lynn Barber

Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?

This slim volume has only one fault. It has no illustrations. So you’ll have to do some Googling or visit the current Duchamp exhibition at MoMA (until 22 August) if you want to know what ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ looks like. Otherwise it’s perfect – wittily written and packed with many fascinating characters besides the ever intriguing Marcel Duchamp. He didn’t actually arrive in New York until 1915, but when he did he found himself already famous. His ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ had been included in the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, alongside works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Braque, and completely stole the show. Duchamp didn’t even know the painting was being exhibited.

Tuesday

Rose George

The tragedy of Sir Walter Ralegh’s impossible quest

I remember little of my two years at boarding school, where I arrived aged eight, apart from the cloaks. Red, green, blue and yellow, for the houses of Ralegh, Nicholson, Gordon and Wellesley. They were called after generals, we were told, and of the four, Ralegh’s name is the best known. But why? I take a short survey of my colleagues. They all know the name but not why they know it. It is a curious fame to have, and perhaps David Gibbins’s book will do something to give it substance. Sir Walter Ralegh (Gibbins’s choice of spelling, as opposed to Raleigh, Rawleigh, Ralley and other versions in the elastic Elizabethan way with names) was more than a military commander.

Michael Arditti

Love and loneliness in the Outer Hebrides: John of John, by Douglas Stuart, reviewed

For his third novel, Douglas Stuart moves north from the Glasgow tenements of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. John-Callum, known as Cal, returns to his family croft after spending four years at a mainland textile college, following a call from his father, John, to tell him that his grandmother is dying. John is the precentor of his local church, a congregation of Free Presbyterians, who adhere to an extreme biblical morality. The 26 remaining members attend four services each Sabbath and believe that fathers have authority over children and husbands over wives, since women ‘rarely know what is best for themselves’. Stuart treats this faith, which will be inimical to the majority of his readers, with great respect.

Sinclair McKay

Were the lies we told to combat communism so shameful?

This, we might imagine, is the Age of the Fake. AI videos; TikTok fascists; the Joycean mind-fragments of a US president for whom truth itself is an ever shifting quantum concept. Surely no other generation has had to navigate such a disorientating landscape of deceit. Or perhaps they have. Our old friends the Russians gave the world The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century – a lethal, widely circulated (and still circulating) hoax outlining the world-dominating plots of Jewish people. Meanwhile, a still unidentified forger composed the Zinoviev Letter, which was published by the Daily Mail a few days before the 1924 general election.

Frances Wilson

Mourning becomes Siri Hustvedt

At 6.58 p.m. on 30 April 2024, Siri Hustvedt’s husband of 43 years, the novelist Paul Auster, died of cancer in the library of their Brooklyn home. He was surrounded by family, including his adored daughter Sophie, who three months earlier had given birth to his first grandson, Miles. Hustvedt and Auster met at a poetry reading in 1981 and married later that year. It was she who proposed to him. Auster, aged 34, was not yet famous and Hustvedt, aged 26, was still a graduate student. By the 1990s, when she too became a novelist, they were New York literary royalty. In the 1970s, Auster had been married to the translator and short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had a son called Daniel. If Sophie was a summer’s day, Daniel was darkness.

Christopher Bray

The movie brats who changed popular cinema

For some people it’s Star Wars; for others it’s Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For me not a year goes by without watching Chinatown and the first two parts of The Godfather. This urge to repeatedly live through familiar narratives surely starts with bedtime stories; and though it diminishes in early adulthood as we push ourselves out into the world, the habit returns before long. So, although The Last Kings of Hollywood, Paul Fischer’s partial history of American movie-making focusing on Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, tells a familiar story, it will be read by the same people who have already worked their way through the holy scriptures on the period.