More from Books

Tuesday

Elisa Segrave

Paw prints through the ages: a stunning visual history of man’s best friend

Inspiring, educational, moving, sometimes distressing, this is a riveting visual history of man’s best friend. Thomas Laqueur, from a German Jewish family, whose mother owned boxers, introduces us to many hitherto unexplored facts. Who knew that in 1938 guard dogs, using Bedouin herding dogs, were specially bred for ‘the new Zion’? Or that Darwin thought that dogs have a conscience?   We are encouraged to scrutinise master- pieces of art with a fresh eye. In ‘The Wedding at Cana’ (1563), Paolo Veronese includes one white dog, who is ‘looking up at Jesus’s white shining face and invites us to join it’. Five dogs feature in this painting, and I took some time to spot each.

Miriam Balanescu

The good old bad old days: Prestige Drama, by Seamas O’Reilly, reviewed

Set in present-day Derry, Seamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama centres on the filming of a television series set in the 1980s. Monica Logue, a glamorous American actress and crime drama regular, has been cast as the lead, and residents are divided between apprehension and hoping she ‘would do for Troubles-era Derry what she’d already done for shops that sold satin gloves’. When Monica vanishes, the community is left to deal with the fallout and their feelings about the Troubles, known as ‘the bad old good old days’. Each section is narrated by a different townsperson – from the show’s historical adviser to a mural painter, the local witch to a clairvoyant taxi driver – all with their own ideas about what has become of ‘the woman always catching sex pests on TV’.

Bryan Appleyard

Does a propensity for crime depend on one’s DNA?

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

Tuesday

Simon Kuper

Would W.G. Grace recognise the game of cricket today?

There’s a fascinating thought that the authors of Full Circle pursue for just a couple of pages, then leave hanging: ‘Association football offers an alternative history by which to consider the course cricket might have taken.’ In fact, the book demonstrates that cricket has followed football’s course, albeit about a century late. In cricket, too, professionals ousted amateurs, embraced the market, saw economic power shift east and chose a short format that allowed games to be played in an evening. Like it or loathe it, cricket has effectively become football. Reading this serious and competent work, you wonder at times why the journalists Richard Heller and Peter Oborne bothered to write it. There are already countless cricket histories.

Lynn Barber

Lean and mean: Mick Jagger was always a tightwad

This book got glowing reviews when it was published in the US a few months ago: ‘Irresistible’ (New York Times); ‘Riveting’ (Boston Globe); ‘Energetic and engaging’ (Washington Post). I kept wondering if I was reading the same book. You wouldn’t have thought it possible to make the Rolling Stones boring, but Bob Spitz somehow manages to. Let me count the ways. By giving his own programme notes on every Stones record; by paying far too much attention to the actual recording process and crediting every new sound engineer; and by totally missing the point that it is the Stones themselves we are interested in. I’m fairly typical of diehard Stones fans in that I got hooked in the 1960s and have stayed with them ever since. I am now 82.

Kate Chisholm

Marvels of the masked ball: dressing up in Georgian London

In the satirical print ‘Remarkable Characters at Mrs Cornely’s Masquerade’ from February 1771, the Georgian craze for dressing up as fantastical characters is shown in all its theatricality and wild invention. The harlequin was always popular, as was the domino, but here we also have a ‘Savoyard’ (supposedly from Savoy) playing a hurdy-gurdy with his dancing bear in tow, a nun in full habit, ‘Mad Tom’ with wild hair and ragged clothes, and, perhaps weirdest of all, a coffin, decorated with a skull and crossbones. Peeping out from beneath its sombre frame are the two ridiculously dainty feet of the masquerader.

