More from Books

Thursday

James Ball

Will there ever be a reliable lie detector?

For as long as we have been human we have looked for some way of telling when we are being told the truth. We tried dunking witches, only to find that buoyancy is not connected to the supernatural. We tried torture, but discovered that people will eventually say just about anything to make it stop. We experimented with scopolamine and sodium pentathol, to learn that ‘truth serums’ do little more than make their targets susceptible to suggestion. And we’re still trying – with scientists pushing MRI scans and ECGs alongside AI as a ‘brain fingerprinting’ technique. The jury is out as to whether the latest ideas will prove any more reliable than those that went before.

David Honigmann

Stewart Brand: man of ideas and infuriating contrarian

In his 2005 book What The Dormouse Said John Markoff traced the roots of the personal computer industry to the counterculture of the 1960s – a tale that owed as much to Jefferson Airplane as Jeffersonian ingenuity. Constantly popping up in that narrative is the adopted Californian Stewart Brand. Markoff wrote of his ‘Zelig-like penchant’ for being present at turning points in the story. Whole Earth, viewed one way, is an extended apology for that epithet. ‘The Zelig reference,’ Markoff says now, ‘is the wrong way to describe him, for there has been a consistent through line that has connected his various campaigns, crusades and inquiries over more than six decades.

David Abulafia

Bitter harvest – how Ukraine’s wheat has always been coveted

Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat remaking the world, was no doubt devised to appeal to readers in the United States. It is not really appropriate: for ‘American’, read ‘Ukrainian’. The focal point of Oceans of Grain lies very far from the vast wheat fields of North America. This is mainly a book about Ukraine and the Black Sea, and the importance of Ukrainian grain in world history. Its appearance during the current war is extraordinarily timely. Scott Reynolds Nelson insists that grain supplies have lain at the heart of millennia of conflict.

Camilla Swift

Four difficult women who fought to preserve the English countryside

One thing that Covid lockdown made us appreciate was the importance of being outdoors. When we were finally allowed into them, national and local parks became chockfull and many people rediscovered that being in the open had health benefits. How timely, then, that Matthew Kelly has written an account of four redoubtable rural activists: Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Sylvia Sayer and Pauline Dower. He describes them as ‘the women who saved the English countryside’ – which is perhaps a bit of a stretch, though it’s true that individually they fought tooth and nail to preserve vast tracts of it.

Claudia FitzHerbert

Mismatched from the start: One Day I Shall Astonish the World, by Nina Stibbe, reviewed

First the bad news: Nina Stibbe’s new novel does not feature Lizzie Vogel, the engaging narrator of the trilogy that made her name as a comic novelist after she’d first published some extremely funny letters written during her stint as a nanny in a north London household in the 1980s. Man at the Helm (2015) is the novel Dickens lacked the generosity to write, in which tribute is paid to the creative value of a chaotic childhood presided over by what the conventional world calls an unfit parent. The two which followed covered just a year of Lizzie’s teens and early twenties. The fact that our beady-eyed chronicler remains on the threshold of adult life ensures an atmosphere of optimism, despite the dark strain of jeopardy running through each of the books.

Daniel Hahn

Does knotted string constitute ‘writing’?

What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that is, the specific tool created for recording and conveying language visually. Sound made visible, tangible. The impulse to communicate might be innate, but writing is cultural, and in no way inevitable. It’s a bit of tech, which needed to be developed, and which needs to be learned. Writing has many obvious benefits – allowing communication to survive across time, thus enabling cultural traditions and posterity – unlike purely synchronous conversation, face-to-face, stuck in the present. Yet as a species (and a species with memory, specifically) we could live perfectly well without it, as indeed we did.

Simon Heffer

How Britain was misled over Europe for 60 years

Just as one is inclined to believe Carlyle’s point that the history of the world is but the biography of great men, so Christopher Tugendhat, in this level-headed account, is right to conclude that the history of the Conservative party in the past 60 or 70 years has been deeply affected by the biography of the movement for the European Union. And it would have shocked Carlyle that a great woman – Margaret Thatcher – played a central part and, according to Tugendhat, altered the course of the party’s relationship with Europe. She was certainly central to the debate, not least because rather too many Conservatives felt she had died a martyr’s political death in 1990 when she was forced from Downing Street by people they regarded as treacherous pro-Europeans.

