More from Books

Tuesday

Mark Cocker

Symbol of wisdom or harbinger of death – the owl preserves its mystery

As the author of this engaging book makes plain, it is with good reason that owls are such cherished birds. They possess the most acute sense of hearing not just of any avian group but possibly of any creature. In experimental conditions of total darkness, barn owls were able to catch mice merely by hearing their rustling as they moved. The owls’ own flight is soundless because of special comb-like structures on the leading edges of their wings. Almost all owl species are adapted to see acutely at night and the largest are able to catch deer or pluck young eagles from the nest. But it is not merely these definable physical attributes that set owls apart. They also have a psychological aura. Their forward-facing eyes in a rather flat-faced configuration mimic our own arrangement.

Charlotte Stroud

The agonies of an abandoned wife: Mrs Dickens, by Emily Howes, reviewed

For every smog-spitting chimney in Victorian London there was a woman tasked with keeping the hearth clean, both physically and morally. This ‘angel in the house’, as Coventry Patmore dubbed her, lived entirely for her family, but above all for her husband. With her organs tightly compressed beneath a whalebone corset, she ministered to his every need and forgave him all his worldly sins. She was, in short, not a real woman but an ideal. In Mrs Dickens, Emily Howes exercises the novelist’s prerogative to flesh out an ideal, to show how the real woman beneath her halo of thorns suffered.

Philip Hensher

The banality of Hélène von Bismarck’s view of Britain is astounding

Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.

Jim Lawley

The disgrace of Juan Carlos of Spain, a modern-day Don Juan

The life of Juan Carlos I, Spain’s 88-year-old former king, who reigned from 1975 until his abdication in 2014, falls into two parts: richly deserved triumph followed by richly deserved disgrace. Building on his 2004 biography, Juan Carlos: A People’s King, Paul Preston’s account of this extraordinary life is magisterial. The son of Don Juan de Borbon, the exiled heir to the Spanish throne, Juan Carlos was born in Rome in 1938. With a view to the eventual restoration of an authoritarian monarchy, he was sent to Spain, aged ten, to be indoctrinated in General Franco’s political tenets. He also had to endure the dictator’s long lectures on the mistakes made by previous Spanish monarchs.

Victor Sebestyen

The botched coup that presaged the end of the Soviet Union

The best thing about the Soviet Union – arguably the only good thing – was the manner of its going. Though it lost its European empire when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, almost nobody predicted that the USSR itself would fall apart so quickly. Most historians, Moscow-based journalists and the world’s espionage agencies thought it would limp on for decades, like the Ottoman empire. Yet the world’s second most powerful state withered away, and not in the classical Marxist sense: it just ceased to exist. As Robert Service shows, the Soviet people destroyed the Soviet Union, not outsiders, and without any significant violence.

Kate Chisholm

In the dazzling company of Alexander Pope and friends

In the summer of 1726, the writers Jonathan Swift and John Gay spent several weeks at the home of their friend Alexander Pope on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham (then known as ‘Twitnam’), not resting but toiling away at their various literary activities and mutually inspiring each other. On the surface they were an unlikely trio: Swift was almost 20 years older than either Pope or Gay; Pope was Catholic (at a time when Catholicism was still treated with suspicion) and financially independent, while Swift was an Anglican cleric, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Gay, in contrast, was a jobbing writer, dependent for financial security on his amiable sociability and maintenance of good relations with a long list of wealthy patrons.

Tuesday

Alys Key

Jaded and adrift: I Want You to Be Happy, by Jem Calder, reviewed

Two people make an awkward stab at a relationship, even as both flounder under the realities of modern life. Yes, we’ve seen elements of I Want You to Be Happy before – and it even comes with an endorsement from Sally Rooney. But Jem Calder still succeeds in offering something fresh, and the novel stands on its own two feet as an intricate analysis of love in the 2020s. Chuck and Joey meet at a nightclub. He is in his thirties, recently single, with a steady job as a senior copywriter. She is in her early twenties and works as a barista. The chapters alternate between their perspectives as their relationship develops. It’s a very east London book. The couple’s dates include a trip to ‘an independent bookshop, whose branded tote bag they both owned’.

