More from Books

Tuesday

Dominic Green

The Anne Frank story continues

The first time a friend told me that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews I was six. Most of my classmates agreed, and quoted their parents in evidence – from which I conclude that anyone who suggests that they don’t understand how the Holocaust happened is either a fool or a liar. It was a team effort by popular demand. If the Germans had won the war, no one would have felt bad about it. But the Germans lost. How awkward. Anne was freezing, starving and dressed in rags. ‘They took my hair,’ she said. Then she disappeared It became necessary to convince non-Jewish Europeans that mass-murdering Jewish Europeans was wrong. It was a hard sell.

Stuart Kelly

Ghosts from the past: Beethoven’s Assassins, by Andrew Crumey, reviewed

In an uncanny way, Andrew Crumey’s Beethoven’s Assassins reminded me of Vanity Fair. It has no epigraphs, but both these quotes nudged into my mind: ‘Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out’; and ‘The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face’. I have admired Crumey’s work for decades. When I first returned to Scotland, I found it astonishing that there was a writer being talked about as ‘our’ Calvino or Borges when the enthusiasm generally was for Trainspotting. His latest novel is more like Umberto Eco in some regards, but is still quintessentially Crumey. I hope its valedictory tone is a fiction within a fiction.

Chloë Ashby

The haunting power of 17th-century Dutch art

Laura Cumming writes about art with a painter’s precision. She’s been the chief art critic for the Observer since 1999. Her fourth work of non-fiction, Thunderclap, is a beautifully illustrated memoir that intertwines biography, visual analysis and personal reflection. An eloquent homage to her artist father, James Cumming, and to the artists of the Dutch golden age, it explores the power of pictures in life and in death. Dutch art is less about things and the way they look, and more about feeling, mood, charisma Dutch art is a culture like no other, writes Cumming. ‘Which other nation wanted to portray all of itself in this way, its food and drink and physical conditions, its lovers, its doctors, housewives and drunks?

John Self

Spirit of place: Elsewhere, by Yan Ge, reviewed

This collection of stories is so assured, and delivered with such aplomb, that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut – and, as it turns out, that’s because it isn’t. Although Elsewhere is Yan Ge’s first book written in English, she is a seasoned novelist in China, where she has been publishing fiction for more than 20 years. For the past decade, Ge has lived in Britain and Ireland, and the collection captures the spirit of both her birthplace and her adopted homes in a variety of registers. The stories set here have a whiff of autofiction to them, but transcend their origins with style and wit.

Nigel Jones

In seven years, Lenin changed the course of history

The upheavals convulsing the Russian empire in 1917, Victor Sebestyen argues convincingly, were the seminal happenings of the past century. From them directly stemmed the second world war, the Cold War, the collapse of European imperialism and the dangerous world we inhabit today. There are many weighty modern accounts of these epochal events by historians such as Richard Pipes, Robert Service and Orlando Figes, and it is these that Sebestyen chiefly relies on in this brisk, well-informed and chilling account. He makes no pretence of original research. How did Trotsky’s childlike vision become a nightmare system, dependent on evil, oppression and violence?

Wednesday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Can the ancient Greeks really offer us ‘life lessons’ today?

Adam Nicolson’s seductive new book –a voyage around early Greek thought – opens with a lovely passage. Moored with his wife off the island of Samos, Nicolson rises at first light, with ‘only the cats awake’, to find that other boats have come in during the night and laid their anchor lines over his. Our action-man author dives in and swims down ‘the 12 feet or so to the sandy sea floor, hand over hand and link by link down the chain, looking for the tangle that needed to be undone’. It’s a metaphor for the task he sets himself in How To Be, which aims to separate out the strands of thought that originated in Greece between 650 and 450 BC.

Suzi Feay

Fame came too late for Nick Drake

A friend suggested I might bring a feminine twist to this review by imagining what it felt like to be Nick Drake’s mother. It was a startling thought. When I read artists’ biographies I tend to stand with them eye-to-eye, rather than conjure the perspective of an older generation. But the further we are distanced in time and age (the singer-songwriter died in 1974, aged 26), the more the picture morphs. Just as we’re supposed to grow out of liking Shelley (I never did) or learn to swap Mozart for Bach, our view of someone who was both an undoubted genius and the definition of callow inevitably matures.

