More from Books

Tuesday

Hugh Thomson

Living with the Xingu in deepest Amazonia

The Amazon is a notoriously difficult part of the world to write about – and I’ve tried. Travelling the river’s slow length, it can be hard to make sense of any changes beneath the forest canopy or to link its disparate communities. The Brazilian writer Eliane Brum succeeds triumphantly. Acclaimed for her previous ‘despatches from Brazil’, appealingly titled The Collector of Leftover Souls, she moved from São Paulo, one of the largest cities of the Americas, to the isolated Xingu tributary to embed herself completely. Or, as she might put it, to lose herself. When asked their age, tribal people just make up a number to be helpful – and then repeatedly change it As a journalist, she is used to asking people their age.

Michael Arditti

A father’s nightmare: What You Need From the Night, by Laurent Petitmangin, reviewed

The unnamed narrator of Laurent Petitmangin’s prizewinning first novel, What You Need From the Night, a middle-aged railway engineer and lifelong socialist, is faced with his worst nightmare when his 24-year-old son Frédéric, known as Fus, joins a violent far-right group. The narrator lives with his younger son Gillou and Fus in a village in eastern France, near the Luxembourg border. It’s an insular part of the country, suspicious of the capital and devoid of employment prospects or cultural resources. The sole diversions appear to be football and alcohol. Petitmangin depicts a predominantly male world, accentuated in the narrator’s case by the death of his wife after her three-year battle with cancer.

Sam Dalrymple

The trials of England’s first ambassador to India

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organised and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the Earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England. So began Alex von Tunzelmann’s 2007 end-of-empire classic, Indian Summer. Now Courting India by Nandini Das traces the first encounter between these vastly different worlds, offering a fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire. The world into which we are dropped is in many ways eerily familiar.

Tessa Dunlop

What possessed the Duke of Windsor to visit Nazi Germany in 1937?

Bombs start exploding at the beginning of this book. Buckingham Palace was targeted by the Nazis early on in the war in an act of extraordinary audacity – and one that backfired. George VI noted in his diary: ‘We all wondered why we weren’t dead.’ Little did he realise that Hitler had gifted him his first wartime ace. But while George grew into the role of stoic monarch, his older brother never worked out how shake off the trammels of his birth. Edward was hurt, angry and rudderless – which resulted, if not in treason, certainly in disloyalty The Windsors at War is a follow-up to Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis, which explored the abdication of 1936.

Katrina Gulliver

Mass poisonings in a small town in Hungary

There is a small town in Hungary called Nagyrév. With a population of 800, it seems unlikely to make the news. But a century ago it turned out to be the centre of a murder ring, and suddenly it became the focus of news-paper reports across the world. The unlikely setting made the story. It was a backwater, literally: the redirecting of the Tiszaltiver river decades earlier had cut Nagyrév off. Forget cars: this was a town where it was notable in the 1920s if someone owned a bicycle. Yet the place had the murder rate of a violent city. By the time the authorities woke up to what was going on, they discovered dozens of homicides going back several years, and all traced to the town’s midwife, Suzannah Fazekas.

Andrew Lambirth

The European influence on modern American art

Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York is somewhat misleadingly titled, though its true content and focus are revealed in the subtitle: ‘Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism.’ Perhaps that sounds obscure and even academic. If so, it gives the wrong idea, for this is a very readable and accessible account of a hitherto unexplored area of mainstream art history. Many of us suspected the importance of European influence on what is always claimed as the thoroughly American art movement of Abstract Expressionism. This book sets out the situation in detail, and makes a convincing argument for giving credit not only to a bunch of European émigrés but to an Englishman as well.

Jamie Collinson

A deep mystery: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes, reviewed

Martin MacInnes’s third novel, In Ascension, is a literary sci-fi epic set in the 2030s. It centres on a Dutch marine microbiologist called Leigh Hasenboch. As a child she suffers from a violent, frustrated father and a distant, unavailable mother, and tries to protect her younger sister from the worst of it. One day, swimming in the Nieuwe Maas, she experiences a revelation: ‘Absolutely everything around me was alive.’ Her fascination with the marine world eventually takes her on a voyage to explore a newly discovered mid-Atlantic trench. Strange, harmful things happen to divers who approach it. It seems to repel the ship she is on, and its oval shape appears significant. But people who experience this alien, damaging space seem to be irresistibly drawn back to it.

