More from Books

Wednesday

The Spectator

Books of the year II: more choices of reading in 2023

Ruth Scurr In Ways of Life (Jonathan Cape, £30), Laura Freeman channels the spirit of the art critic and collector Jim Ede. She traces the origins of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – not a museum, nor art gallery, more a cabinet of curiosities – through Ede’s own life, his work for the Tate, the other houses and countries he lived in and the artists he cared for and wrote about. In Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster, £30), Simon Schama argues that ‘all history is natural history’, and introduces a rich cast of protagonists who pushed forward the frontiers of science for the good of humanity, regardless of national, territorial boundaries.

Wednesday

Katrina Gulliver

Not everything in the garden is lovely

While I was reading Most Delicious Poison, I visited a herbal garden in Spain which features the plants grown by the Nasrid rulers of Granada hundreds of years ago. They cultivated myrtle for its medicinal uses and jasmine for its fragrance. How did they know of myrtle’s properties? Some ancient ancestor must have figured it out. And that ancestor might be more ancient than we realise. Noah Whiteman explains that DNA from plants found in Neanderthals’ teeth tartar suggests even they were self-medicating with herbs. We have been entangled with the chemicals around us for as long as we have been human. The author of this book, a professor of biology at Berkeley, takes us on a global trip through plants and their chemicals.

Ursula Buchan

The best of this year’s gardening books

What makes a garden is an increasingly pressing question, in the light of what Jinny Blom, in her witty and wise What Makes a Garden: A Considered Approach to Garden Design (Frances Lincoln, £35), calls ‘hairshirt hubris’. By that she means the refusal of some gardeners to call any native plant a weed or any slug or aphid a pest. She wishes to inject a little sense into what has become an ill-tempered dialogue between ‘traditional gardeners’ and the self-deniers who cannot see gardens as anything but parcels of sacrosanct earth, in which any major intervention by a human is to be regretted. But to Blom, garden-making is one antidote to the modern curse of solipsism. ‘Gardens insist we care for them as much, or more, than ourselves.

Anna Aslanyan

Always carry a little book with you, and preserve it with great care, said Leonardo da Vinci

In 1299, Amatino Manucci, a Florentine helping to run a merchant’s business in Provence, kept at least seven ledgers and notebooks, each serving a specific purpose. One covered the firm’s trade in wool and cloth, another in wheat, barley and other victuals, and so on. It wasn’t just figures Manucci worked with. It was also financial concepts, quite advanced by the standards of that time: accounting entities and periods, profit and depreciation – notions that heralded the invention of accounting as we know it. ‘If you’ve ever tapped numbers into an Excel grid,’ Roland Allen writes in his engaging popular history, ‘you have Manucci and his contemporaries to thank – or blame.

Lee Langley

Heart of Darkness revisited: The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson, reviewed

When Joseph Conrad sent his narrator into the heart of darkness, Africa was unknown territory. Revisiting the scene now, Greg Jackson dispatches his explorer to an even stranger destination: an algorithmic universe.  Jackson, a Granta Best of Young American Novelists in 2017, won prizes with his story collection Prodigals. His debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, could hardly be better timed. New fears about AI give it disquieting relevance. Conspiracy theories mingle with deep state corruption. Gradually it grows into a Chandleresque adventure: down these mean cyber streets a man must go. Dropped into the thick of it, the reader might get the feeling of arriving late at a party where everyone else has already been introduced.

Dorian Lynskey

The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends

When it comes to Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin is The Man Who Knows Too Much. Since publishing his first biography, 1991’s Behind the Shades, he has become the world’s most committed Dylanologist, doggedly untwining the facts from the artist’s self-serving fictions. When he describes Dylan’s wildly unreliable 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One as ‘all a put-on... all a lie’, he has the receipts. As he never tires of pointing out, scholars and diehards are in his debt, but amassing data from sessions, setlists and now 130 boxes of Dylan’s formerly private papers is not the same as telling a good story. For someone innocently hoping to understand one of the cultural giants of the last century, the reading experience might resemble drinking from a firehose.

