Book review

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

Peter Levi – poet, priest and life-enhancer

From our UK edition

Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics expressed their doubts about the old boy. Levi leaned forward in his chair to say, with passionate intensity, ‘But Belloc is worth discussing... because he was... very nearly a poet.’ At the time, I thought this judgment a trifle snooty. Could the words ‘very nearly a poet’ not be applied to Levi himself? In the years since he died, however, revisitations of Levi’s work have convinced me that, uneven and florid as his poetry is, he was very definitely a poet. True, you can hear echoes of his masters in his verse – Valéry, George Seferis, Wallace Stevens.

Cressida Connolly

This thriller is as good as anything by Hilary Mantel

From our UK edition

A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were plainly visible, I discovered a remarkable fact: if you wear a pink or even a crimson bra underneath a pale shirt, it doesn’t show. For several weeks I passed on this gem of truth to all my women friends. Was my enthusiasm met with relish, gratitude? It was not. They all said the same thing in response: ‘Oh, didn’t you know? I’ve always known that.’ I expected it would be the same in the case of Andrew Taylor. While reading The Silent Boy I was so overexcited by its brilliance that I asked numbers of friends if they’d ever come across Taylor’s work. Surely I was alone in the world in not having heard of this paragon?

Philip Hensher

Germans see the best of their soul in Weimar. Everyone else, on the other hand..

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Thuringia, a region of former East Germany, occupies a special place in the thoughts of Germans, who like to regard it as the origin of all their best virtues. It’s an alluring place, full of wonderfully untouched stretches of densely forested hills; the occasional small historic town seems hardly to have changed for decades, and the tourist can spend a happy week pottering from Schmalkalden to Ilmenau to Eisenach in the illusion that none of those unpleasant realities of the last century ever touched this place. I once asked the guide at the Wartburg, the magnificent medieval and mock-medieval castle on a snowy crop outside Eisenach, what this place meant to modern-day Germans.

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Sorbet with Rimbaud

From our UK edition

The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would rather be a child and walk in a crocodile down a suburban path than write poetry, I have heard prose writers say,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, albeit tongue-in-cheek (maybe). Nonetheless, unsurprisingly, these non-poets steal the first chapter of this amuse-bouche of a publication. They are allowed to so that the author, or rather his sources, may describe the rather dull area of London that abuts the eastern end of the Euston Road to the north, and to the south High Holborn. ‘A cold grim house in a cold, grim district,’ wrote Harold Nicolson of Virginia and Vanessa Stephens’s house in Gordon Square.

David Gilmour

A Hello! magazine history of Venice

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When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of the western world. The Venetian Republic had lasted over 1,000 years — longer than ancient Rome — without a revolution, a coup d’état or a successful foreign invasion.  Yet after 1797 it was never to be independent again: it was given to Austria, taken back by France, allotted once more to Austria and finally, in 1866, handed over to the young Kingdom of Italy.

Lee Langley

A novel that will make you want to call social services

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Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary Hampstead family observed in all its turbulence by the teenage Stibbe, working as the nanny. Written as letters home to her sister, Love, Nina won over fellow writers and critics; reviews spoke of a quirky, life-affirming comic genius. Now she’s written her first novel, and again she has the domestic arena in her sights. Man at the Helm is a wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old narrator. Think What Maisie Knew with laughs and four-letter words, plus a touch of The Young Visiters — baroque formality undermined by an engagingly frank view of sex. Henry James meets Daisy Ashford.

Leanda De-Lisle

Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins

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The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What do they believe?’ This is also a good place to begin when writing about the past, not least when your subject is Thomas Cromwell, a key figure in the English Reformation.  But Tracy Borman’s Cromwell doesn’t have beliefs so much as qualities: ones that will appeal to fans of the fictional Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. Borman’s Cromwell likes women, and is nice to the poor. True he fits up Anne Boleyn on treason charges, and has the illiterate nun Elizabeth Barton executed without a trial. But then he is a ‘pragmatist’, and much of his killing, torturing and bullying is ‘self-defence’.

