Books

Wednesday

John Sturgis

Good riddance to long books

From our UK edition

As soon as I picked up the parcel, my heart sank. The sheer weight of it gave the game away. Already I could unhappily picture myself struggling to hold it in one hand without straining a wrist while standing on the Piccadilly Line. I’d ordered it after coming across a couple of positive references to it in quick succession: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Written in the 1980s, set in the 1870s, it’s a cowboy story that won a Pulitzer in its day and still has its enthusiasts. I just hadn’t thought to check its length. In fact the paperback isn’t much smaller than a box of Kleenex and runs to 839 pages. That’s scarcely less than my paperback of Ulysses and more than other whoppers I’ve read lately, The Magic Mountain and Our Mutual Friend.

Wednesday

Jonathan Meades

The art of menus

From our UK edition

There is, of course, no endeavour, no craft, no profession, no trade that neglects to ‘reflect society’. This is a commonplace. The collective narcissism of considerate builders, for instance, claims that hod carriers and brickwork reflect society. The contention of Menu Design in Europe is kindred. Graphic artists, restaurateurs, decorators and chefs have, through two centuries, expanded their capabilities according to the milieux in which they have practised. Menus are, then, not merely functional lists, they are self-advertisements, exhibitions, seductions and, occasionally, desirable objects that are apparently collectible. Indeed this book has the unmistakable feel of an obsessive’s scrapbook, a completist’s trophy.

Toby Young

I’m on Andrew Doyle’s side – for now

From our UK edition

I’ve agreed to interview the author and journalist Andrew Doyle about his new book at the Conservative party conference – on stage, no less – so I thought I’d better read it. It’s about the inexorable rise of the social justice warriors, whom he regards as a danger to the survival of free speech and, by extension, the institutions and traditions that our liberal democracy depends on. My first reaction was one of irritation. The book is called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World and it’s annoyingly similar to the title of a book I’ve been working on – Salem 2.0:the Return of the Religious Police to the Public Square.

Thursday

Keiron Pim

What young Ukrainians will learn from reading Joseph Roth

From our UK edition

As Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, Volodymyr Zelensky’s ministry of education has just announced changes to the national curriculum that include removing almost all the Russian authors on the foreign literature syllabus. In last week’s Spectator, Svitlana Morenets revealed the new names: we see Robert Burns, whose inclusion may be a nod to Britain’s support during the conflict. Then there is Joseph Roth, a master of German prose, whose writing about interwar Europe speaks to Ukraine’s modern upheavals. Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, a town that now stands in western Ukraine but then lay in what was known as Galicia, the eastern Austro--Hungarian crownland.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at 100

In the United States a century ago, a single poet dominated the literary sphere. He was not only the recipient of the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Poetry — which he would win twice more during the course of an internationally distinguished career — but would be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on four separate occasions. He was beloved by presidents, described by one admirer as “more artful than Hardy and more coy than Frost” and found himself one of the bestselling writers in America. His reputation seemed assured forever.

waste land
Joyce
David Marcus

A Joycean odyssey

In retrospect I should have done it the other way round. When I mapped out the walk from my elegant Zurich hotel it looked to be about twenty minutes. What I failed to spy was the topography — and soon I was climbing a pretty serious hill through a high-end residential neighborhood. It was hot. I soldiered on, obviously appearing to the unamused Swiss on the sidewalk a weird and confused American, huffing and puffing and smoking. Then the little mountain plateaued into a blind road, a ball field and across from it the cemetery. Now it was just a matter of finding his grave. No writer, possibly no person I have never met, has occupied as much time in my mind as James Joyce. I first read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at fifteen.

Wednesday

Ameer Kotecha

The enduring wisdom of Robert Baden-Powell

From our UK edition

I do not yet have any children of my own, but a large extended family means plenty of young nieces and nephews to buy presents for come birthdays and Christmas. Those moments provide an opportunity to indulge in some pedagogic guidance: I’ll be damned if you're getting the latest Fifa game for the PlayStation 5 – you can have a real football to kick around outside. Ditto the inevitable requests for Nintendo virtual reality headsets and Frozen merchandise. Happily, I’ve got at least one Christmas present this year sorted already – and I’m quietly confident my nephew is going to enjoy reading it as much as I just have. Lord Robert Baden-Powell’s life-guide book Rovering to Success is a century old this year.

Wednesday

Spectator Life

The books Spectator readers take on their summer holidays

From our UK edition

Recently, Spectator writers shared their all-time favourite summer holiday reads. In response, Spectator readers have been offering their own recommendations for what books to take to the beach… 'You might try Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, a history of oil politics. It starts with the simple fact that in evolving from the steam to petroleum age, the old western powers no longer had direct access to fuel and faced a growing dependency on oil from Russia, initially, and then the Middle East. The US, of course, is an exception as it has domestic resources – but foreign policy errors led to it being the guarantor of petroleum resources to the rest of Nato.

