Book review

Thursday

Joanna Kavenna

A Place in the Country, by W.G. Sebald – review

From our UK edition

Within a few years, and in four books — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001) — W. G. Sebald achieved a reputation as a major international author. He was tipped for the Nobel, seen to supply heartening proof that ‘greatness in literature is still possible’ (John Banville) and that ‘literary greatness is still possible’ (Susan Sontag). Literary greatness it seemed, at times, was Sebald, and for a while after the publication of The Rings of Saturn, it was hard to find a work of fictive non-fiction that wasn’t riddled with grainy photographs of dubious quality integrated into the text.

Tobias Grey

Tales of Two Cities, by Jonathan Conlin – review

From our UK edition

In Jonathan Conlin’s Tales of Two Cities the little acknowledged but hugely significant histoire croisée of two rival metropoles gets a long overdue airing. For, like it or not, London and Paris would be much duller places if neither had deemed fit to discover the other. Oddly, up until now no historian has ever explored this fecund, though sometimes grudging, exchange of ideas and cultural mores. Perhaps it required an outsider such as Conlin (though resident in London, he originates from New York) to martial the necessary objectivity.

William Leith

Consolations of the Forest, by Sylvain Tesson – review

From our UK edition

In this book, the French writer Sylvain Tesson spends six months, mostly alone, in a log cabin in Siberia. ‘Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that tomorrow will be more valuable than gold,’ he tells us. So, Tesson grabs these things while they are still relatively cheap. He is, you might say, a modern-day Whitman with the soul of a speculator. He escapes into discomfort, and finds it bracing and thought-provoking. In the end he’s quite sad to leave. But you never get the impression he wants to stay for ever. He packs vodka, cigars and ten boxes of painkillers to deal with his hangovers. He also takes along a mini-library — Tournier, Lawrence, Camus, Sade, Casanova, Mishima. Uh-oh. Required reading for the young man in crisis, you think.

Sam Leith

The birth of modern Britain

From our UK edition

‘Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?’ asked Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. ‘No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.’ Reading David Kynaston’s densely detailed new book — in a ‘projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979’ with the slightly magniloquent general title of Tales of a New Jerusalem — there isn’t half a whiff of onions.

Thursday

John Grimond

This Boy, by Alan Johnson- review

From our UK edition

This Boy is no ordinary politician’s memoir, still less a politician’s ordinary memoir. It ends where others might begin: when the author is barely 18, newly married and only just starting work as a postman. The trade unionism that he later took up and the career in politics that led to several cabinet posts in two Labour governments are not even hinted at. Yet however thrilling, their story, when it is told, will be dull by comparison with this. Alan Johnson had a childhood quite unlike most politicians’, and he describes it with a simplicity and power that make it easy to see why he came to be the potential Labour leader most feared by many Conservatives.

Lewis Jones

The Frontman, by Harry Browne – review

From our UK edition

According to a story which Harry Browne accepts is surely apocryphal, but which he includes in his book anyway, at a U2 gig in Glasgow the band’s singer silenced the audience and started to clap his hands slowly, whispering as he did so: ‘Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies.’ Someone in the audience shouted: ‘Well fuckin’ stop doin’ it then!’ The story is worth repeating because it reflects the way many people, even charitably disposed rock fans, feel about Bono. They think his name — born Paul David Hewson, he appropriated the stage name from a Dublin hearing-aid shop that advertised devices called ‘Bono Vox’ — is ineffably silly, and join Sinead O’Connor in preferring to call him Bozo.

Molly Guinness

Hairstyles Ancient and Present, by Charlotte Fiell – review

From our UK edition

The key thing in 18th-century France was to get the hair extremely high. Perching on a small ladder behind his client, a Parisian hairdresser could pull off all sorts of engineering feats. Once the hair was three foot in the air, the coiffeur could add props — ribbons, shepherdesses, feathers, mythical allegories. After a French naval victory in 1778, some of the more patriotic women took to sporting a ship riding on the waves of their hair. Extravagance was frowned upon after the Revolution, but innovation continued; some ladies of fashion took to wearing their hair very short like the hair of those condemned to the guillotine. The style was called ‘à la victime’.