Jonathan Boff

Accelerating the ‘kill chain’ – a terrifying glimpse of future warfare

America possesses the most powerful military in history, but since 1945 it has not won a war against anyone other than Saddam Hussein. It appears not to understand why. In fact the only thing the US seems worse at than winning wars is learning lessons from its defeats. People such as the secretary of war Pete Hegseth think it’s all about woke. Lily-livered longhairs stateside stabbed the army in the back over Vietnam; then ‘stupid rules of engagement’ tied the military’s hands in Iraq and Afghanistan and caused the disasters there. The solution is to fight harder, if necessary even at the expense of ethics and the law. Another answer might be to get US forces fighting smarter.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

From pike-and-pitchfork brigade to crack militia: ‘Dad’s Army’ wasn’t so ludicrous after all

Ever since the BBC’s Dad’s Army (which ran from 1968 to 1977), it’s been hard to keep a straight face when talking about the Home Guard. Just thinking about Corporal Jones one beat out from the rest of the platoon during drill makes us go weak. Sinclair McKay’s book on the subject, actually called Dad’s Army, does not shirk from the hilarious aspects of this domestic front line of two million volunteers at its peak, many of whom did a full day’s work before turning out to practise defending their country all evening and sometimes all night.

Susie Mesure

No one is ordinary: The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed

It is both a comfort and a discomfort to yield to a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, who writes with such perspicacity that any time spent in her world unsettles as much as it consoles. So it proves with The Things We Never Say, her 11th book and the first since My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) to feature a new character. He is Artie Dam, a misunderstood 57-year-old history teacher from a Massachusetts coastal town. He is married, popular – ‘“Damn-dam, the greatest man,” his students would sometimes say to him’ – and likes nothing better than to take his sailing boat out in Massachusetts Bay. But it soon transpires that the joviality so treasured by his friends is a sham.

Ian Sansom

Is coffee-drinking the new secular religion?

A lot of books, obviously depending on what mood you’re in and viewed from a certain angle, slantwise or squintlike, hover on the edge of self-parody: the Bible; poetry, particularly if American; pretty much everything on a Booker shortlist; Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; Ottolenghi’s cookbooks. Like most things, the best approach to books is to view them with a mixture of open-minded curiosity and outright hostility – is this thing actually profound, useful, interesting or an irritating waste of time and money, a bit of a joke, offensive, crass or just stupid and worth avoiding at all costs?

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

They shoot horses: Boyhood, by David Keenan, reviewed

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favourite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

Roger Lewis

The exquisitely dull life of Elizabeth II, expert on cap badges

The dogs, horses, diamonds, furs, full-length evening gowns of lace and pearls; private jets and limousines; the ever-present jostling retinue; the push and shove of photographers and the clamour of crowds – Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth II had a lot in common, each taking themselves very seriously and needing to be seen to be believed. Whereas the Hollywood actress was majestic mainly in her vulgarity and brashness, however, the late Queen, as is evident in this pair of biographies, did her level best to be reticent, even non-existent. The best known of her few recorded utterances are ‘Oh really?’ and ‘Are you sure?’. She had a tendency to stare at a person with ‘absolutely no expression’, or at best ‘an expression of controlled irritation’.

Wednesday

Nikhil Krishnan

Were Britain’s postwar dons just having too much fun?

A history of academic life stands and falls by the number and quality of its anecdotes. On this count, Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons unquestionably delivers. Did you know that the biologist Francis Crick wrote to Winston Churchill suggesting that an educational institution named after the statesman would be better off with a college brothel than the proposed chapel? Or that Eleanor Plumer, an early principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, told the fellows of her fledgling institution that if they simply must have children, could they ‘kindly ensure’ they had them ‘in the University vacation’? At times, the book can seem to be an anthology of such anecdotes, combining, often in the same story, the world-historic and sociologically significant with the gossipy and trivial.

Justin Marozzi

How Syria’s dream of freedom ended in further repression

Anand Gopal has form when it comes to war. In Afghanistan, distrustful of President Bush’s ‘good vs evil’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us’ narrative, he did what every good reporter does: ‘I learned the language, grew a beard and hit the road like a local.’ The result was No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. In its refusal to stick to the script – especially American and British propaganda about all the ‘progress’ which later proved so illusory – the book recalled Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam exposé, Dispatches.