Jonathan Meades

The world’s most beautiful man in a den of iniquity

A photograph from the late 1960s shows a lavishly underdressed Marianne Faithfull sandwiched between Alain Delon, the most beautiful man in the world, and Mick Jagger, the second most beautiful man in the Rolling Stones. The gulf between these two indefatigable tombeurs is not merely sartorial. Delon wears a sharp suit, gun-metal grey, and a black tie. There are the makings of a master/servant dialogue here, for Jagger, far from mondaine, is gauche and scruffy with mismatched socks, no doubt counter-cultural. His picayune mis-demeanour, and his fitting up by bad apples in blue such as Pilcher of the Met, might have been a glitch, but it all turned out cosily parish-pump and, further, a great career move, assisted by William Rees-Mogg’s indignation. No one died in that Sussex cottage.

Genevieve Gaunt

Mapping the Emerald Isle: Land, by Maggie O’Farrell, reviewed

Maggie O’Farrell’s two previous historical novels, Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, made her a household name. Land marks a return to her Irish roots: ‘Every family has its myths and ours was that my great-great-grandfather had worked on the early maps of Ireland.’ The year is 1865 and 31-year-old Tomás, a mapmaker, accompanied by his ten-year-old son Liam, is in the employ of the English redcoats and tasked with surveying and mapping Ireland from top to bottom, rocky outcrop to drumlin.

Suzi Feay

Signs of impending doom: The Given World, by Melissa Harrison, reviewed

Melissa Harrison’s bestselling 2018 novel All Among the Barley, set in the early 1930s, was much concerned with the pace of change in the countryside. The interfering outsider Constance FitzAllen passionately advocated for tradition, while worn-down farmers welcomed any innovation that would ease their punishing workload. Almost a century later, in another fictional English village, change can be neither debated nor resisted. While Barley was narrated by an elderly woman looking back at her rural childhood, The Given World portrays a whole community, granting a chapter each to significant characters over six months, with birds, blossom and crops forming a restless backdrop.

Elizabeth Garner

The importance of fairy tales in testing times

In the realm of magic and imagination, human nature can be better understood than in the world of our everyday lives: ‘The best of our tales do not lie or die.’ It is a bold claim, which the folklorist Jack Zipes explores across continents and class in a series of essays. He guides the reader from the origin of oral storytelling, through medieval writings, to 17th-century literary salons and finally to today’s cinema screens. In the course of this journey, he focuses on the specific genre of the ‘wonder tale’, in which ‘those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognise the wondrous signs... They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism.

Christopher Akers

The Panic of 1873 seems eerily familiar

On 18 September 1873, the leading American bank Jay Cooke & Co collapsed after a disastrous bet on the railroad boom. Like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was a watershed moment in an unfolding global financial crisis. Yet ‘the first Great Depression’, which lasted until 1896, is now mostly forgotten, despite some intriguing parallels to contemporary events and a fascinating dramatis personae, which includes the Rothschilds, Ottoman sultans and Otto von Bismarck. The Panic of 1873 and its aftermath took place in a period of financial globalisation and technological growth, with bond markets funding the epochal projects of America’s first transcontinental railroad and the Suez Canal. US railroads were the artificial intelligence investment of the day.

Christopher Webb

Will robots simply bore us to extinction?

A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a ‘tidal wave’; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind co-founder talks urgently about an ‘impending deluge’ (while repeatedly warning us that the ‘wave is coming’, and, even more alarmingly, ‘the coming wave really is coming’). It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a ‘tsunami hitting the labour market’.

Patrick West

The humiliating truth about the way we think

Over the long span of human existence, different cultures have held varying notions as to how responsible we are for our own thoughts and beliefs. Before the dawn of the Abrahamic religions, and in places untouched by these faiths, it tended to be the rule that individual members of the group could only be understood as parts of the whole, or in the grander cosmic scheme of things. The ascendence of Christianity in Europe, with its idea of the indivisible soul, tilted matters more towards a belief in individual agency and accountability. This concept, secularised by Descartes, who gave us the commanding rational ego, has proved resilient ever since, despite the best efforts of Freud, neuroscience and gene selection theory to dethrone it.

