Book review

Thursday

Tobias Grey

What took Francis Mitterrand to the top?

From our UK edition

Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than I did, he was more seductive to women. In some ways, he gave me a complex. But he lacked perseverance. The man of whom Mitterrand spoke was a certain Félix Gaillard, whose claim to fame during the Fourth Republic was to become France’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of 38. He lasted barely five months in the job (1957–58) and was never heard of again. As Philip Short — who has previously written works on Mao and Pol Pot — makes mordantly clear in his well-rounded, albeit meandering biography, Mitterrand’s career path to the summit of French politics was an altogether more tortuous and drawn out affair.

Wynn Wheldon

Deserter, wifebeater, great poet: the shame and glory of Vernon Scannell

From our UK edition

Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward. Plenty of material for a biography, then, especially given that he was also a novelist, a critic, a memoirist, a boxer, a teacher, a broadcaster, a loyal friend, a passionate lover and ‘a fun grandfather’. Most of all, he was a poet. Walking Wounded was the title of a Scannell poem and collection published in 1965, and James Andrew Taylor is right to use it as the title for this biography. Beaten viciously by a thug of a father, uncomforted by an unloving mother, by the time he was 19 he was himself a father (of a son he never met) and a soldier, and soon to be a deserter, wounded chronically in mind if not in body.

Justin Marozzi

In defence of Herodotus

From our UK edition

How many writers would give their eye teeth to have a book reissued 2,500 years after their death? It certainly beats being pulped after a year or two. And who better to receive the Penguin Hardback Classic treatment than Herodotus, the fifth-century BC ‘Father of History’, he to whom historians today owe so much, whether they know it or not? This is a new translation. of a book that remains more relevant than ever. by the popular historian Tom Holland, with an introduction by the Cambridge professor Paul Cartledge, doyen of classicists, citizen of Sparta and a Herodotean to the core.

Anne Applebaum

Secrets of the Kremlin

From our UK edition

A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to Russian sovereignty. To the modern eye, the Kremlin fortress seems as if it had always been there, as if it had never changed and never will. All of which is utter nonsense, as Catherine Merridale’s fascinating history reveals: the story of this famous compound is not one of continuity, but of construction, destruction and reconstruction. Every reincarnation of the Russian state over the centuries — and there have been many — has been accompanied by a corresponding reincarnation of the Kremlin. Its history is thus a metaphorical history of Russia, as Merridale understands very well.

Sam Leith

How honest was Bernard Berenson?

From our UK edition

When the great Jewish-American art expert Bernard Berenson died in 1959, he had acquired the status of a sort of sage. He was the relic of a prewar culture that had vanished. He was an embodiment of the idea of connoisseurship that had at once given birth to a great boom in art collecting and yet that was, by the end of his life, being superseded. When Berenson embarked on the career that would see him widely accepted as the world’s foremost authority on Old Masters, the painters of the Italian Renaissance were barely regarded in the US. He died — at 94 — in the age of Andy Warhol. The very span of his life gives his story resonance.

Thursday

Jane Rye

The mad, mum-fixated maiden aunt of modernism

From our UK edition

Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as they were to the avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s New York. Much of the fascination lies in the contrast between what Linda Leavell calls Moore’s ‘maiden-aunt persona’ and her position as a ground-breaking modernist, whose highly idiosyncratic verse and technical experimentation dazzled and baffled her contemporaries.

John Preston

Curtains for kitty! How to care for cats — and how to kill them

From our UK edition

The New Yorker has always had a peculiar affinity with cats, perhaps because they have a lot in common — an elegance, an abhorrence of sentimentality and an innate sense of superiority. The Big New Yorker Book of Cats is full of cats and owners, each holding one another at arm’s length and peering through invisible lorgnettes. Pulitzer prizewinner Susan Sheehan writes about a tabby cat called Pynchon, owned by the proprietor of a Manhattan bookshop. Pynchon, who for unspecified reasons arrived in New York ‘with no front claws’, is fond of listening to classical music on the radio and regularly attends meetings of the James Joyce Society at the shop. However, he seems to have little in common with his namesake, being both unusually gregarious and enormously fat.

