Book review

Thursday

David Crane

How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis

From our UK edition

Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise to are the following. Of the Jews in Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Latvia and Poland, between 70 and 90 per cent died, while the corresponding figures for Estonia, Belgium Norway and Romania were between 40 and 50. In France and Italy somewhere around 20 per cent perished. In both Bulgaria and Denmark, however, just one. Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the story of how Denmark to a great extent saved its  Jewish population from the labour and extermination camps, but it inevitably raises issues of equal relevance to the rest of Europe.

Michael Questier

Lords, spies and traitors in Elizabeth’s England

From our UK edition

There are still some sizeable holes in early modern English history and one of them is what we know — or, rather, do not know — about the aristocracy. Of course, peers who held high office under the Crown often have their biographers. But there is still a rooted assumption among scholars that the aristo-cracy as a caste or class was in decline during and after the later 16th century. If the papers have not survived, we are left with little idea about a peerage family apart from snippets of information and the odd anecdote. Also, the sort of documents which tend to get kept are the ‘boring’ ones — estate papers, rent rolls and such like. Much less frequently preserved are the family’s private and confidential papers and letters.

James Mcconnachie

Lawrence of Arabia, meet Curt of Cairo

From our UK edition

How do you write a new book about T.E. Lawrence, especially when the man himself described his escapades, or a version of them, with such inimitable genius? Scott Anderson’s answer is to intercut Lawrence’s extraordinary story — the camel raids and blown-up bridges, the rape and torture, the lies and shame — with those of three contemporaries, all supposedly engaged in a grand intelligence duel in Syria and Arabia.

Charles Cumming

The spy who came in from le Carré

From our UK edition

The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August 2008. I had a written a novel, Typhoon, in which disenfranchised Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province riot against the Han government. By coincidence, a few days before publication, large numbers of Uighurs started doing exactly that, in a curious real-life echo of the book. James Naughtie had read Typhoon and wanted to get me onto the Today programme to talk about it. It was like receiving a royal summons. But as the minutes ticked down towards the interview, I was transformed into a pitiless, gibbering wreck, so nervous of making a fool of myself on national radio that I was tempted to bolt for the door. Naughtie could see he had a problem.

Douglas Murray

The Edward Snowden scandal viewed from planet Guardian

From our UK edition

Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies or as a traitor. His revelations provoked outrage from South America, cold fury from Germany and a warm smile from China and from Russia — where Snowden is currently granted asylum. The Guardian newspaper co-operated with Snowden in releasing this material, as they did with Julian Assange before him.

Philip Hensher

Kim Philby got away with it because he was posh

From our UK edition

The story of Kim Philby is, of course, like so many English stories, really one of social class. He was one of the most scandalous traitors in history, and from within the security services sent specific information to the Soviets during the early years of the Cold War that resulted directly in the deaths of thousands of men and women. Among them were the Albanian guerrillas, hoping to liberate their country, who found Soviet-sponsored troops waiting at their landing places to shoot them. A list of non-communist opposers to the Nazis in Germany was passed on to the Russians who, advancing into Germany in the last years of the war, summarily executed 5,000 named people.

Thursday

Daniel Swift

‘One warm night in June 1917 I became the man who nearly killed the Kaiser’

From our UK edition

The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard memoirs, the claim that ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but in 1919 I was a comparative rarity: a complete young man, a man with two arms, two legs, two lungs, two eyes.’ He had fought in the war, and came home unscathed, and that was that. Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sieveking is a slightly otherworldly book: a collection of agreeable stories drawn from a colourful life, all told with good humour and very little fuss. It reads like a document from a lost time.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sex, secrets, and self-mortification: the dark side of the confessional

From our UK edition

I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of the sort, and I feel ashamed, because, although it’s smartly, smoothly written, my pleasure was partly based on titillation. I smirked — I occasionally snickered — at the madder facts of self-mortification, whereby in the Middle Ages the (frequently female) faithful might flaunt their holiness in acts of rank humility. Elizabeth of Hungary kissed the feet of lepers; Margaret Marie Alacoque ate vomit; Catherine of Genoa, it’s said, sucked the pus of a plague victim. More than this, though, John Cornwell’s history of confession is preoccupied with sex, which always helps the pages riffle past.

Colin Maccabe

Want Hollywood’s conventional wisdom? Then read Blockbusters

From our UK edition

You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend more on advertising than small ones. Maria Sharapova is attractive. Given that the book is written in the dullest of academic prose, there may even have been a paragraph I missed about how there is a Tuesday in next week. I’ve often wondered what they taught in business schools and if this book, which has Harvard Business School plastered all over it, is a guide then the main subject is the stunningly obvious. On 20 June 1975 Universal released Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws with a spend on television advertising and an opening in hundreds of cinemas, both of which were unprecedented at that time.

Andrew Taylor

Pick of the crime novels

From our UK edition

Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than his excellent Logan McRae series. Set in a fictional Scottish city where a miasma of corruption oozes out of the very stones, most of its characters are sadistic, victimised or both. The narrator, Ash Henderson, appeared in an earlier, equally bleak novel. Now an ex-detective inspector, he’s being systematically persecuted in prison (where most of the other inmates seem to be former cops as well). Matters look up, at least for Henderson, when he is temporarily, if implausibly, seconded to help investigate a serial killer known as the Inside Man, who murders women and sews dolls into their stomachs.