Oliver-James Campbell

Was Thomas Edison guilty of murder?

In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris, with the intention of connecting to London and then to Leeds, before finally joining his wife Lizzie and family in New York. But the weeks turned into months, and to his wife’s astonishment and dismay he never arrived or saw his family again. He had disappeared. A mere eight months later Thomas Edison would unveil the ‘Kinetograph’ to the world, claiming his apparatus to be the birth of the moving image, featuring ‘pure motion recorded and reproduced’ for the first time. Recognising the device as a version of one invented by her missing husband, Lizzie became convinced that Edison was behind Louis’s disappearance.

Thursday

William Shawcross

The Queen’s dedication to service was learnt at her father’s knee

If you have ever thought that there cannot be anything new to say or to learn about the Queen, you have not yet read Robert Hardman’s revelatory new biography of her in this, her astonishing Platinum Jubilee year. Hardman has spent the past 30 years researching and understanding the British monarchy, and he writes with an extraordinary fount of knowledge but, even more important, with a heartfelt appreciation of what has been called ‘the genius of constitutional monarchy’ and for the members of the family who implement it. He has interviewed everyone possible, including Prince Philip’s German great-niece and almost everyone else on the German side of the family, of whom the Prince took great care – as he did with every aspect of his life.

Emily Hill

AOC, America’s youngest congresswoman, has already been compared with FDR and JFK

‘Who is AOC?’ the back cover of this book asks. ‘A wack job!’ says Donald Trump. ‘She needs to run for president when she turns 35,’ Cardi B explains. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in America. She goes by her initials (like FDR and JFK) and is a Latina from the Bronx and Westchester, with no background in policy making, a bartender. She has a boyfriend; she uses social media to communicate with fans and fight with political foes, and also to cook ramen noodles in front of millions of people while chatting with them about structural inequality and mass incarceration. And every one of these things winds up meaning so much. Take Up Space is a ‘kaleidoscopic biography’, assembled by the editors of New York magazine.

David Horspool

How Charles II sought to obliterate a decade of British history

When the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, in the person of that ‘lovely black boy’ Charles II, was announced in May 1660 it was with a flourish of public amnesia. Charles had, it was declared, already been king for 11 years, from the moment in January 1649 when his father had been unlawfully executed. Such acts of contrived forgetting were not unprecedented in English history. William the Conqueror effaced Harold’s short reign from the records and Henry VII did much the same for Richard III. But 11 years was ambitious. And this forgetting would be expected not of people on whose daily lives the great affairs of state barely impinged, as might have been the case for many in the Middle Ages when a royal bloodletting substituted one crowned head for another.

Henry Hitchings

An inspirational teacher: Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes, reviewed

‘Whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.’ So says the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s latest novel, the poised, droll, epigrammatic Elizabeth Finch, who is loosely modelled on his late friend and fellow Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner. A lecturer delivering an adult education course on Culture and Civilisation, an exercise she considers ‘rigorous fun’, she introduces her students to figures such as Goethe and Epictetus.

Tibor Fischer

Like it or not, cryptocurrency is here to stay

There was a time when you could read a book to keep up to date about a subject. Well, that’s over. If a week is a long time in politics, in crypto it’s like a geological period. By the time a book on crypto hits the shelves it needs to be in the ancient history section. The Cryptopians is an attempt to sum up ‘the first big cryptocurrency craze’ by Laura Shin, a financial journalist who writes for Forbes and who has a successful crypto podcast. Its scope is the first decade of crypto, from the creation of Bitcoin to the current frenzy of DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and NFTs.

Julie Bindel

The spycop debacle is another nail in the Met’s coffin

In 2010, Mark Kennedy, a tattooed social justice warrior, was exposed as an undercover police officer. In this guise he infiltrated climate change activist groups and in the meantime formed a number of sexual relationships with fellow activists. Kennedy manipulated and deceived several women, including ‘Lisa’, with whom he formed a particularly close bond, while his wife and children were left in the dark about his exploits. But Kennedy was no lone bad apple. He was part of a group of Metropolitan Police spies deployed to gather intelligence on left-wing protest groups.