Lee Langley

The trials of a Tokyo housewife: Mild Vertigo, by Mieko Kanai, reviewed

Natsumi lives in a modern flat in Tokyo with her husband and two young sons, her life comfortable but circumscribed by the tedium of household chores. Washing dishes in the sink, she finds herself transfixed, gazing at the ‘rope of water’ falling from the tap, twisting like a snake: ‘There was something Sisyphean in the nature of the roster of simple domestic tasks... never an end in sight.’ Things are at once too easy and too much for her; the kitchen is so perfect she hesitates to spoil its pristine condition and ends up buying ready-cooked meals, her life shrunk to what seems stifling captivity.   She memorises the layout of the super-market and makes notes: ‘Fish Day specials: tuna or red snapper or yellow-tail or octopus sashimi.

James Ball

The bored teenagers who can disrupt the world

Most of us live a strange double life when it comes to hacking. We read headlines saying that our toaster might spy on us, that Russia is trying to hack into our social media, and that society as a whole could be under threat. At the same time, we install smart speakers in every room of our house, post more than ever to social media, and the worst we see of hacking attempts is the occasional email from a Nigerian ‘prince’. Trying to calibrate whether we should be terrified or unconcerned is a difficult task, so it’s refreshing when Scott Shapiro – a Yale law professor who also serves as the director of the university’s cybersecurity lab – says early in his book that neither is the correct approach.

Tom Williams

A study of isolation: The Late Americans, by Brandon Taylor, reviewed

The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor’s second novel, follows the lives of a group of friends living in Iowa City over the span of a year. Early on, Seamus, a poet completing his master’s degree, imagines an ‘indifferent God... squinting at them as they went about their lives on the circuits like little automata in an exhibit called The Late Americans’, and this is a fine description of the novel. Each character is the focus of a chapter, and we watch as Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Timo, Noah, Bea, Fatima and Daw’s lives overlap, in bars, seminar rooms and dance studios, while they negotiate their place in a world determined by their race, class and wealth.

Simon Ings

Sports fans are rarely shamed for being overzealous

Have you ever loved someone and got nothing back? Next question: was it really so bad? We all feel things for people who don’t even know we exist, and the experience is often enriching. For me, David Bowie’s life held meaning. If the Thin White Duke did not rate as your personal companion, then our late Queen almost certainly did; or, if not her, then what about Walter White, from the TV drama Breaking Bad, since we love fictional characters too? Walt saw me through my divorce; and we enjoy these relationships in private. Sometimes we meet fellow fans, and then, as the cheery Michael Bond points out, ‘one of the incentives for being part of a fandom is that you get to do things with others’. Bond sketches the psychology of belonging very lightly in his book.

Hannah Tomes

Is Margaret Thatcher ultimately to blame for the current social housing crisis?

By the time she was 25, the journalist and broadcaster Kieran Yates had lived in almost as many houses. Having rented for more than a decade, I feel her pain. I’ve lived in flats that made me physically unwell (mould has a lot to answer for) and survived housemates whose approach to kitchen hygiene made every day a salmonella minefield. I would visit a former boyfriend whose bedroom was, essentially, a glorified crawl space in a cold artists’ warehouse. He was 6ft 6in and couldn’t even kneel up in it, but, aged 24, I thought it was cool. Now I see it for what it was: an indictment of London’s rental market, embodied in grey concrete and exposed piping.

Nicholas Lezard

Judge Dredd: the prescience of a 45-year-old comic strip

In 1977, an enduring character was created for the pages of the IPC comic 2000 AD: Judge Dredd, lawman of the future, the most visible symbol of police procedure – a helmeted, black-clad, motorbike-riding policeman patrolling the streets of Mega-City One, a vast metropolis stretching along the eastern coast of the US, whose remit also allows him – as his honorific implies – to be an on-the-spot judge, jury and, when the occasion demands, executioner. The occasion often demands it. It is interesting that the two longest- running human cartoon characters in Great Britain represent opposite poles of the psyche. Their names both begin with D, for some reason or none. Dennis the Menace is all about anarchy; Dredd very much not so.

