Book review

The Watergate scandal already commands a wide bookshelf. In the fifty years since Richard Nixon fell on his sword, we’ve had the big-ticket books by the tag-team of Woodward and Bernstein, and others, by contrast, seeking to exonerate Nixon and pin the whole thing on his adversaries; tales about secret sources and White House interns and plucky whistleblowers like the oleaginous John Dean and that human hand grenade Martha Mitchell; not to mention self-serving memoirs from all the principals, some now on their second or third helping at the table; or the ones saying it was all a conspiracy involving an unholy alliance of the FBI, MI6 and KGB, with the little green men from Mars thrown in.

James Shapiro, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, has turned his attention to the seeds of today’s culture wars in this fascinating, timely and deeply researched book. He unearths them in the demise of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, brought down by a Red-hunting congressional committee. Shapiro’s is an unexpectedly gripping tale, as he exposes the “playbook” of the Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, a white supremacist and glory hound who seems to have settled on destroying the Federal Theatre simply as a means of boosting his profile, while also exploring the relationships between politics, plays and propaganda. The Federal Theatre was a utopian project of galactic size, of a kind which, in these days of funding cuts, now seems impossible.

In 1831, while the slave rebel leader Nat Turner sat in jail awaiting trial in Southampton County, Virginia, he was visited by a local lawyer named Thomas Gray. Turner spoke at length to Gray, who subsequently published his record of their conversations. At one point Turner said he had been visited many years before by the spirit. “What do you mean by the spirit?” Gray asked. “The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days,” Turner replied. Gray was unmoved by Turner’s claims of divine inspiration and concluded that he was a “gloomy fanatic” moved to mass murder by religious delusions.

It is not hyperbole to call Stephen King the most influential horror writer alive. Across page and screen alike, nobody else can claim to have had such an expansive and lasting impact on popular culture. King’s name has become so commonplace that it’s easy to take it and him for granted, and to forget that behind the ultrafamiliar and now-ubiquitous branding there lies, in fact, a wild and strikingly original mind and a beating, bloody, passionate heart. You Like It Darker, King’s latest offering, is a highly accomplished and masterful collection of twelve short (and not so short) stories, all blistering examples of King’s powers. Though some have seen the light of day elsewhere, most are published here for the first time. All are worth the purchase.

On a recent visit to the bookshops of New York, I found all the usual suspects front and center. If you wanted David Grann, Amor Towles or Salman Rushdie, you had come to the right department; if your tastes veered more toward the Air Fryer Cookbook, that particular whim would be well catered for, too. But the single book I saw on most prominent display everywhere I visited was the new novel by the Irish author Paul Murray, The Bee Sting. A shop assistant in McNally Jackson professed herself an admirer of both writer and work. “I’ve never seen anything like it. We sell a dozen copies a day, sometimes more. It’s hit a chord with people in a way that other books just don’t.

"He walked as calamity. He walked under Libra. He was living all this bullshit from the inside out. Oh, he scathed himself and harangued and to his own feet flung down fresh charges. But there were dreams of escape, too — one day you could ride south on a fine horse for the Monida Pass.” Well met by moonlight, Tom Rourke, doper and dreamer, formerly of County Cork, now a miner in Butte, Montana, in 1891. Welcome to yet another wild and whirling world made by Kevin Barry. Barry’s first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, appeared in 2007; he was already celebrated in his native Ireland as a creator of darkly comic troubled characters compassionately drawn.