More from Books

Tuesday

Lynn Barber

How Britain prepared for Armageddon from the 1950s onwards

Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the nuclear heat, blackened fingers claw out from the rubble’ and was convinced this was really happening. ‘The experience scarred me for life,’ she declares, ‘and it is the reason you are reading this book.’ In her twenties, she suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia, so she decided to confront her fears by becoming a journalist specialising in the nuclear threat. This book – and it is a very good one – is the result.

Victor Sebestyen

The GDR was not the Stasiland of grey monotony we imagine

One of the great unsung heroes of modern times is Lt Colonel Harald Jäger, an East German border guard who was the commanding officer at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in central Berlin on that wondrous night of 9 November 1989.  There are heart-rending stories of those who were shot ‘wall jumping’, the near-impossible method of escape By 10.30 p.m., 20,000 people had massed in a narrow street, demanding to be allowed into the West, on the other side of the Wall – though at that crossing point the border was just a pair of gates. The mood was extraordinarily tense as the crowd became angrier.  Whenever Jäger asked for instructions from his bosses in the Politburo or the higher brass in the army they panicked and told him to do nothing and wait.

Jude Cook

The lady vanishes: Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, reviewed

‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone. Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the historian and translator Cecilia Berg, disappears without trace, leaving her publisher father Martin to bring up her and her brother Elis in a Gothenberg suburb. Fast-forward 15 years, and Martin is still living alone, visited by his children and haunted by Cecilia’s ghost.

Horatio Clare

The life of an Exmoor stockman reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir

British nature is having a moment, thanks to David Attenborough’s Wild Isles (BBC One). As ever, spring brings a crop of new nature writing, but you are unlikely to come across anything like Once Upon a Raven’s Nest. This is the story of the life of an Exmoor man – Hedley Ralph Collard, known as Tommy – and it reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir. Fans of Niall Griffiths and Kevin Barry will bolt it down. But although the tale is told by Tommy, and rampages along like fiction, the book is actually a blend of reportage and imaginative truth constructed by Catrina Davies, who writes: ‘Where necessary I have put my own words into his mouth, and filled in the gaps of his story using my imagination. This is a portrait, not a biography.

Scott Bradfield

The tragically short life of Bruno Schulz – and his complicated legacy

This is the second excellent book by Benjamin Balint to consider the cross-cultural perils of being a great writer after you’re dead. His first, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, described legal battles over the residence of Kafka’s literary estate. This new one shifts the focus to a very different (and equally unusual) writer, Bruno Schulz, whose work has long been caught up in posthumous conflicts about who it most belongs to – that motley assembly of us selfish readers who actually read him, or those various governments competing to claim him as part of their national heritage.

Kate Chisholm

The savage power of 18th-century caricature

Thanks to the work of the caricaturists of the late 18th century, the mistresses of the future George IV – Mrs Fitzherbert, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and Lady Jersey among them – are better known to us than his eventual wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Prince of Wales’s decadent, spendthrift lifestyle (we see him emerging in 1788 from a lavish four-poster from which Mrs Fitzherbert arises en déshabillé), combined with his florid face and corpulent physique, were perfect fodder for this new genre of artistry, which used caricature (or visual exaggeration) to make political points. James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank were its chief proponents.

Jenny Colgan

A modern Cinderella story: Romantic Comedy, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Romance, and romantic comedy, make up a third of all novels sold – by far the highest-earning genre of fiction. They outdo crime novels 2:1. They are very rarely reviewed, and are generally excluded from year-end round ups, awards, gongs and TV book shows. They do not have their own festivals or celebrations; romance writers are extremely thin on the ground at Hay. They suffer from a triple bigotry (in an industry that likes to think itself terribly progressive): they are read by women; they are read by older women and they are read by working-class women. So it’s a landmark that the critically garlanded Curtis Sittenfeld is having a go. And what’s this? A ‘subversive’ novel, says the book’s jacket. Sittenfeld is a marvellous writer.

Monday

Suzi Feay

Magic and espionage: The Warlock Effect, by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, reviewed

When a shocking, plot-terminating event occurs almost halfway through The Warlock Effect, it’s not just the prospect of another 200 pages to go that alerts the reader to narrative trickery. The central character, Louis Warlock, is after all a stage illusionist who has already pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of mind-reading in front of a crowd of sceptics. Though Warlock likes to come across as a lone genius, behind his stunts lurks an invisible team of problem-crackers he dubs the Brains Trust. They include fellow magic- obsessive Dinah, a girlfriend he seems puzzlingly ambivalent about.

Paul Baker

Dazzling wordplay: Man-Eating Typewriter, by Richard Milward, reviewed

Imagine you work for a grubby Soho publishing company (the fictional Glass Eye Press) in the late 1960s and an unhinged anarchist gets in touch, offering to send you his memoirs which will detail how and why he will commit the crime of the century. Such is the premise of Richard Milward’s clever dark comedy, Man-Eating Typewriter. Coded messages are sprinkled throughout the book, with a faulty typewriter playing a key role The novel’s severely unreliable narrator is Raymond Marianne Novak, the son of a French surrealist (semi-affectionately called Madam Ovary), who is brought up in a war-damaged London squat. Novak is breathtakingly ugly, pansexual, a dab hand at the old maquillage and can run up a spectacular cossie on his sewing machine in minutes.

Kate Womersley

Great men don’t shape history – but tiny microbes do

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode. The tiny world beneath my lens created an illusion of human supremacy, a world where the truth was small, immobilised and bored of itself. Pathogenesis – the cause of disease, its development and the impact it has on cells and organisms – is thankfully not what Pathogenesis is about. Jonathan Kennedy is a sociologist, not a microbiologist, and his unit of interest is the epidemic event, not the single bacterium.