Thursday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The parent snatchers: The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan, reviewed

Frida Liu, the 39-year-old mother of a toddler named Harriet, has a very bad day which will haunt her for the length of this novel. She is divorced from Harriet’s father, a middle-aged man called Gust who has left her for a 28-year-old Pilates instructor called Susanna. Harriet will only fall asleep, Frida explains, ‘if I’m holding her hand’. As a consequence, Frida herself has been averaging two hours sleep a night when she finally cracks and decides to leave her daughter unattended so that she can collect some papers from her work place. After her neighbours hear the child crying they call the police and Harriet goes to live with Gust and Susanna.

Leyla Sanai

Zimbabwe’s politics satirised: Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo, reviewed

NoViolet Bulawayo’s first novel We Need New Names, shortlisted for the Booker in 2013, was a charming, tender gem, suffused with the guileless hilarity of children and the shock of tragedy in Zimbabwe, the author’s birthplace. Her follow-up, Glory, features animals as characters. I was initially mystified. Who would try to match Orwell’s allegorical masterpiece Animal Farm? Art Spiegelman succeeded in Maus, his graphic novel about the Holocaust, but each species represented one race, so the symbolism packed a punch – German cats hunting Jewish mice. Here the species are often random, apart from the savage dog police. But the use of animals at least lends humour to a heavy subject: the betrayal of the people of Zimbabwe.

Nigel Jones

History must at least be readable if we’re to learn anything from it

Richard Cohen was once one of our foremost book editors as well as being an Olympic sabre champion. Since moving to New York 20 years ago he has turned author himself, writing books on Tolstoy, the sun and his own sport of swordsmanship. Now he focuses his attention on historians. His aim, he tells us at the outset of this superb survey from Herodotus to Mary Beard, is to discover the opinions, biases and open prejudices of those who chronicled the past and thus shaped the way we view it. Making History is very much a compendium of his own tastes and enthusiasms, and cheerfully omits such masters as Clarendon and Carlyle, whose histories of the English Civil War and the French Revolution laid the foundations of all subsequent historiography of those events.

Toby Young

Are cancel-culture activists aware of their sinister bedfellows?

Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This 500-page door-stopper, which combines a history of free speech with a persuasive case for its defence, is aimed squarely at snowflakes and social justice warriors. Mchangama deals patiently and methodically with all the objections they might make to ‘the first freedom’ and then tries to convince them it’s in their interests to defend it. Take the assumption that untrammelled free speech perpetuates current inequalities, favouring the privileged and penalising the disadvantaged.

Jay Elwes

Has the past decade blunted our sense of the duty of care?

Modern British history can be divided into two parts: before Covid and after. That is the central pillar of this at times arid but ultimately compelling account of British social policy since 1945. We recovered in the aftermath of the second world war. Can we do it again, post-pandemic? Peter Hennessy, a crossbench peer, starts with the observation that government has a duty of care to the people, a conviction that emerged in the aftermath of the war and underpinned the creation of the welfare state. At the centre of it all was William Beveridge – ‘dry, prickly and difficult, but a genius when it came to the social arithmetic of welfare’. His aim was to attack the five great social evils of the time: want, disease, ignorance, idleness and squalor.

Duncan Wu

Homage to Joseph Johnson, the radical 18th-century publisher

There’s no excuse for dullness, especially when writing about a life as eventful as Joseph Johnson’s, the publisher and bookseller who worked with Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin and Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others. I opened this book expecting it to lift the veil on dinner with Joseph Johnson, but the title’s a misnomer. (Other than a brief introductory passage, Johnson’s weekly dinners are mentioned only in passing.) Descriptions of his relationships with Wollstonecraft and Cowper are perhaps the most successful parts of Daisy Hay’s book, but elsewhere it is under-researched and under-written. This becomes evident early on when she writes about the Gordon Riots.