David Ekserdjian

Google Images can’t spoil the fun — here are the most gorgeous art books of the season

From our UK edition

Good news for the festive season — the inexorable rise of the virtual image on our computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones would appear to have done nothing to diminish the flood of gorgeously produced art books being published. This year’s selection ranges in time from the third century AD to now, and reaches all over the globe. First up is Antony Eastmond’s The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom (Phaidon, £59.95, Spectator Bookshop, £49.95), which is in essence a sumptuous anthology of 267 unusually carefully chosen highlights, bookended by a short but profound introduction and an exceptionally useful glossary.

Sebastian Payne

Hugo Rifkind’s My Week reminds me why it’s worth getting up on Saturdays

From our UK edition

‘Nothing’s funny any more’ has become the daily mantra of this magazine’s cartoon editor, Michael Heath. Thanks to Leveson, political correctness, taste and common decency, lampooning public figures in particular has become more difficult than ever. Hugo Rifkind still has the right idea. From the despair of trying to conjure up a column for the Times’s Saturday edition, he came up with ‘My Week’, and these diaries, in which he takes aim at someone — usually in politics — who has dominated the news, are now the first thing many people turn to. This compilation brings together his best sketches in an enticing bible of satire. The merriment gained from the material is dependent on whom Rifkind has to work with.

John Sutherland

The book that Boris should give to all seniors, along with their Freedom Passes

From our UK edition

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a story for the older reader. One might go so far as to suggest that local authorities should give ‘seniors’ a copy free with their euphemistically named ‘Freedom Pass’ as a reminder of the longest journey they will ever take. Boris’s memento mori. Perversely, because it is short and by a writer whose name is better known than his work is read, The Death of Ivan Ilyich routinely appears on ‘Great Books’ courses for the young — to whom the story manifestly does not speak, since the young know they will never die. The narrative opens with the announcement of the death of a senior public prosecutor, Ivan Ilyich, to his assembled colleagues. Their faces are properly grave on receiving the sad news.

Marcus Berkmann

‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ —  the best lines from the movies

From our UK edition

Many of us, I get the feeling, don’t go and see as many films as we used to, or want to. Instead we spend all our time complaining that we don’t have enough time to watch films any more. Speaking purely as a hard-working freelance, I also miss all those old black-and-white movies BBC2 used to show in the afternoon, to fill in the yawning hours between lunch and teatime. You would see things you hadn’t seen before, you would see things you had seen a million times before, and you would doze happily through all of them, while characters walked around wearing hats and talking and talking and talking more than anyone would be allowed to in the cinema of today. George Tiffin’s All the Best Lines is a grand hardback trawl through the Golden Age of Cinema Dialogue.

Elfreda Pownall

Famous female cooks, a juicy salmon recipe from 1664 — and the only interesting thing about Mrs Beeton

From our UK edition

In Cooking People  Sophia Waugh describes, with dash and wit, the personalities of five important women cookery writers: two Hannahs (Woolley from the 17th century and Glasse from the 18th), Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton from the 19th, and Elizabeth David from the 20th. And she illustrates their merits with recipes for the home cook that are (mostly) still usable today: Woolley’s ‘To Boyl a Salmon’ of 1664 would produce a juicy, perfectly cooked fish, despite the lack of quantities, cooking time or ingredients list. Acton, a proper cook who laboured for ten years on her book, is Waugh’s darling. David is a vivid writer but ‘upper- class, opinionated and direct, with a feeling of entitlement that was bred in her’.

Philip Hensher

If only Craig Raine subjected his own work to the same critical scrutiny he applies to others’ 

From our UK edition

It’s important not to be too immediately dismissive of poor Craig Raine. Book reviewers and editors like him, who invent rigid literary principles and then dismiss anything that fails to embody them, have been on the decline since the 1970s. It’s true that one would probably sooner go for guidance to a generous reader who tries to discover what an interesting book is seeking to do, and how it achieves it. But the principle-wielder is an endangered species, and however ill-founded the principles themselves may be, as readers we might welcome the existence of one or two. The trouble is, no one is really interested any more.