Paul Levy

The doyen of the France’s culinary scene is unmasked

For some reason it took nearly a decade for the news of a revolution in the restaurants of France to reach the British media. The Americans were much quicker off the mark. In March 1972, Raymond Sokolov reported in the New York Times that a chef near Lyon named Paul Bocuse, along with several of his colleagues, including Michel Guérard and Alain Senderens, were serving their customers ‘a radical simplification of the grand cuisine of the 19th century, the heavy, formal style of cooking codified by Escoffier’. Luke Barr, whose latest book is a compelling history of this culinary earthquake, last wrote about the crook, embezzler and fraudster who curiously remains the patron saint of professional cooks in Ritz & Escoffier (2018).

Suzi Feay

A foolproof way of predicting the future

A peek at the horoscope, puzzling the meaning of dreams, wearing lucky socks, having a method for choosing lottery numbers – many otherwise rational people retain a vestigial interest in prediction to ensure favourable outcomes. I’ll happily admit to a fascination with Tarot cards – and I do seem to be an archetypal bossy Aries. Christopher Dell’s Prophecies demonstrates just how widespread a belief in divination has always been across cultures, however peculiar or unsavoury the methods. In ordering his vast material, Dell sets out some ‘categories of convenience which allow us to impose some structure on a naturally amorphous topic’.

Sarah Moorhouse

In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction

When I met Brian Dillon in February 2023, he seemed to have a lot on his mind. We had arranged to speak about Affinities, the newly published final instalment of Essayism, his sprawling three-part survey of literature, art and aesthetics. That morning, as he sipped decaf coffee in a quiet corner of the Barbican Kitchen café in London, he still didn’t know what his book was about. ‘At this point you don’t,’ he confessed. But even though he hadn’t made up his mind about Affinities, Dillon had already begun to think about his next project. It was to be a memoir of his education, called Ambivalence. This has now come to fruition.

Benjamin Myers

The land of missed opportunity: The Left and the Lucky, by Willy Vlautin, reviewed

Were arriving aliens to be introduced to the concept of the USA via the work of Willy Vlautin, they would find a country populated by quiet people enduring quiet struggles. Family dysfunction, the repetitiveness of minimum-wage work, crushing loneliness and the detailed grind of daily existence (rarely has a writer said so much through groceries bought and meals cooked) are dominant themes, though always backlit by the suggestion that goodness prevails. Even entertaining the idea of the American Dream is an indulgence when the reality of simple survival is far more urgent. In this sense Vlautin is the son of John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver.

Francesca Peacock

The art of printmaking in all its glorious complexity

Do you know your aquatint from your drypoint? Your intaglio from your lithograph? The appearance of any one finished print can vary so much from another – the feathery delicacy of etching replaced by the bold forms of linocut or the carved sinews of a woodblock – that it can be difficult to believe they all derive from the same initial process. What image appears when an object – be it carved, chemically altered, or engraved – is covered in ink and pressed into a piece of paper? As Holly Black explains, it is difficult to know when this technique first originated. Was it with the work of monks carving woodblocks in the mid-9th century to print the lines of the Diamond Sutra (now held in the British Library)? Or does it have its origins centuries earlier?

Jon Day

A meditation on reality: Transcription, by Ben Lerner, reviewed

Near the beginning of Ben Lerner’s new novel the unnamed narrator recalls visiting an exhibition of botanical models made by the father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blashka in Dresden in the 19th century. Like Zeuxis’s grapes, so lifelike that birds would come and peck at them, the models, ‘impossibly delicate things’, challenge the narrator’s sense of the real: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck/rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. Transcription, like Lerner’s previous three novels, is an autofiction about the tension between the given and the constructed. It is arranged in three acts.