Mia Levitin

Femicide in Mexico reaches staggering proportions

In July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20-year-old architecture student, was strangled to death at her home in a borough of Mexico City. Her suspected killer, Ángel González Ramos, an ex-boyfriend, fled and remained at large. Three decades later, buttressed by a movement protesting against violence towards women, her sister returned to Mexico in the hopes of finding justice. An acclaimed author and essayist, Cristina Rivera Garza is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Liliana’s Invincible Summer begins with her quest to track down the case files. When the paper trail hits a dead end, she turns her detective work to her sister’s personal archive, motivated to memorialise Liliana in the absence of an institutional record.

Tuesday

Duncan Fallowell

Karl Lagerfeld – from fashion icon to invisible man

Karl Lagerfeld was an icon when he died in 2019, but for most of his career he was unknown outside the fashion business. He was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, a distasteful coincidence, so Lagerfeld altered his birth to 1938. He was an only child, whose father did well by introducing condensed milk into Germany. His parents had been Nazi members, and Karl saw his future elsewhere. At 18 he left Hamburg for Paris. Short and chunky, he had simian good looks, with beetling brow and a smile that was wider than his eyes; and he didn’t want for admirers. In 1954 he won the young designers Woolmark Prize, but only in ‘the coat category’. The winner in the more prestigious ‘dress category’ was the several-years-younger Yves Saint Laurent – and that scorched Karl for life.

Elizabeth Goldring

A passion for painting at the early Stuart courts

Four years ago Roy Strong – one-time director of both the National Portrait Gallery (1967-73) and the V&A (1973-87) – published The Elizabethan Image: An Introduction to English Portraiture, 1558-1603, in which he returned, after more than a 30-year hiatus, to the subject with which he first made his name: the imagery of Queen Elizabeth I and her court. Now 88, the indefatigable Strong has produced a follow-up volume charting the fate of portraiture (and painting and the visual image more generally) at the courts of Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, James I and Charles I. Charles I would travel by barge to Van Dyck’s studio to pass the time with him and watch him paint The format of – and thinking behind – The Stuart Image is the same as in the previous book.

Lee Langley

Inside Warhol’s Factory: Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, reviewed

In 1965 Andy Warhol set out to record 24 one-hour audio cassettes focused on one of his ‘superstars’, the actor known as Ondine. The recordings later became a, A Novel, a Joycean distillation of a day in the life. Four typists, two of them teenagers, transcribed the cassettes verbatim – everything they heard on their headphones, every word, cough, gurgle, screech of chair or clink of glass. In his memoir POPism, Warhol mentions ‘two little high school girls’ who typed up his recordings. ‘The typists’ mistakes are all part of the process... that’s what makes it real.’ This is the inspiration for Nicole Flattery’s blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel, Nothing Special.

Steven Poole

Why Anaximander deserves to be called ‘the first scientist’

It’s a daring thing to write a whole book about a man while confessing early on that ‘we know almost nothing of his readings, life, character, appearance or voyages’, and of whose writings only a three-line fragment survives. Luckily, as with many ancient authors, the works of the 6th-century BC philosopher Anaximander are described in subsequent treatises, and a resourceful writer can infer much from this evidence about what might have been ‘the first great scientific revolution in human history’.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Ghosts of the past: Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed

Nothing is quite what it seems in Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, and that isn’t meant entirely as a compliment. While Old God’s Time is a powerful story, I will surely not be the only reader who’s occasionally baffled by its cast of ghosts presented initially as living people. After 200 pages, I lost count of the number of times one character explains to another that the person they think they have just seen is actually dead. The protagonist is the recently retired and somewhat haunted policeman Tom Kettle, who feels ‘his pension was his gun, his weapon against work’. He now lives in a lean-to annex of a Victorian castle in Dalkey, overlooking the Irish Sea, where he catches only glimpses of his landlord and neighbours.

