More from Books

Tuesday

Ariane Bankes

Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning

I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world, breaking records with the sale at Christie’s of a tiny but key early work for more than £4 million. Her prices have risen an astonishing sevenfold in the past year, as collectors cotton on to her significance as a Surrealist; and while she may still be trailing on Leonora Carrington’s coat-tails, she looks to be steadily catching up.   Born in America to Swedish parents, Tanning was the very model of a fiercely independent artist, and her works are singular and disquieting like few others. She was largely self-taught as a painter and developed a virtuoso technique.

Mark Nayler

How the paralysed Franz Rosenzweig continued to translate the Bible

In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith. He thus became one of the pioneers of a Renaissance in German Jewry that occurred during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33). This short, dense biography by Paul Mendes-Flohr, an expert on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, who died in 2024, aged 83, also highlights Rosenzweig’s existentialism (which saw him break from the western philosophical tradition by elevating subjective experience over abstract theorising) and his influence as an educator.

Mathew Lyons

Self-betterment through contemplation of the Seven Deadly Sins

What mistake did Narcissus make when he looked into the water? To fall in love with his own ravishing self, we might think. But to the medieval mind, that wasn’t his problem at all. In John Gower’s 14th-century poem ‘Confessio Amantis’, Narcissus falls in love all right – but with someone else entirely. His fault isn’t that he loves himself; it’s that he doesn’t even recognise himself. Then, as now, as Peter Jones argues in this revelatory exploration of late medieval psychology, the path to self-betterment went through self-knowledge. Like our own, it was ‘a civilisation geared towards understanding the human mind’.

D.J. Taylor

Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed

Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like ‘cheery-bye’ and whose decrepit bathroom has ‘a Miss Havisham aspect’; or Chris, the lairy Irish stand-up, by whom, as a besotted teenager, the heroine Laura Miller is cheerlessly seduced.

Leyla Sanai

The harm of dwelling on a traumatic past

Back in the 1970s, people in Britain were mystified by the enthusiasm of Americans – especially New Yorkers – for shrinks. Since then, the vogue for therapy has spread and advice from non-experts on surviving divorce, bereavement and bankruptcy is now commonplace and not always insightful. By contrast, Gwen Adshead, a psychiatrist who has specialised in trauma, is invariably rewarding. Her previous book, The Devil You Know (2021), on the minds of violent criminals, was written with Eileen Horne, a former drama producer – as is Unspeakable. I wasn’t entirely sure why Adshead needed a collaborator here, being so obviously well-read. There are references to Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Keats and Yeats, along with C.S. Lewis, T.S.

Richard Walker

Is private equity secretly running your life?

Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 per cent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you out on all that. Private equity is one of those things that you either know about or don’t. If you are in the finance business you know, because it is the story of the past quarter century. If you are not in that world, if leveraged buyouts and limited partners and debt pushdowns are all just so much business-page noise, then you are in the majority. And it turns out that means you may not know who is really running your life.

Caroline Moorehead

Living in the shadow of Etna

The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its ‘impenetrable darkness’ reminded Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land where Lemons Grow (2014) won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring, yet respectful, eye. Unpicking its geological and human history and a landscape ‘cobbled together from the expressions of the Earth’s unrest’ became for her a way of returning to the very beginnings of life. Mount Etna, almost 3,500 metres in height, is Europe’s biggest volcano and one of the most active in the world, grumbling and spewing for many months at a time.

Monday

Simon Heffer

Why the General Strike of 1926 could never succeed

Although it may be in bad taste to have a favourite story about the General Strike of May 1926, one served up by David Torrance in his superb The Edge of Revolution is probably unbeatable. He quotes an anecdote told by Walter Citrine, the 39-year-old acting secretary of the TUC, who recalled a man ‘with rather sharp, hawk-like features’ turning up at the Congress’s London headquarters in Eccleston Square, near Victoria Station, and offering, in return for £1,000, to solve the unions’ problems.  He announced: I want 100 trusted men and if you cannot find them, I can. I will arm them, take them along to Downing Street, shoot the members of the cabinet and hold Princess Mary’s children as hostages.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Expect toddlers and parlour games at today’s dinner parties

When I was in my twenties and giving dinner parties every week, I came up with a couple of money-saving devices. First, no snacks. This also ensures that, by the time dinner is served, your guests are so hungry they’ll mistake almost anything for a masterclass. Second, invite people on a Monday evening, so they won’t stay too late. As my millionaire cousin likes to say: ka-ching! I mention all this because one reason people don’t give more dinner parties is that they think they’re too expensive. Another is that they’re afraid of being judged. I remember being taken aback when a guest of mine said she would never dare to give a dinner party.

Alex Diggins

Who wants to bring back the Neanderthals?

In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.

Andrew Rosenheim

Tradecraft secrets: a choice of crime fiction

If it takes one to know one, this may explain why spy fiction is enjoying such a renaissance, since among the best new titles are those written by former intelligence operatives. I.S. Berry and David McCloskey are both former CIA officers who happily acknowledge how much their novels rely on their past careers. Equally impressive is the work of ex-MI6 officer James Wolff, whose use of a pseudonym puts him at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to promoting his books, but whose Spies and Other Gods (Baskerville, £20) places him in the top tier of today’s spy writers. A young ex-academic, Aphra McQueen, is sent by a parliamentary oversight committee to investigate a whistleblower’s complaint about MI6.