Lloyd Evans

Strictly Ann, by Ann Widdecombe – review

From our UK edition

An oddball. And proud to be one. Ann Widdecombe has sailed through life with the same brisk, no-nonsense style that she brings to this highly readable memoir. She attended a school where God was taught ‘as a fact not a belief’. Her parents encouraged her to choose friends on the basis of ‘fun and kindness’ and nothing else. When she entered parliament in 1987 she suspected that her personal eccentricities would disbar her from high office while guaranteeing the loyal affection of the country at large. She embraced this fate cheerfully. Her ‘Doris Karloff’ tag was originated by the Labour MP Paul Flynn and she instantly adopted it as a personal signature.

Matthew Dennison

Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge, by Evan S. Connell – review

From our UK edition

A policeman encountering Mrs Bridge on the home furnishings floor of a Kansas City department store recognises her at once for what she is: ‘a bona-fide country-club matron’. Had she been asked to identify herself, Mrs Bridge would have said the same, after asserting unequivocally that she was first and foremost the wife of Mr Walter Bridge, successful Kansas City lawyer, as entirely constrained by her status as professional spouse as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath or Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver. Like Mrs Miniver, Mrs Bridge inhabits an interwar world shaped by a promise of certainties — domestic, social, cultural and sexual — which are never wholly realised and remain frustratingly elusive.

Charlotte Moore

The Spark, by Kristine Barnett – review

From our UK edition

Jacob Barnett is a youthful prodigy. His IQ tested off the scale. At nine he began work on an original theory in astrophysics; aged 12 he became a paid academic researcher. He can play complicated musical pieces or learn foreign languages almost instantly and without tuition. As one researcher puts it, ‘Jake’s working memory is a piece of paper the size of a football field.’ Jacob’s mother, Kristine, comes from an Amish family — ‘not horse-and-buggy Amish, but city Amish’; her faith has directed her along the path she has taken with her extraordinary son. (It would be interesting to know the religious views of the young quantum physicist, but we’re not told.

James Mcconnachie

Alexandria, by Peter Stothard – review

From our UK edition

This subtle, mournful book is many things. It is a diary of three weeks spent, during the tense winter before the outburst of the Arab Spring, in off-season Alexandria, where nothing comes ‘except birds to the lake, most of them when they have lost their way’. It is also a series of fragments rescued from Peter Stothard’s rich life as Essex schoolboy, Oxford student, Times editor and lifelong classicist. Another part, but only a small one, is a history of Cleopatra — and the story of Stothard’s seven previous, failed attempts to write about her. Classical scholars, however, will recognise this book for what it really is.

Owen Bennett-Jones

To Move the World, by Jeffrey Sachs – review

From our UK edition

Jeffrey Sachs is the world’s best-connected development economist. An academic with highly developed communication skills, he has always managed to secure access to policy makers and to offer them advice. His record is controversial. Back in the 1990s he worked on Russia’s transition from a command to a capitalist economy. He advocated the approach that Yeltsin adopted — shock therapy. The result was pensioners on the streets selling off furniture, jewellery and even their clothes to raise cash for food. Whilst there were many other factors at play, it now seems obvious that China’s transition to capitalism was better handled. China didn’t take Sachs’s advice.

Oliver Rackham

The Man Who Plants Trees, by Jim Robbins – review

From our UK edition

Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those trees and how many are still alive? Since then, planting amenity trees has grown into an industry, and turns out to have its down sides. One is that little trees are imported in industrial quantities from other countries, as if they were cars or tins of paint, and inevitably bring with them foreign pests and diseases which destroy established trees. Globalisation of tree diseases has overtaken climate change and too many deer to become the number one threat to the world’s trees and forests. This book, by a scientific journalist, is a miscellany of what people, especially Americans, think about trees and the virtues that they ascribe to them.