Anna Aslanyan

Michael Frayn remembers old friends – and the spy who duped him

Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. Guided by this principle, Michael Frayn devotes his new memoir to his friends, embracing the chance to pay tribute to those who shaped him. The octogenarian warns in the foreword that his choice of protagonists is ‘pretty capricious’ – a comment on the arbitrary nature of both memory and creativity – and yet the way he treats them is anything but fickle. He remembers every one of them with fondness, never slipping into sentimentality or idealisation. These sober recollections are interlaced with the irony familiar from Frayn’s novels, while his playwright’s genius occasionally flashes in such lines as ‘Two legs – a very reasonable number’.

Rupert Shortt

David Baddiel rejects religion – but describes himself as a ‘reluctant unbeliever’

The cover design of this tract-length book associates it with David Baddiel’s excellent Jews Don’t Count (2021), which exposed a prejudice infecting both ends of the political spectrum. The God Desire resembles its precursor in other ways. Wit and dry humour abound. But as a verdict on the human appetite for the divine, it is disappointing. The question of whether life has ultimate meaning and purpose can plainly claim to trump all others. Atheism may be a viable world view, but it is hardly unproblematic. The same goes for theism.

Simon Heffer

The Edwardian era was not such a golden summer

This is a rather odd book and, I regret to say (given the reading that seems to have gone into it), not a very good one. If one had little knowledge of the reign of King Edward VII, or of the jokes, anecdotes and scandals of that period, then it might serve as a useful introduction to it. To anyone familiar with the history of the opening years of the past century, however, there is little to learn from a book dependent entirely on secondary sources, old newspapers and copies of Tatler. Martin Williams is clearly fascinated by the Belle Époque and has read much about it; but in avoiding archives and serious research, he has produced nothing that other scholars of the period did not already know, which gives his otherwise articulate book a stale flavour.

William Dalrymple

How a humiliating defeat secured Britain its empire

Beneath a flinty church tower deep in the Kent marshes, ‘among putrid estuaries and leaden waters’, lies a monument to an Elizabethan man of business. It is not much to look at. David Howarth calls it ‘second rate... dull’ and ‘strangely provisional’, despite its expanse of glossy alabaster. Moreover, the name of the man commemorated will ring few bells, even among historians. But it is the only memorial erected to one of the most important men in English history. Sir Thomas Smythe was perhaps the greatest businessman in Elizabethan England. He not only founded the East India Company; he also played a leading role in several other significant commercial and pioneering proto-colonial ventures of the age.

Claire Lowdon

Woman of mystery: Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed

Catherine Lacey’s new book is the second literary novel I’ve read recently to radically rewrite American history. In last year’s To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara imagined a different outcome for the Civil War: the Confederate states secede to become the thoroughly racist ‘United Colonies’. Up north are several political unions, such as the ‘Free States’ (including New York), where gay marriage is not just legal but widespread by the end of the 19th century. Lacey plants her sensational plot-twist a little later on the timeline. In Biography of X, ‘the Great Disunion’ occurs at the end of the second world war, when a wall goes up around the ‘Southern Territory’, a theocratic entity eager to protect its citizens from the purportedly communist north.

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

Painful memories: Deep Down, by Imogen West-Knights, reviewed

‘What are you like with enclosed spaces?’ Tom asks his sister Billie before they head into the maze of tunnels under Paris. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city. As the setting for the climax of Imogen West-Knights’s subtle and compelling debut Deep Down, it is certainly fitting: in the wake of their father William’s death, the siblings begin to explore hidden and submerged memories from their childhood. The two are not close.

Boyd Tonkin

Find the lady: Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías, reviewed

The plot sounds like an airport thriller – or a Netflix mini-series pitch. In a proud and staid riverside town in north-west Spain, where ‘each individual played the role assigned to him’, live three women. One is a merciless terrorist killer: Magdalena Orúe, or Maddy O’Dea, half-Spanish, half-Northern Irish, a warrior on long-term loan from the IRA to the Basque separatists of ETA, but now either retired from the armed struggle or quietly brewing fresh mayhem. A mothballed secret agent, one of those ‘nasty angels’ who ‘never forget what everyone else forgets’, arrives in ‘Ruán’ in 1997 on an off-the-books mission hatched in London and Madrid.

Richard Briand

The fall of the Berlin Wall promised Europe a bright future – so what went wrong?

Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir.  On several occasions, Russia accepted Nato membership for the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled the author is and how extensive his contacts are, among its great strengths are the personal encounters, experiences and anecdotes it relates. We learn, for example, of the Romanian pastor who, on hearing that Garton Ash is from Oxford, asks in all seriousness whether he has met John Henry Newman.

Zareer Masani

There was no golden age for Muslims in Nehru’s India

It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has successfully explained the consequences of that transition. This latest attempt, though often original and incisive, fails to bridge that gap, partly because it ends in 1977, thereby largely ignoring the major turning point that brought to power India’s current Hindu-chauvinist rulers.

Michael Ledger-Lomas

Our struggle to concentrate is nothing new

Our ruined attention spans seem to be the consequence of a recent fall from grace. Big Tech was our tempter. Having tasted its dopamine, we got hooked on its likes and notifications. Even Thoreau got bored with practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond But while the digital attention economy is new, the struggle to concentrate is not. Caleb Smith’s elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention begins with the perplexities of Henry David Thoreau in early19th-century England. Believing that the ‘mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things’ and that a commercial age allowed ‘no sabbath’ for our thoughts, Thoreau fled Boston for a shack on the quiet borders of Walden Pond.