Honor Clerk

The dilemmas and difficulties of artists through the ages

Walter Neurath, refugee from Nazism, public educator and the founder of Thames & Hudson, would have loved this book. In Lachlan Goudie the publisher has found a born guide, a painter himself and the son of a painter, perfectly equipped to explain how artists have created their masterpieces, from the cave paintings of Chauvet to the machine-learned extravaganzas of AI. Some ten years ago Goudie’s television series The Story of Scottish Art introduced viewers to a similarly broad sweep of art history, and if this book doesn’t make it to the screen then it ought to. Here, too, Goudie uses his own practice to convey the dilemmas and difficulties that artists of every era have confronted in the mastery of their materials.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Looking back in anguish: Good Good Loving, by Yvvette Edwards, reviewed

Ellen is at the end of her life and is frankly waiting to die while her extended family surrounds her, discussing her shortcomings: It felt very unfair to be so completely mentally alert while she was lying there on her hospital bed trying to await a peaceful passing. Her hearing was perfectly intact, and as a consequence she was forced to endure the never-ending discussions about the mass of her failings. This is the first novel from Yvvette Edwards for a decade. Her debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011), longlisted for the Booker, was inspired by a friend showing her a newspaper cutting about her former partner being convicted of the murder of his next girlfriend. The Mother (2016) was about a woman whose son is murdered.

Peter Pomerantsev

With no coherent strategy, Britain seems perpetually adrift in the world

The British state seems perpetually befuddled. Every international crisis catches it in its sudden glare like so many headlights trained on a nervous rabbit hopping hopelessly around a motorway. One moment Russia is invading Ukraine, then Hamas attacks Israel, Israel flattens Gaza, America knocks out Venezuela, then attacks Iran, while all the time China leers over Taiwan. Each new event leaves us spinning. Whose side are we on? What do we want? How do we get it? We use grand words to navigate our way in the confusion: ‘the special relationship’; ‘the national interest’; ‘the rules-based order’. But if these once signified some grand story we could all relate to they now feel empty and confusing.

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

Tales of quiet intensity: The News from Dublin, by Colm Toibin, reviewed

Colm Toibin is a master of understatement, his work characterised by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). He fills the gaps between words – what he doesn’t say – with as much meaning as the prose. Familiar themes emerge. There is the Irish diaspora in the US (as in Brooklyn and Long Island); the Catalan Pyrenees (the setting for ‘The Long Winter’ in Mothers and Sons); and Argentina (as in the novel The Story of the Night). Feelings of exile and being an outsider are aroused, while Catholicism still taps on the shoulders of those long lapsed.

Annie Walton Doyle

Two Tokyo misfits: Hooked, by Asako Yuzuki, reviewed

Following the enormous success of Butter’s English translation in 2024, it seemed inevitable that another of Asako Yuzuki’s novels would surface in the UK. Nairu pachi no joshikai (The Nile Perch Women’s Club), published in 2014, has now become Hooked. Billed as a literary thriller about female friendship, loneliness and obsession, it is a deeply strange, unsettling read. The novel follows Eriko, a high-flying project manager, and Shoko, a slacker housewife blogger, who both struggle with life – or, rather, with the behaviour expected of Japanese women. Both have achieved a level of acceptance socially (Eriko in her career, Shoko in her relationship), but they find the pursuit of ‘gal pals’ a major stumbling block in their quest for the appearance of normality.

Philip Clark

James Baldwin – dogged by painful uncertainties throughout life

James Baldwin, like many American novelists before him, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos included, spent his formative years flitting restlessly between New York and Europe – New York being a source of fascination but also of creative burnout. He completed his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), not in Harlem, where he grew up and set the book, but in a Swiss chalet owned by the family of his then boyfriend, Lucien Happersberger. As he lived and worked in Loèche-les-Bains, Baldwin reasoned that the village children who shouted ‘neger’ at him did not mean to be unkind. They were simply curious and could never have known ‘the echoes this sound raises in me’.

David Honigmann

The misery of working with Chuck Berry

In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular music. There are three dynamics at play. First, there are the Thucydides tensions, where a waning power tangles with a rising one. Frank Sinatra invites Elvis Presley to join him on a television show; Keith Richards throws a filmed concert with Chuck Berry. (Richards, for once, is the younger partner.) The older player is not always generous.

Sebastian Faulks

The mystery of what makes us special remains unsolved

Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special. Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match. Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes from a literature background but is fluent in the relevant science.

Stuart Jeffries

Dark family secrets: Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, reviewed

‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I was living in a crime scene.’ So writes the narrator 48 years after the strange events that unfold in this bitter, brief, shattering novel. But what was the crime? Is the narrator the victim? Is her controlling mother’s hysteria over perfectly normal adolescent exploits explained by the fact that the father had abused his daughter? Is the narrator in truth Vigdis Hjorth? And is this book then the Norwegian novelist’s harrowing memoir? Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality? Like the police, Hjorth doesn’t do answers.