Christopher Bray

There’s nothing ‘magical’ about a great theatrical performance

‘Make him read the lines the way they’re written!’ Raymond Massey snarled at Elia Kazan during the East of Eden shoot. Classically trained, Massey was infuriated at the way the movie’s star, the Method instinctive James Dean, never played a scene the same way twice. Kazan, who had refereed similar rows between Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando on the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, did what good directors do with warring actors: play them off against each other the better to boost both performances. Nobody who has watched the picture, especially those scenes in which Massey flinches at Dean’s latest flight of fancy, could doubt the artfulness of Kazan’s technique.

Anthony Sattin

A source of bitter rivalry: Burton and Speke fall out over the Nile

For the 19th-century English adventurer, author, ethnographer, pornographer and all-round maverick Richard Burton, one of life’s happiest moments was ‘the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands’. There would of course be difficulties; but happiness derives from the prospect of overcoming great challenges and in the process achieving fame and perhaps even fortune. By contrast, what delights the reader most is when a traveller, somewhere deep in those unknown lands, faces overwhelming obstacles. What possible interest is there in hearing that they went, they saw and they returned? Few journeys involved more hardship than the one Burton contemplated in the spring of 1855.

Rose George

Women beware women: young feminists are betraying their older sisters

Where are all the father-in-law jokes? You won’t find them, because fathers-in-law are not fair game in the way middle-aged women are. There is no male ‘Karen’. Men are not mocked as wizards, but we are witches. Victoria Smith has subtitled her timely book ‘The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women’, and if you are one of them you will know that is no exaggeration. Witches, crones, hags, scolds, evil mothers-in-law – up here in middle age, we are used to male scorn. But Smith has a different target: ‘I do not wish merely to present the myriad ways in which older women are belittled, undermined or misrepresented.’ We know all that, it’s obvious: ‘Ageist misogyny has always existed.

Tuesday

Richard Baxell

The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’ Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it.

Andrew Lycett

Poetry anthologies to treasure

Francis Palgrave, the founder of the Public Record Office, didn’t like having his version of the past parcelled in neat gobbets. In his History of Normandy and England, he described anthologies as ‘sickly things’, adding that ‘cut flowers have no vitality’. His son, Francis Turner Palgrave, differed fundamentally, and, with Alfred Tennyson’s help, gathered what is still the greatest collection of English lyric poetry, The Golden Treasury, which sold 10,000 copies in six months after its publication by Macmillan in 1861 and, according to Clare Bucknell in this delightfully engaging survey of verse anthologies, had shifted 650,000 copies by 1939 and must surely now be hitting the million mark.

Victor Sebestyen

Why is Ukraine honouring the monsters of the past?

The historian Bernard Wasserstein is admired as a rigorous academic. In his monumental work on the Holocaust and his perceptive study of barbarism vs civilisation in the West, he strove for objectivity and maintained a professorial tone, as if writing of the past from an Olympian height. Wasserstein’s grandparents and aunt were forced to dig their own graves, and were then shot Not so in this extraordinarily moving book about Krakowiec, the shtetl 40 miles from Lviv where his forebears lived for generations, and the role his family played there. At various times part of Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Soviet Russia, it was, he says, ‘a small place you’ve never heard of’. Yet its complex history is relevant today, as war returns to Eastern Europe.

Mark Cocker

Living trees that predate the dinosaurs

It is perhaps easy to understand why some of the Earth’s largest trees, with roots spreading deep into the underworld as their upper limbs ascend to heaven, are charged with symbolic importance. Yet the origins of our fixation are perhaps surprising. To give one example, the Buddha was said to have attained enlightenment beneath the spreading limbs of a bodi, or pipal tree. That same specimen still reputedly flourishes at Bodh Gaya in Nepal. Even earlier, the first temple of Jerusalem was constructed from timbers King Solomon obtained specifically from the cedars of Lebanon, whose own sacred status recedes into the mists of prehistory. Elderflora – a name coined by Jared Farmer for these venerable old masters – suggests that little has changed since Solomon’s time.