Book review

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

The twice-promised land

From our UK edition

If books about the Israeli-Arab conflict were building blocks, the Palestinians would have their own state already and then some. Most volumes bring little that is fresh or challenging, so selectivity is key. Daniel Gordis and Benny Morris are essential, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev unavoidable. Take time on unsexy stylists like Mustafa Kabha or Anita Shapira; they will reward you. Anything by John Pilger or Ilan Pappé should be tossed aside like an iffy shawarma wrap, and for the same reason. Disconcertingly, Ian Black defies this framework. Enemies and Neighbours, his history of a century of blossoming and bloodshed in the Holy Land, is not revelatory and yet it is quietly compelling.

James Evans

Catfight at court

From our UK edition

Apart from glorying in a memorable name, Lettice Knollys has chiefly been known for her connections — with her second husband, Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester; with the woman who was deeply in love with Dudley, Queen Elizabeth I; and with her hot-headed son who, as Earl of Essex, for a time enjoyed a flirtatious closeness to the older Queen. Until now, there has been no biography of the Countess of Leicester in her own right. Elizabeth, having been close to Lettice in her youth, was enraged and embittered by her marriage to Dudley, the one man in the Queen’s life who was ‘completely off limits’, according to Nicola Tallis.

Stuart Kelly

It’s grim up north

From our UK edition

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the Costa First Book Award. His new novel, Devil’s Day, is equally good, even though its similarities slightly muffle the surprises. Like his debut, it is a work of gooseflesh eeriness. The Loney artfully described the north-west coast of England; Devil’s Day as proficiently conjures the fells of an area hazily between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Loney featured a damaged family on a religious retreat encountering old paganisms; Devil’s Day has our protagonist, John Pentecost, returning to the family farm for the funeral of his grand-father, the Gaffer, which coincides with a ritual for placating the devil before the flock is brought in for the winter.

Laura Freeman

Pulling through

From our UK edition

Grief is not being able to eat a small boiled egg. ‘Could you face an egg?’ the widowed Jean asks her daughter Eve in Susie Boyt’s sixth novel, Love & Fame. It is not long after Jean’s husband, Eve’s father, John Swift, a sitcom actor, a national treasure, has died. Eve can’t face an egg; Jean has lost her appetite for anything but eggs. One small boiled egg, morning, noon and night. This is a clever, wise, often sad book about failure, dashed hopes and bereavement. It could be bleak, but Boyt is fiercely funny, skewering fads and self-help trends. A professional de-clutterer in the Marie Kondo mode is called ‘the Prim Reaper’. The novel opens with a stop-start list of modern platitudes and wellness nuggets: You tried Tranquiltea?

Rose Prince

On the wild side

From our UK edition

The terroir of the Kentish coast is faultlessly represented in The Sportsman (Phaidon, £29.95), a book of recipes from an acclaimed pub restaurant in the village of Seasalter, close to Whitstable. On the bill of fare (it’s that English) you will find slip soles and thornback ray, salt marsh lamb and oysters, seaweeds of all sorts, wild berries, venison and much else from this landscape with its watery edge. The food is seasoned with home-panned sea salt and the kitchen churns its own butter. The Sportsman’s chef-proprietor,Stephen Harris, writes that terroir is a troublesome word that has come to mean too many things, especially with wine. The French have perhaps deliberately mystified it, he says.

Julie Burchill

Gathering moss

From our UK edition

Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I’ve been for the past four decades. It’s hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I’ve met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive in the Antipodes, while my colleagues were regularly flown to the USA and supplied with groupies and cocaine as if they themselves were rock stars. And then punk came along and rocked the gravy boat — and the internet finished the job. Last time I saw a copy, it was lying wanly in a bin marked FREE — PLEASE TAKE ONE.

Rose George

A different kettle of fish

From our UK edition

Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the historical record, too: fishing equipment is soft and decays (bamboo, hemp, lines made from kelp, cedar bark, women’s hair). Brian Fagan is an archaeologist, a profession that we associate with dust and soil and stone, but here he attempts to capture the history of fishing in ancient civilisation. It is not just fish that elude the historian: fisherfolk have always lived on the margins — of land and in recorded history (and still do). ‘To a scholar,’ writes Fagan, ‘the illiterate fishing people of the past are elusive, and their trade is a challenging puzzle of clues.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Problems of her own

From our UK edition

If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato nation, it will make you feel great affection for it. Sprawled on L-shaped sofas with comfort cushions or slobbering dogs on their tummies, or sitting side by side on armchairs with a vase of carnations on a doily between them, the programme’s chosen telly-watchers make what must be the most unselfconscious, and therefore genuine, remarks spoken by anyone on air. There’s no doubt in my mind that Giles and Mary are the most watchable of all the watchers.

Thursday

Laura Beatty

Angel and demon

From our UK edition

Read cover to cover, a book of essays gives you the person behind it: their voice, the trend of their thinking, their tastes and the nature of their engagement with the world. So, here are two, one from each end of the human spectrum. Think of Milton’s Archangel Raphael, intellectually wide-ranging, lucid, informative and fair, and you have Francis Spufford. Think of his darkly glittering Satan — vivid, passionate, partisan and fatally persuasive — and you have Martin Amis. Read these books together and you have, in essay terms, a Miltonic whole. These are collections of what might be called ‘pre-loved’ pieces, not originally designed to cohere, so they have been washed and brushed for resale.