Henry Jeffreys

The shocking truth about adulterated wine: it was delicious

In 2012 the esoteric world of wine connoisseurship made the news when the FBI raided the Californian home of an Indonesian national called Rudy Kurniawan. They found a factory for creating fake wines with bottles, corks, labels and even recipes. According to Rebecca Gibb in Vintage Crime, Kurniawan’s counterfeit Mouton Rothschild from the legendary 1945 vintage consisted of two parts Cos d’Estournel, one part Château Palmer and one part California cabernet. Now tell me that doesn’t sound delicious. Most people don’t care about provenance as long as the wine tastes good and isn’t actually poisonous The book takes the reader on a highly entertaining tour of wine fraud from ancient times up to the present day. Gibb is a Master of Wine but wears her erudition lightly.

Caroline Moorehead

The misery of the Kindertransport children

On the night of 9 November 1938, across Germany and Austria, Jews were attacked and their synagogues and businesses set on fire. In the days that followed Kristallnacht, a scheme was put in place to save children from Nazi persecution. Known as the Kindertransport, it would, over the following ten months, bring 10,000 children to the UK.  The Kindertransport – the word refers both to the means of transport and to the overarching programme – has always been regarded as a symbol of British generosity towards those in peril and seeking asylum. But it was all rather more complicated, as Andrea Hammel sets out to show.

The Spectator

Books of the year I: a choice of reading in 2023

Andrew Motion Something old made new: The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s muscular and moving new translation, the first by a woman, is truly what it claims to be – a version for our time (Norton, £30). And something new made immediate: Hannah Sullivan’s second collection of poems, Was It For This (Faber, £12.99), ambitiously extends the already considerable range of her first book, Three Poems. She’s the cleverest poet of her generation and also one of the most deep-feeling. Clare Mulley Vulnerability, strength and defiance this year, starting with Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £25), which caught me up in its humanity as it testified to the importance of bearing witness to extremism.

Tuesday

Scott Bradfield

In search of utopia: Chevengur, by Andrey Platonov, reviewed

It has been a long journey into the light for the greatest Russian modernist most people have probably never heard of: Andrey Platonov. Born in 1899 in Voronezh, he started professional life as a mechanic and land-reclamation engineer, making him one of those rare writers with an affinity for both people and machines. In the mid-1920s, he was branded an ‘anarchic’ spirit by Maxim Gorky, who nevertheless admired his work. His great early novels were openly critical of the Soviet policy of ‘total collectivisation’ – which, in Platonov’s nightmare scenarios, tends to collectivise people to death.

Honor Clerk

The force of nature that drove Claude Monet

There have been some really good biographies of artists over recent years and what distinguishes the best of them is their sense of context and a lucid prose free from the jargon of the art historian. In the end, of course, any work of art has to be able to stand by itself, but for Jackie Wullschläger her appreciation of Monet’s paintings has been immeasurably deepened by her sense of the man behind them. ‘My approach,’ she writes, ‘stems from the belief that painters transform the raw material of experience into art’, and that material, both the familiar external events and, more illuminatingly, the inner man, is what she gives us here.

Michael Arditti

Escape into the wild: Run to the Western Shore, by Tim Pears, reviewed

Quintus, an Ephesian slave, is in attendance on his master, Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman governor of Britain, when Cunicatus, the chief of one of many warring tribes in ‘this hideous island at the edge of the world’, seals a marriage alliance between Frontinus and his daughter, Olwen. She, however, rejects the match, escaping from the camp at dead of night and impulsively asking Quintus to accompany her. Despite having seen a recaptured fugitive in Gaul torn apart between four horses, he agrees to go. Tim Pears’s Run to the Western Shore follows the pair as they flee through south Wales, hotly pursued by Frontinus’s legionnaires.

Dylan Neri

Now imagine a white hole – a black hole’s time-reversed twin…

There are many ways to measure the course of human history and each will give an insight into one or more of the various qualities that have made us the most successful great ape. Every major advance, whether in war or art or literature, requires imagination, that most amazing of human capacities, and the ability to ask ‘What if?’ – to take the world from a different perspective. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of science. While there is an inherent provincialism in revolutions in art and literature, progress in science is universal, and moves, like Dante’s Hell, in concentric circles of ever deeper understanding.

