Book review

Thursday

Sarah Ditum

A cursed house

From our UK edition

Beyond the patricide and even the incest, the horror of the Oedipus myth lies in its insistence that our fates are not ours to change. And yet the story itself is far from unalterable, having been handed down in multiple variants — something that Natalie Haynes knows very well as a classics scholar. Now Haynes has written her own version of the tragedy, finding new space in the narrative by looking at it through the eyes of two characters neglected by antiquity: Oedipus’s mother/bride Jocasta and their youngest daughter Ismene. We meet Jocasta as a clever 15-year-old girl married off to old King Laius of Thebes, in what her grasping father declares ‘the best deal of [his] life’.

Elisa Segrave

Brava Bella

From our UK edition

I like Bella Pollen for her open-mindedness, self-deprecation and verve. Given her early success as a fashion designer — top client Princess Diana — her memoir is extraordinarily modest. Now in her mid-fifties, she has also published five novels — one, Hunting Unicorns, a bestseller. Unusually, this had a dead narrator, and Meet Me in the In-Between also begins with an unearthly creature — a ‘demon’ sexual predator, who won’t leave our memoirist alone. It also deals with writer’s block.

Ian Birrell

Every horror imaginable

From our UK edition

The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being urged to convert to Islam with machetes pressed to their necks. They did their best to gabble words that sounded like the prayers they were being taught before one fighter noticed a captive with a swollen belly. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she insisted, spreading her hands over her belly in an instinctive reaction that only showed she was lying. The most senior of the armed men, who looked barely 20 years old, ordered her to lie down on the ground. ‘We don’t bring any Christian babies into the world here,’ he screamed.

Maggie Fergusson

The gull’s way

From our UK edition

In 1978, Adam Nicolson received three Hebridean islands as a 21st birthday present from his father, Nigel. The Shiants, each about a mile long, were uninhabited, with just one rat-infested bothy: not everyone’s idea of paradise. But, precisely because human beings had neglected them, wild life flourished — the islands were ‘thick with the swirl of existence’, thrumming with life and death, suffering and triumph, ferocity and conquest. Sea Room (2002) is Nicolson’s rousing love lilt to the Shiants, for him the most beautiful place on earth.

Thursday

Peter Carty

The last great pandemic

From our UK edition

The symptoms of the Spanish flu could be ghastly. Perhaps Laura Spinney should have chosen her title with more care because rather than becoming pale and interesting, as with tuberculosis, frequently the flu’s victims turned completely black before dying. ‘It is hard,’ one US army doctor observed, ‘to distinguish the colored men from the white.’ The pandemic is often thought of as a forgotten catastrophe. That is despite its monumental scale. The death toll, which peaked in the autumn of 1918, is variously estimated to be between 50 million and 100 million — far exceeding the 17 million fatalities of the Great War. But have we really forgotten the Spanish flu — and, if so, why? Spinney is both a novelist and science writer.

Jane Ridley

Forty years of comfort-eating

From our UK edition

In 2015 a pair of linen drawers belonging to Queen Victoria sold at auction for over £12,000. In old age Queen Victoria swathed herself in wraps and loose gowns which artfully concealed her figure, and her official photographers were ordered to photoshop her outline. But these knickers with their 45” waistband make plain that the 5’-queen was borderline obese. Annie Gray has written a culinary biography of Queen Victoria which tells us what she ate. Breakfast was a hearty meal, often featuring lamb chops. For dinner Victoria ate rich French food, and her menus were always written in French. No plain Mrs Beeton-style cooking for the queen. Dinner began with a choice of soups.

Michael Auslin

The war in the shadows

From our UK edition

I once spent an evening, back in the mid-1980s, with William Colby, the legendary spy and director of the CIA. I was an undergraduate at the time, and the CIA’s Iran–Contra debacle was in the news. Lured by the agency’s mystique, I was eager to ask him about the fabled Phoenix programme he directed — a top secret initiative to target and eliminate Viet Cong who had infiltrated South Vietnamese villages, often conducted by Americans who had crossed over some invisible line, leaving behind them the normal life that comprised my world. To my disappointment, Colby demystified Phoenix. He was very proud of the programme, and while he never said so, I distinctly remember feeling convinced by him that the CIA should have run the whole war in Vietnam.

Alex Burghart

Perfect, gentle Knight

From our UK edition

I once asked Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, what she did to relax. Nailing me to the wall with her no-nonsense look, she said: ‘I keep sheep.’ A similar association with the animal kingdom resounds through Henry Hemming’s excellent new life of Maxwell Knight, the famous spymaster and possible archetype for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’. Knight’s family and friends observed that, at an early age, he had a particular way with animals that allowed him to bring them under his spell. As a young man he kept a menagerie in his small London flat consisting of a bulldog, a bear and a baboon.

Suzi Feay

A gruesome retelling

From our UK edition

‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B. Yeats in his sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’, seeing in this avian rape the germ of the Trojan war. Leda gave birth to Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the one renowned as the casus belli, the other the most infamous agent of the aftermath. Another Irish writer now takes up the story, without the magnificent cloak of myth. House of Names is a portrait of a brutal, disenchanted world of political tyranny, slaughter and revenge.