Daniel Hahn

The art of deception | 9 November 2017

From our UK edition

Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a charismatic Nazi concentration camp survivor, and more. In January 2005 he addressed the Spanish parliament to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is, everyone agrees, an extraordinary man. Heroic, almost. The thing is, his extraordinary, heroic biography is at least partly a lie. But which parts? In The Impostor, the novelist Javier Cercas seeks to disentangle Marco’s lies from those small provable truths supporting them.

Stephen Bayley

High wire act

From our UK edition

‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation that turned PR and branding into art forms, wanted homegrown creative heroes. In design there were Charles Eames and George Nelson with their homey hopsack suits and wash’n’wear shirts, their sensible Wasp homilies: a counterattack against imported — and often baffling — exotics from the Bauhaus. It was the same in fine art. Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) was a roughneck from cowboy country in Wyoming who became a darling of the media, not least because of his readily reportable deplorable behaviour.

Ian Thomson

Italy’s road to ruin

From our UK edition

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without.

Mary Keen

The future isn’t rosy

From our UK edition

Emotional geography is now a recognised academic subject. Is emotional botany heading the same way? This is a year for thoughtful books about plants and the way they affect lives, what they make people feel and how we can respect nature. Many of the year’s works might appeal to non-gardeners. Readers hoping for rose-tinted pages may be disappointed. Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £14.99) is ostensibly a diary of his allotment over a little more than a year. But, he writes: ‘Sometimes, when I think of this book, I am almost bewildered. It has taken such a turn. It was to be about gardening... with personal stuff added in.’ The editor of the Observer food magazine, Jenkins grows exotic vegetables and describes them lusciously.

Claudia Massie

A blunt instrument of war

From our UK edition

It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura lamenting ‘the number of bad books that have been written and will be written’ about it. Fortunately, James Attlee’s study of Picasso’s superstar work of art is not a bad book and he builds on a solid cultural and historic understanding of the painting to collate 80 years of evolving reaction to it. Attlee begins in May 1937, when, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republic commissioned Picasso to create a painting for its pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. They hoped the famous artist would help secure sympathy, funds and, significantly, political intervention in the Republican cause.

Hugh Thomson

Blowing hot and cold | 9 November 2017

From our UK edition

I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how capricious Homeric weather can be. In the space of a few days the wind shifted dramatically to three different points of the compass — and none of them was the gentle westerly Zephyr that brought Odysseus and his men back to almost spitting distance of their homeland. Almost, because just as they approached, the crew became suspicious of the goatskin bag in which Aeolus had helpfully packed away the other hostile winds and let them all loose. Nick Hunt tries to track down a few of Europe’s more errant and potent winds. He starts with the homegrown Helm, which blusters across the Pennines.

Nigel Jones

The revolution devours its children

From our UK edition

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of his native Georgia, and was an avid reader of history, novels and Marxist-Leninist theory, marking the pages of the 20,000 books in his library with expletives scrawled with the same coloured crayons with which he signed mass death warrants and international treaties: ‘Rubbish!’, ‘Piss off!’, ‘Fool!’, ‘Scumbag!’, ‘Ha-Ha!

Thursday

Nicholas Shakespeare

A sensual Greek goddess

From our UK edition

Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland of the Peloponnese which she had financed by selling her jewellery. Afterwards, whenever Joan’s husband and companion of nearly six decades reclined in her place on the sofa to read, eight of her 73 cats would gather round him in a recumbent group — but after a few minutes slope off. Paddy (who died in 2011) wrote: ‘They had realised they were being fobbed off with a fake.

Jenny Colgan

More secrets and symbols

From our UK edition

Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In a world where a quarter of people read literally no books in any given year, can we give each other a break on this kind of thing? If you found Angels and Demons good fun, thoroughly enjoyed The Da Vinci Code (as I unironically did), but despised Inferno for the worthless piece of rat doodah that it was, then the good news is that Brown is back on form here. Origin is brisk, fun and filled with adorably pointless Wikipedia paragraphs; and what’s at stake is endearingly grandiose. Here, the premise is atheism vs religion.

Graham Robb

The martyrdom of Proust

From our UK edition

Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by neighbours in one of the busiest parts of Paris? In 1906, at the age of 35, shortly after the death of his mother, he moved to a first-floor apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. ‘I couldn’t bear to live in a place that maman never knew,’ he explained. For this ghostly comfort, he paid a heavy price. Petrol fumes and tree pollen — to which he was almost fatally allergic — drifted up from the boulevard.

Douglas Murray

Songs of the blood and the sword

From our UK edition

Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this well-edited and serious volume Thomas Hegghammer — one of the world’s foremost experts on jihadism — has put together a collection of essays by an impressive group of scholars analysing what culture Islamism’s most adamant adherents might be said to possess. The book is not a long one. Designed for a primarily academic audience, Hegghammer’s introduction carries all of the baggage that such audiences demand. It is not writing so much as a set of pleas and signs sent out to academia’s own hostage-takers, who lurk in universities and colleges reading mainly for the hope of discovering a rival’s error.