Matilda Bathurst

Fairytales of racism

From our UK edition

A preview of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird appeared in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists issue in April last year, the decennial list identifying 20 writers under 40 as the names to watch. The previous four novels of the Nigerian-born Oyeyemi (who was first published at the age of 18) revolve around deeply psychological retellings of folk tales, laced with questions of race, gender and, above all, youth. Her protagonists tend to be ‘seers’, characters somehow displaced from their environment and thereby privileged to construct their own story — the lot of the lonely novelist.

Allan Mallinson

A spectacular faller in the Benghazi stakes

From our UK edition

What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory at El Alamein. As the author of this brisk study of one of its more admired practitioners writes: In no particular order, the following were casualties [i.e. sacked]: Wavell, Cunningham, Auchinleck, Norrie, Ritchie, Lumsden, Gatehouse, Rees, Godwin-Austen, Beresford-Pierse, Dorman-Smith, Corbett, Hobart, O’Creagh, Ramsden and Messervy. There might well have been a separate desk in the military secretary’s department in London dealing with officers who had taken a fall in what was laconically referred to as the Benghazi Stakes. And it had all begun so well.

Melanie McDonagh

Secrets of Candleford: the real Flora Thompson

From our UK edition

When Richard Mabey was researching this biography of Flora Thompson, author of Lark Rise to Candleford, he happened to stay at a farmhouse B&B near Bath. Ambling around, he found something very curious ... There were two rows of cottages facing each other, with a dusty track between them ...There were clean curtains in the windows. The gardens were in good order, with sweet peas in flower and rows of fat cabbages. It was a vision of an English village as idyllic as a Helen Allingham painting ... I edged round the back and realised they were two dimensional ... a façade but nothing behind.

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

First novels: When romance develops from an old photograph

From our UK edition

The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and mother of four, finds herself remembering an old love affair. Michèle Forbes achieves a vivid depiction of family life — the daily squabbles and teasing, the nuances of Katherine’s love for her children through a haze of exhaustion, one daughter’s struggle to be liked by bullying friends and another’s blushingly awkward first crush. Interwoven with these domestic scenes are chapters set 20 years earlier, in which we see the unfurling of Katherine’s haunting romance.

Douglas Murray

Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms

From our UK edition

If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity. At the very opening of Inventing the Individual Larry Siedentop lays this problem out. People who live in the nations once described as Christendom ‘seem to have lost their moral bearings’, he writes: We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development. There is little narrative sweep in our view of things. For better or worse, things have just happened to us.

Anthony Cummins

A family novel that pulls up the carpet before you’re even in the door

From our UK edition

I first mistook David Gilbert’s second novel for the sort of corduroy-sleeved family saga at which American writers excel. The main character, Dyer, is an elderly author gathering his sons about him in Manhattan after the funeral of a boyhood friend, Charles. There’s Richard, a Hollywood screen hack whose teenage journal Dyer lifted for a prize-winning novel; his half-brother Andy, 17, on a mission to pop his cherry with Dyer’s sassy young agent; and Jamie, a documentary maker whose time-lapse footage of an ex-girlfriend’s death from cancer has gone viral. What muddies their stories is that they reach us via Charles’s son, Philip, a frustrated writer who left his wife and kids for a 20-year-old Vicodin addict he met on a sex site.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When Israel was but a dream

From our UK edition

‘On the night of 15 April 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa.’ ‘At the end of October 1898 the small steamer Rossiya made its way from Alexandria in Egypt, via Port Said, to Jaffa.’ It is unusual, or maybe even unique, for the first chapters of two books published at the same time to open with almost identical sentences. But then My Promised Land and Herzl are telling different sides of the same tale: the story of Zionism from the beginning, one of the strangest, most romantic, most bewildering episodes in modern history, and to this day one of the most bitterly contentious Aboard that first steamer to Jaffa was ‘the Rt.

John Preston

Hillary, Obama, Osama — and a hapless Bill

From our UK edition

The actor David Niven was once badgered by the American columnist William F. Buckley to introduce him to Marc Chagall, a neighbour of Niven’s in Switzerland. Buckley, a keen amateur painter, wanted to know what Chagall thought of his work. With grave misgivings, Niven agreed to set up a meeting. Chagall in silence gazed at Buckley’s pictures for some time until Buckley could restrain himself no longer. ‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked — whereupon Chagall clapped his hand to his brow and groaned, ‘Poor paint!’ I felt something similar on reading this book about Hillary Clinton’s time as US Secretary of State.

Sam Leith

The Artist Formerly Known As Whistler

From our UK edition

When James Whistler was two years old, he was asked why he’d disappeared from company and hidden under a table. ‘I’s drawrin,’ he replied. He started as he meant to go on. Daniel E. Sutherland’s well-appointed new biography of the American-born painter — whom Henry James described as a ‘queer little Londonised Southerner’ — keeps the attention there, making its central emphasis Whistler’s ferocious single-mindedness in the making of his art. The striking thing is how much the other aspects of him — Whistler the rebel, Whistler the public combatant, Whistler the philanderer, the dandy, the show-off, the semi-delinquent father, the wit and conversationalist — fed into that rather than distracting from it.

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Isabel Allende’s Ripper doesn’t grab you by the throat

From our UK edition

Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to its title. It’s the name of an online game, set in Jack the Ripper’s London. Six players — five teenagers and an elderly man — inhabit their personas with fanatical fervour. They switch their forensic attentions to modern San Francisco when the corpse of a security guard is found obscenely displayed in a high-school gym. The father of Amanda, the group’s games master, is the deputy chief of San Francisco’s homicide department. Her divorced mother is Indiana Jackson, a Reiki healer whose patients are often more interested in her Barbie-doll good looks than in her holistic techniques.