J P O'Malley

Stalin’s Spanish bezzie

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During the Spanish civil war the single greatest atrocity perpetrated by the Republicans was known as ‘Paracuellos’. This was the village where an estimated 2,500 prisoners loyal to Franco were executed by leftish militiamen between November and December 1936. Even though the facts of this massacre are now widely known, one question still remains: who ordered the killings? In his latest book The Last Stalinist,Paul Preston claims that it was Santiago Carrillo who played a crucial role in signing the death warrants. (Carrillo, who died in 2012, always denied any involvement in the incident). It is worth mentioning this mass murder because history tends to catch up with power-hungry leaders devoid of moral integrity. With Carrillo, however, this hasn’t been the case.

Peter J. Conradi

The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again

From our UK edition

How does Philip Larkin’s gloom retain such power to disturb? His bleakest verses have the quality of direct address, as if a poetical Eeyore were protesting directly into our ear. ‘Aubade’, his haunting night-time meditation on the terrors of death and dying, focuses on ‘the sure extinction that we travel to/ And shall be lost in always’ and offers no consolation. His ‘Next Please’ makes grim fun out of our habit of hope, pictured as a ship we expect to greet us with its full cargo of rewards. But of course ‘Only one ship is seeking us, a black-/Sailed unfamiliar….’ He saw religious faith as a form of self-deception. Moreover, his ‘The Old Fools’ mercilessly depicts senility.

Thursday

Will Nicoll

Siberia beyond the Gulag Archipelago

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Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and occuping 77 per cent of the country’s land mass. Ryszard Kapuscinski describes the gulags which were placed there as being amongst the greatest nightmares of the 20th century — and that image of suffering has tarnished the region irrevocably. In her masterful study of Siberia’s people, Janet M. Hartley, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that this has not only been a place of torture and starvation. While it has certainly endured miserable times, and is likely to suffer many more, it should be considered a frontier land, comparable in some ways to America.

D.J. Taylor

The hooligan and the psychopath

From our UK edition

A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s notorious travelling fans (motto ‘we have a dream in our heads, to burn the south’), contains a memorable scene in which Parks spots a teenage boy screaming abuse at some rival supporters before returning to the mobile to assure his mother that, no, they don’t have much homework that weekend. Here, doubtless, was the raw material for 17-year-old Hellas fan Mauro Duckworth, whose absence from his father’s investiture with the honorary freedom of the city is explained by his confinement in a Brescia police cell after a pitched battle with the local constabulary.

James Walton

The case of the amnesiac autobiographer

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In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and had no idea where or who he was. A kindly tourist police officer reassured him that his case wasn’t unusual: plenty of young people came to India, took too many drugs and ended up similarly ‘confused’. MacLean immediately had a flashback to injecting heroin with a redhead called Christina — but this proved to be untrue. (Nor was the universe, as he then believed, created by Jim Henson at a studio in Burbank.) Instead, after he’d been taken to a local mental hospital, the doctor diagnosed the side effects of Lariam, an anti-malaria drug with a history of causing psychosis in a minority of users.

Matthew Dennison

Fifty years of Inspector Wexford – and a new detective on the block

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Early on in The Girl Next Door, Ruth Rendell gives the reader a sharp nudge. ‘Colin Quell had very little interest in people, what they might think, how they might act in the future.’ The novel is Rendell’s latest stand alone mystery, the uninterested Quell its detective inspector. Forcibly she announces that neither physically nor temperamentally is this Wexford territory. Quell’s stomping grounds are the outer suburbs of London, where the capital spills into Essex, specifically Loughton, where once the octogenarian Rendell herself attended the County High School. In the present day, though not at the time of the novel’s buried crime, Loughton lacks the residual rural outlook of Wexford’s Kingsmarkham, itself inspired by Midhurst in West Sussex.