Philip Hensher

How do you define a ‘northerner’?

From our UK edition

Obviously, now that every high street in England looks identical, and everyone under 30 uses exactly the same Australian rising inflection in speech, books of this sort are based on a false and wishful premise. But let us enter into Paul Morley’s game and ask the question he has asked again. What is ‘the north’ — or ‘the North’ — anyway? Obviously, as a geographical entity, we know (roughly) what we are talking about; we can argue about Derbyshire, but between Yorkshire and Scotland no one is going to dispute what the north is. Culturally, we may think we know what we are talking about, but all attempts to pin this down founder on the rocks of narrowness and outdated stereotype.

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, edited by Harry Mount – review

From our UK edition

It’s just a guess, but I suspect that the mere sight of this book would make David Cameron gnash his tiny, perfect dolphin teeth until his gums began to bleed. What on earth can he do about Boris Johnson? What can any of us do? There’s something inexorable — irresistible even — about his progress,  and this slender volume of drolleries represents another small step on the increasingly well-lit path to ultimate power: what may come to be known as the ‘Boris Years,’ or even the ‘Boris Hegemony’. This book thus becomes more than merely amusing and entertaining (it’s both, needless to say); it becomes potentially significant. Future generations may ask themselves, who was this Boris Johnson exactly?

Duncan Fallowell

The Garden of Eros, by John Calder – review

From our UK edition

John Calder is Britain’s most distinguished living publisher, and at the age of 86 he’s still at it. He first set up in business in 1949 and went on to publish 18 Nobel Prize winners, as well as classics and works on music. Why doesn’t he received a knighthood? Perhaps because his distinction lies chiefly in his role as champion of the avant garde. At a time when the heights of literary achievement are said to be the kitsch historical novels of Hilary Mantel, it is salutary to be reminded of a period not long ago when literature was a vital part of the contemporary world, replete with glittering transgressive texts which explored areas previously forbidden or unknown.

Stoker Devonshire

Henry Cecil, by Brough Scott – review

From our UK edition

This is by far the best book on racing I have ever read. It combines a truly extraordinary story — one that no novelist would have dared to submit — with brilliant writing by an author who is almost as knowledgeable about horses and the turf as his subject. Sir Henry Cecil had a privileged upbringing and a not very successful academic career; by the age of 20 he still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and it seems that it was nurture — his stepfather was a flat-race trainer— rather than nature that led him to horses. In view of his superhuman dedication to the career which chose him one must assume that he would have succeeded in anything he decided to do. His career as a trainer does indeed mark him out as a genius.

Daisy Dunn

Russia: A World Apart, by Simon Marsden – review

From our UK edition

Here are acres of desolate countryside, pockmarked by once great estates, ravaged by rot. Could it be much bleaker? Many aristocrats  fled Russia during the Revolution. Even Tolstoy’s family were affected, and while his estate today survives intact, that of his daughter-in-law and countless other members of the 18th- and 19th-century nobility were left to ruin in overgrown fields across the entire country. This book, part travelogue (Duncan McLaren), part photography book (the late Simon Marsden), restores these buildings and their monuments to our consciousness. Or at least what’s left of them. Many of the estates which lie between Moscow and St Petersburg have been eaten away by fire or scavengers. Some are simply lost.

Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux – review

From our UK edition

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper? In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This time he decided to even things out by travelling in the west, from South Africa to Namibia and Angola.

Christopher Booker

Global Crisis, by Geoffrey Parker – review

From our UK edition

Just before I was sent this huge tour de force of a book to review, I happened to be reading those 17th-century diary accounts by Pepys and John Evelyn which record a remarkable number of what would today be called ‘extreme weather events’. Repeatedly we see them referring to prolonged droughts, horrendous floods, summers and winters so abnormally hot or cold that their like was ‘never known in the world before’. These were the days of those London Frost Fairs, when the Thames froze so thickly that it could bear horses, coaches and streets of shops. This was the time of the Maunder Minimum, when for decades after 1645 sunspot activity was almost non-existent.