Robin Ashenden

How does the Russian public view the invasion of Ukraine?

‘It’s too soon,’ said an anti-war Russian friend about the crop of books which have been emerging since late last year on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps he is right. Yet, mindful of Lenin’s maxim that ‘there are weeks when decades happen’, many may feel the period since February last year to have been one of the longest of their lives. Amid the fog of war – an endless news cycle in which events pile up, too enigmatic or episodic for the big picture to emerge – one is grateful to any writer who sets out to give the wider narrative. ‘To look at Russia now, as someone who loves the country, is to despair’ One such is Serhii Plokhy, the Zaporizhzhia-born historian and Ukrainian specialist, in The Russo-Ukrainian War.

Adam Begley

A doomed affair: Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck, reviewed

We all live with boundaries, but few of us feel that as keenly as Jenny Erpenbeck, who grew up in the Pankow district of East Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Wall. Now a leading novelist of a unified Germany, she explained several years ago that when the Wall came down in 1989 and the East German state collapsed (she was 22 at the time), a ‘border’ was created between two halves of her life. ‘Without this experience of transition, from one world to a very other one, I would probably never have started writing.’ It will never be like this again, thinks Hans.

Thursday

Simon Heffer

What do we think of when we think of Essex?

Apparently much of the notoriety – or perhaps by now it has become allure – of Essex is my fault. In 1990, weeks before Mrs Thatcher was defenestrated, I wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph called ‘Essex Man’, in circumstances that Tim Burrows describes entirely accurately in this exceptionally well-written and intelligent book. Although the Iron Lady was about to be history, the part of England that had come to exemplify her achievement and her legacy was throbbing with capitalist energy more than ever – which motivated the profile of Essex Man and his hard work and ability to seize opportunities in a society where native ability counted for more than class.

Wednesday

Peter Pomerantsev

Lies about the Katyn massacre added insult to the horror

On 5 March 1940, as the USSR stamped its authority on a Poland it had partitioned with Hitler, Stalin signed a decree to murder 14,700 Polish officers in the woods by Katyn. These ‘hardened, irremediable enemies of Soviet power’ were not informed of their sentence and simply shot in the back of the head, a form of execution favoured by the secret police, the NKVD, for whom this method was just part of bureaucratic procedure. NKVD forgers changed the dates on the documents found in the dead officers’ pockets at Katyn When the Nazis turned on the Soviets in 1941 and marched east, they found the mass grave.

Stuart Jeffries

The philosophical puzzles of the British Socrates

Imagine your donkey and mine graze in the same field. One day I conceive a dislike for my donkey and shoot it: on examining the victim, though, I realise with horror I’ve shot your donkey. Or imagine a slightly different scenario. As before, I draw a bead, but just as I pull the trigger, my donkey – perhaps more invested in this vale of tears than yours – steps out of the firing line and I shoot your donkey. Now here’s the question. When, in either case, I turn up on your doorstep with the remains of your donkey, how should I frame my apology to you? In his 1956 presidential address to the Aristotelian Society, J.L. Austin (1911-1960), White’s Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a man who, M.W.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Divine revelations: I, Julian, by Claire Gilbert, reviewed

Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. What seems indisputable is that Julian was the author of the first work written in English by a woman. This rather wonderful fictional autobiography was published to coincide with the 650th anniversary of Julian first experiencing, in May 1373, the series of 16 visions she wrote about in Revelations of Divine Love. It comes garlanded with praise from, among others, Jeremy Irons and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

Emily Rhodes

Turmoil in Tuscany: The Three Graces, by Amanda Craig, reviewed

The title of Amanda Craig’s enjoyable and provocative ninth novel might conjure the dancing trio in Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ (which we visit in the book, set in Tuscany); but the three graces here are Ruth, Diana and Marta, elderly expat friends who meet for weekly gossips over coffee, ‘united by age, exile, the love of dogs and their disinclination to discuss their infirmities’. The women may be less beautiful than Botticelli’s, but they are certainly more formidable. By the end of the first chapter they’ve already smashed a car window to rescue an overheating dog.