Guy Stagg

Putin and Erdogan are playing with fire in the Balkans and the Caucasus

There are 34 disputed territories in and around Europe. In some cases, two or more nations claim the same patch of land. In others, separatist governments demand their own sovereignty. Many of these disputes have a quaint, eccentric interest: Italy and France struggling over the summit of Mont Blanc; or Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Iceland arguing over the barren islet of Rockall. But a few of them – such as Cyprus, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria – provide more urgent political challenges. As Hannah Lucinda Smith argues, these places are Petri dishes – experiments in populism, nationalism and covert conflict that are being repeated across the continent. Her book Hinterlands explores several of these blind spots in most people’s mental map of Europe.

Lynn Barber

Wham! How George Michael shot to stardom straight from school

It turns out that the writer Sathnam Sanghera, ‘The Boy with the Topknot’, has been a besotted George Michael fan since the age of eight, when he started listening to his older sisters’ Wham! records. This was an unusual thing to be as a Sikh growing up in Wolverhampton and it got him teased at school. But he stuck with it. So when a friend suggested that he write something fun to compensate for the years of heavy historical research he’d put into his excellent book Empireland, he decided to set off on a sort of pilgrimage in search of his dead hero. First stop was Mondial Cars, a showroom in Northwood, north London, which used to be the Bel Air restaurant, where the teenage Michael worked as a DJ.

Annie Walton Doyle

The Battle of Cross Street: High and Low, by Amanda Craig, reviewed

Writing a state-of-the-nation novel that is also tense and funny is no mean feat, but that’s what Amanda Craig seems to have accomplished in High and Low. Ambitious and far-reaching, ittakes not a scalpel but a machine gun to the issues of modern city living, leaving no target safe. Set on a north London street over the course of a single day, it compresses time and space, which, together with its plethora of characters, gives a feeling as oppressive as the city itself. Cross Street houses a cosmopolitan mix of the privileged and the poor. Prospect Park and the Cross Estate are both metaphorical and geographical parallels, rubbing together while rarely intersecting. Alongside these highs and lows, Craig focuses on the world of the writer.

Philip Marsden

The wonder of nature’s ability to heal itself

A decade ago, I planted 12 acres of trees in a field that had proved unsuitable for productive grazing. The trees themselves are doing well but the most remarkable change has been the increase in birds, invertebrates and flora. Each year brings new species, new levels of abundance. It has been very satisfying and strangely quick. We’re encouraged to think that the planet’s natural processes work if not always at a geological pace, at least not in the instant reward timeframe that characterises our own brief lives. In Nature’s Echo, the leading ecologist Thomas Crowther takes this capacity for nature’s rapid recovery as one reason why we should temper pessimism about environmental catastrophe.

Tuesday

Amy Liptrot

Portrait of an addict: Keshed, by Stu Hennigan, reviewed

In the tradition of literary lowlifes and lushes as conceived by Charles Bukowski or Jean Rhys, Keshed is a story about an alcoholic, with a distinctive 21st-century, northern English working-class setting. Formally inventive, the ‘now’ sections of the novel are not sentences but strings of words, effective and short: ‘Rancid liquid squirting chin soggy torso peristaltic rush rapid.’ One such section opens the book, setting the uncompromising tone. The protagonist, Sean (‘He was pissed when I met him and he hasn’t changed’), a bright, charismatic lad from an unnamed small Yorkshire town, has been to university in Manchester where he drank heavily. He then moved back home, and we meet him working as a plasterer, living to get smashed.

Stuart Kelly

Reading between the lines: the power of the unsaid

This is the kind of book I wish I had the chance to sit down and discuss with the author. It is accessible without sacrificing academic rigour, astute and ingenious in its close readings and balances breadth with depth admirably. But why on earth does it have a singular title, given that the whole thrust of the argument depends on silence being a multifarious phenomenon? The reader encounters the enigma of silence as rapture, failure, slyness, avoidance, challenge. Silence is both built into literature and a kind of enwrapping, enclosing ocean, out of which words will emerge and back into which they will sink, rather like the primordial chaos at the beginning of Genesis. Speaking or writing about silence is inherently paradoxical. Many years ago I interviewed A.S.