Helen Carr

Ordinary women make just as thrilling history as great men

In 1348, the year the Black Death reached England and devastated the country, Matilda, the wife of Robert Comberworth, attacked someone called Magota and drew blood. She was fined 3d. Agnes, the wife of William Walker, attacked William de Pudsey and was fined four times the amount. Amica, an official watch-woman tasked with guarding a fruit crop, caught a certain Cecilia stealing. These women are among the many who star in Philippa Gregory’s latest book. Post-Conquest England is well-trodden ground, but Gregory’s history is not one of great men. It is of normal women – the women of legal battles, petitions, wills and letters. Her characters farm, pray, heal the sick, revolt and go to war. They are mothers, political agents, activists and victims.

Sam Dalrymple

A Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitates hundreds of maharajas

On 25 July 1947, in the searing heat, almost 100 princes bedecked in jewels gathered in a circular room in New Delhi. Some of them ruled over principalities of less than a square mile; others over an area larger than Korea. All of them had been Britain’s close allies for more than a century and, now that the British were leaving India, many looked forward to regaining their states’ independence. But on that fateful day, as Lord Mountbatten swaggered around in his ivory white uniform, anxious murmurs rippled through the throng. A cousin of George VI, and related to virtually every royal in Europe, the viceroy was no republican; yet he was about to set in motion one of the great revolutions in world history.

Emma Beddington

Nina Stibbe’s eye for the absurd is as sharp as ever

Nina Stibbe is back in London. It has been 20 years since she left, and 40 years since she first arrived from Leicester to nanny, ineptly, for Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books. Back then, she chronicled her adventures (minor car crashes; thinking Alan Bennett was in Coronation Street; inadvertently stealing Jonathan Miller’s saw) in deadpan letters to her sister Vic that became the delicious Love, Nina. This time she’s resolved to keep a diary of her year as ‘Debby’ Moggach’s lodger in a narrow Kentish Town terrace with an over-watered garden she already disapproves of.

Tuesday

Susie Mesure

The hell of the antebellum South: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward, reviewed

Jesmyn Ward, America’s only female two-time National Book Award winner, has had more than her share of hellish experiences to fuel her literary life. Her Mississippi-based family endured Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones (2011), set during the catastrophe, was Ward’s response. Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), tackled her grief at losing five men close to her, including her brother, who was killed, aged 19, by a drunk driver. In January 2020, Ward’s husband died of acute respiratory distress syndrome. Ward recreates the hell of the antebellum South for the ‘stolen’ people forced into chattel slavery Hell is very much the context for her fourth novel, Let Us Descend.

Clinton Heylin

Thurston Moore relives the early days of Sonic Youth

There are a surprising number of books on or by Sonic Youth, the most important of the East Coast bands to emerge in the wake of the first wave of US punk (1974-78). An excellent Spanish biography and an Italian potted history precede the three English language bios to date, while Thurston Moore’s ex-wife Kim Gordon published her own embittered memoir (Girl in a Band) in 2015. Seems Thurston had been a very naughty boy, and she was determined to tell the world all about it. In fact he may well be the least naughty boy in the history of rock music. ‘Neither hardcore sex nor drug action figured very much in my world,’ he writes. ‘Boys have always wanted to be in rock bands to get laid, or so it’s said. But that was not a defining factor for me.

Francesca Peacock

Satirical pulp: The Possessed, by Witold Gombrowicz, reviewed

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. It’s hardly an event which needs its significance re-stating, but there was one outcome which has received rather less attention than the impending crisis in Europe. After the first instalments – serialised in newspapers in the summer of that year – a bizarre, flamboyant, mock-gothic novel by an unknown writer, ‘Z. Niewieski’, was forced to cease publication on 3 September. Witold Gombrowicz, the author of The Possessed and master of Polish modernism, had penned the work under a pseudonym, and, he claimed, only for money. If that distance from the book weren’t enough, he then put an ocean between himself and the manuscript.

Lee Langley

Anonymous caller: This Plague of Souls, by Mike McCormack, reviewed

Mike McCormack is much garlanded. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature with his first collection of stories; the Goldsmith’s Prize followed in 2016, along with the Irish Book of the Year Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, for his novel Solar Bones. A book-length, single- sentence analysis of a man’s life, that story sprang off the page with the force of a blow.  This Plague of Souls, his fifth novel, is more distanced. Not a story with a beginning, middle and end, it circles in widening gyres, swooping now and then on to a tightly focused moment as its ambiguous hero tries to make sense of an impossible situation. The basic carpentry is simple.