Susie Dent

What family life — and love — was like in East Germany

From our UK edition

Historians still argue over whether the regime of the GDR can be called a totalitarian one. Some say that the definition reduces the difference between the Socialist Unity Party and National Socialism —that the Nazis left millions dead while the SED left millions of Stasi files. It’s a loaded question, and one that will occur frequently to the reader of Maxim Leo’s startlingly powerful Red Love, a memoir of his childhood in the GDR. But as the political theorist Hannah Arendt observed, ‘storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it’. In this case the story is real, and is not one but many, running back and forth over the lives of Leo’s family as they form and re-form their relationship with their country.

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

A book that’s inspired by a movie (for a change)

From our UK edition

Books become films every day of the week; more rarely does someone feel inspired to write a book after seeing a film. Peter Conradi’s Hot Dogs And Cocktails tells the story of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s visit to North America in the summer of 1939 and specifically the couple of days they spent at President Roosevelt’s country retreat at Hyde Park on Hudson. In the film of that name, Bill Murray played FDR with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, and the story was fleshed out with a did-they-or-didn’t-they illicit romance with his distant cousin, played by Laura Linney. For reasons of professional integrity Conradi can’t play quite so fast and loose with events, but his is an entertaining tale even so.

Hugh Rathcavan

The Last Knight, by Robert O’Byrne – review

From our UK edition

I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a sequence of his unpredictable and volcanic rages drove us apart. Robert O’Byrne explains how the Knight suffered for most of his life from the illness and strong medication of manic depression. It is a tribute to him that I never knew of this medical diagnosis until much later and that, despite it, he achieved so much in his life, drawing international acclaim to Irish pictures, architecture and furniture and producing so many learned books on their quality and beauty. In fact there is a photograph in this book of the Knight and I dancing a jig to the melodious tin-whistle music of Paddy Maloney. But in the caption I am described as someone else, albeit a cousin.

Julian Spalding

When Francis Davison made me judge — and burn — his art

From our UK edition

In 1983, Damien Hirst saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of the collages of Francis Davison which ‘blew him away’. He spent the next two years trying to emulate them, in vain. As he discovered, although Davison’s works might look casually thrown together, they are in fact immaculately crafted orchestrations of colour, shape and tone.  In the light of this experience, Hirst’s subsequent output can be regarded as his dispiriting revenge on all genuine artistic creation.

Cressida Connolly

‘God has given me a new Turkish colleague called Mustapha Kunt…’

From our UK edition

Under normal circumstances, Simon Garfield’s chatty and informative excursion into the history of letter-writing would be a book to recommend. In recent years this author has produced eloquent and witty accounts of his fascination for maps and for typefaces: To the Letter makes a nice companion piece. Part of the book is a gentle lamentation about the end of letters; a death hastened, Garfield believes, by the digital age.

Bevis Hillier

A book on Art Deco that’s a work of art in itself — but where’s the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Oxo Tower? 

From our UK edition

Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them — which was mine when I wrote the first little book on the subject in 1968 — was to treat the subject as a sociological, as well as artistic, phenomenon. As I wrote then, it was ‘the last of the total styles’, affecting almost everything, from letter-boxes and powder compacts to luxury liners and hotels. With that approach, one shows the dross as well as the gold, and asks such questions as ‘Why did the style become so universal?’ ‘How far did it succeed (with mass production) in coming to terms with the machine age’?

Matthew Walther

Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor – review

From our UK edition

‘She wrote fiction?’ Even today, with the admirable ladies at Virago nearly finished reissuing her dozen novels, Elizabeth Taylor remains mostly unknown except to fellow novelists, literary journalists, worthier publishing types, and a handful of dedicated readers. Even Nicola Beauman felt obliged to call her wonderful 2009 biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor so as to avoid confusion with the overrated actress whose debut film, National Velvet, was released only a few months prior to the publication of Taylor’s first novel. It cannot help her reputation that she had a majority of her papers burned, produced no journalism and kept her distance from literary London, writing only to friends such as Ivy Compton-Burnett and Barbara Pym, kindred spirits of sorts.