Roy Kerridge

Chris Barber should let someone meaner tell his story

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Chris Barber, still going strong with his big band, was born in 1930. He heard jazz as a schoolboy on the radio programme Music While You Work and tried to find out more about this wonderful music. He soon discovered that, in his words, ‘black music was the real thing, although some white people managed it pretty well’. By the time I became a secondary schoolboy in the 1950s, Chris Barber’s band was the sensation of the age. Chris played the trombone, sometimes switching to harmonica on blues numbers. He and his glamorous Northern Irish wife, Ottilie Patterson, seemed a golden couple. Ottilie had a superb voice for the blues, ancient or modern. She sounded like a classic blues singer of the 1920s, presenting a style that had died out in North America.

Marcus Berkmann

A toast to beer, from Plato to Frank Zappa

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‘He was a wise man who invented beer,’ said Plato, although I imagine he had changed his mind by the following morning. Beer: A Global History (Reaktion, £9.99, Spectator Bookshop, £9.49) is the latest addition to ‘The Edible Series’, following Cake, Caviar, Offal, Wine, Soup and, rather shockingly, Hot Dog into the catalogue. As reading about food and drink is second only in pleasure to consuming it, this might be one of the most ingenious publishing ideas of all time. Gavin D. Smith, author of several books ‘on drink-related topics’, traces brewing history from the neolithic peoples of Asia Minor to beer’s current pre-eminence: global consumption has increased every year for 25 years in a row.

John McEwen

What’s eating London’s songbirds?

From our UK edition

This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity, because it is a thorough and entertaining history; the first to cover the entire London area within a 20-mile radius of St Paul’s, from the earliest record, in Roman times, to the present. A chronology lists the date when the 369 species were first recorded, from the red kite in the 2nd century AD to Bonaparte’s gull and the buff-bellied pipit in 2012. The last named illustrate the recent rise in esoteric sightings following the postwar birth of the bearded-birder brigade, with their competitive box-ticking and ever more hi-tech equipment. There are many surprises.

Wynn Wheldon

The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis’s best for 25 years

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‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,’ wrote Hannah Arendt of Adolf Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Eichmann was certified as ‘normal’ by half a dozen psychiatrists. On more than one occasion in Martin Amis’s troubling new novel one of its main characters, the fictionalised commandant of a thinly disguised Auschwitz, declares himself ‘completely normal’. He also happens to be an oaf, a clown. We are dealing, then, with the banality of evil. Set in the months from August 1942 to April 1943, when it became clear that the Germans were going to lose the war and that the Final Solution had better be hurried up, the story is told in three voices.

Alastair Smart

The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill

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Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few decades earlier and worked in the Victorian age, when statues of the builders and defenders of empire were erected proudly and prolifically across the land, he’d surely have received no end of garlands. As it is, Roberts-Jones (1913–96) found himself constantly battling against artistic fashions and today is barely even talked about. Born in the Welsh border town of Oswestry, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools and Goldsmiths College (the latter’s fame as a breeding ground for conceptual excess still a long way into the future).

Sam Leith

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

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Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s Englishing of Proust — widely and immediately agreed to be one of the greatest literary translations of all time — very nearly didn’t happen. Scott Moncrieff only suggested the project to his publisher after they rejected a collection of satirical squibs in verse (sample: ‘Sir Philip Sassoon is the Member for Hythe;/ He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe.’). Like any good hack, he had another suggestion up his sleeve: there was this character Proust just starting to be published — making a bit of noise in France. Constable didn’t immediately see the value: ‘They replied that they did not see much use in publishing a translation of Prevost [sic].

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

Interviews with the great, the good, the less great and the really quite bad

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The TV chat show, if not actually dead, has been in intensive care for a while now, hooked up to machines that go bleep. But the long-form interview, as pioneered by John Freeman’s Face to Face in the 1960s, is a tougher customer. Laurie Taylor’s In Confidence series on Sky Arts has featured the great and the good, the less great and the really quite bad, all of them attracted by the professor’s gentle sociological probing and the show’s reliably modest viewing figures, which suggest that no one will notice if it all goes terribly wrong. This book is Taylor’s artful distillation of more than 60 interviews, shaped according to his own tastes and preferences. Cleo Laine was his teenage crush, Alan Ayckbourn is a friend from way back, E.L.