John McEwen

Home from the hill

From our UK edition

As well as being a leading architectural historian Mary Miers is an editor at Country Life. For her latest book she has mined the magazine’s unmatchable picture library and the photographs are by Country Life regulars Simon Jauncey, who lives in Highland Perthshire, and the late Paul Barker, who sadly died before publication. His memory is duly saluted. Crucially the author is a Highlander by birth and domicile. Every week she commutes between London and her Black Isle home and she summers on South Uist. She knows the Highlands and Islands, or the Gàidhealtachd, from top to bottom: from Balmoral and the Highland balls of the Northern Meeting to crofters’ kitchens and island ceilidhs.

Peter Bradshaw

Moments of absurdity

From our UK edition

The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially for The Santaland Diaries, his uproarious account of earning part-time cash as a department store Christmas elf. Now he is bringing out an edited version of his personal diaries. It’s the first volume of two, taking us from his days as a broke student, stoner and young gay man in North Carolina and Chicago, through to the years of literary fame and success in New York and Paris as the new century dawns — a distinction worn lightly. Fans, semi-fans and non-fans (I am midway between the first two categories) may well crack open this book in search of David Sedaris’s private reality.

William Leith

Cold comfort | 25 May 2017

From our UK edition

All animals, Scott Carney tells us, seek comfort. But human beings are a bit different. We don’t need to spend much time actively seeking it. He’s right: it’s all around us — in your nice warm house, your air-conditioned car, your shoes, your bed, the temperate shopping mall you visit. Here in the affluent west, we eat comfort food in comfortable chairs, and then we recline on cushions, tweaking our dimmer switches and thermostats and adjusting the brightness on our screens. Good for us, you might think. We can ‘control and fine-tune our environment so thoroughly that many of us can live in what amounts to a perpetual state of homeostasis’.

Jonathan Mirsky

The ruin of a ruin

From our UK edition

In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, tortured and beheaded by Isis two years ago when they destroyed the remains of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important ancient cities. Their victim was its director of antiquities. In an icy fury, Paul Veyne, a French expert on Palmyra, has dedicated this comprehensive, passionate, but concise book to the memory of the murdered Syrian scholar. In it he relates thousands of years of Palmyra’s history, describing those who lived there and pausing only briefly to underline what monsters Isis were to smash the site.

Stuart Kelly

Homer Simpson in a chasuble

From our UK edition

This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time — not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop. Patricia Lockwood is a poet — dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ — who, after unexpected and costly medical bills, was forced to move, with her husband, back to her parents’ home. Her mother is more than mildly neurotic, fretting over things like children jumping out of windows in imitation of Superman.

Jonathan Keates

The fount of all knowledge

From our UK edition

Somewhere around the middle of the 17th century our modern concept of the museum began to take shape. Until then the cabinet of curiosities formed by a prince or a dilettante was on show solely to his friends or to scholars deemed worthy of having it unlocked. Nothing in the way of a systematic catalogue existed to help them navigate the gallimaufry of odd objects filling its shelves and cupboards. A Japanese netsuke button, an Arawak headdress and a handkerchief soaked in the blood of Charles I could be found nestling beside a stuffed alligator or a bezoar stone, calculus from an animal’s stomach held to possess magical curative powers.

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Soaring and singing

From our UK edition

Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature is measured out in warbles and wingbeats — metaphors that have long since broken free of their originals, birds made not of sinew and bone but ‘ink and sentiment’. Richard Smyth’s A Sweet, Wild Note brings these black and white creatures back into colour, gives them science and geography, acoustics and ecology as well as poetry, bringing all these disciplines to bear on one question: what do we really hear when we hear birds sing?

Andrew Barrow

Paradise or prison?

From our UK edition

This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story begins in 1663, jumps forward to modern times and then back to 1665. On all occasions, our attention is less on the actual house, Wychwood, than on the power of nature, whatever’s left of the surrounding primeval forest, ornamental lakes-in-the-making, majestic vistas and, above all, the ‘monstrously expensive’ wall or ‘the great ring of stone’, built, or being built, around its park. Those featured include the original landscape designer Mr Norris, his silk-coated, high-heeled employer Lord Woldingham and later the silk-and-chiffon-clad Rossiters, who rule the roost in the 1960s.

Julie Burchill

Fallen idols

From our UK edition

David Hepworth is such a clever writer — not just clever in the things he writes, but in the way he has conducted his career. A decade older than me, he too started out at the New Musical Express; but he went on to take Smash Hits to glory as editor, to launch Just Seventeen, Empire, Mojo and Heat, and remains the only person to have won both the PPA’s writer of the year and editor of the year awards. His previous book, Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year that Rock Exploded, was a great critical and commercial success.

Michael Beloff

No ordinary judge

From our UK edition

Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the bar at 25. After ten years of provincial practice he turned down the offer from Joseph Chamberlain of a safe Conservative seat, although politics was then the conventional highway to the bench (unlike now when it is a cul de sac). He also rejected an offer of silk, after withdrawing an earlier application which he thought the lord chancellor had been too slow to consider, and was, on the initiative of H.H. Asquith, the then liberal prime minister, appointed to the bench at 47 — the youngest of his generation — and the first junior to receive such promotion for over a century.

Victor Sebestyen

A brave new world – at gunpoint

From our UK edition

Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most curious. China Miéville is best known as an imaginative and entertaining writer of ‘weird’ (his word) science fiction and magic realism. October is a narrative history of the two 1917 revolutions in Russia, written from an ultra-left perspective — with a novelist’s eye for a good story and colourful characters. So it’s an examination of why the communist experiment failed miserably — at the cost of much blood — that is also wonderfully well written: smart, witty and full of fresh insight. But it can also read like an A-level essay, regurgitated from textbooks. Weird indeed.