Saturday

Nick Cohen

Salman Rushdie overcame his fear

From our UK edition

After Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1989, Julian Barnes gave Salman Rushdie a shrewd piece of advice. However many attempts were made on his life and the lives of his translators and publishers, however many times Special Branch moved him from safe house to safe house, he must not allow the ‘Rushdie affair’ to turn him into an obsessive. When I interviewed him ten years ago he had learned to live without fear. No shaven-headed bodyguards accompanied him as he walked into a Notting Hill restaurant. His eyes did not scour the room for signs of danger. If the other diners knew who he was, they were too well-versed in the manners of the English upper-middle class to stare at a celebrity.

Tuesday

Alec Marsh

Off the books: there’s more to Hay-on-Wye than the literary festival

From our UK edition

Chances are you will have heard of Hay-on-Wye. You might even have been. It’s the town on the Anglo-Welsh border where more than 30 years ago a man called Peter Florence began what has become the world’s most famous literary festival. Now some 200,000 people descend on the place each May and June, and for 11 days it feels like the centre of the literary universe, with hordes carrying tote bags traipsing hither and thither and pubs and restaurants overflowing like Venice in high summer. If that’s what floats your boat, then get stuck in. But for my money, Hay is worthy of a visit in its own right – and preferably when all those other visitors (not to mention ex-presidents and Booker prize-winners) aren’t there.

Thursday

Neil Clark

What we can all learn from Jim Corbett’s tiger tales

From our UK edition

‘The word “Terror” is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.’ Thus begins the third chapter of The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (1947), part of the Man-Eater series by the great Anglo-Indian hunter and naturalist Jim Corbett. I was reminded of Corbett and his wonderful books when reading last week that human-assaulting tigers are once again on the prowl in Nepal, with 104 attacks and 62 people killed in the past three years. Conservation efforts have seen tiger numbers rise three-fold since 2010, but with that good news comes the bad news of increased danger to humans.

Wednesday

Spectator Life

What Spectator writers read on their summer holidays

From our UK edition

The flights are booked, the passports are dusted down and it’s time to pack. But which books deserve space in your suitcase? Here, Spectator writers share their all-time favourite summer holiday reads… Matthew Parris My all-time favourite re-read at any time of year is Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. A very short novel with the kind of perfection a geometrical proof may command, it starts with the death of a group of travellers crossing a Peruvian rope bridge who are linked only by the fact that they were on the bridge when it snapped, and traces the life of each up until that point. Wilder’s quest is to discover whether there exists any divine plan. Toby Young For pure escapism, I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes is hard to beat.

Monday

William Boyd

Evelyn Waugh’s sincerest form of flattery

T.S. Eliot once made the significant point, in an essay on Philip Massinger, that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Eliot knew exactly what he was talking about (himself). However, change “poets” to “novelists” and the same pertinence applies. In fact, this wholesale, covert purloining may be true of all artists in all ages in all the seven arts. Let’s start with some backstory. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as they say, needs no introduction. William Gerhardie (1895-1977) is almost wholly forgotten today, but in the 1920s he was the luminous young wunderkind of English literature — a kind of Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney of his times.

gerhardie
Gaitskill sex pill sex
Francesca Peacock

Mary Gaitskill and the body electric

A man bites a woman’s breast with the aim of drawing blood, before taking a cigarette lighter to her stomach. The woman’s lack of arousal at this cruelty causes the man to enquire angrily why she lied when she told him she was “a masochist.” A young secretary is spanked by her boss for mistakes in her typing, before he masturbates over her naked behind. In a conversation between two young adulterous lovers, a woman casually admits to “flirting... like wild” with a man after she discovered he had “broke his girlfriend’s jaw.” These snapshots of masochism, warped desire and sexual depravity made Mary Gaitskill famous when her short story collection Bad Behavior first appeared in 1988.

Tuesday

Richard Holt Hutton

The melancholy of Middlemarch (1872)

From our UK edition

George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch was released in eight instalments, or 'books', throughout 1871 and 1872. A century and a half later, it is heralded as one of the greatest works in the English language. The following piece was written 150 years ago, in anticipation of the release of the fifth book. The author is Richard Holt Hutton, who edited the Economist from 1857 to 1861, as well as The Spectator alongside Meredith Townsend from 1861 until his death in 1897. He oversaw the magazine's books coverage, during a period in which they and he became one of the most celebrated sources of literary criticism in the country. You can explore more of The Spectator’s archive here.

Thursday

Micah Mattix

Books you should plan to read this fall

Summer has arrived in full force — at least here in southeastern Virginia, where the temperature has been creeping up towards 100 degrees — and so, too, have those lists of the best beach books, hottest summer reads, high temp tomes, etc. But fall is just around the corner, so why not take a peek at what’s in store? Here are a few forthcoming books that piqued my interest for one reason or another. This isn’t a list of the fall’s “biggest” books. Some of these might not be covered at all in the national press. But if you want a list like that, just wait. You’ll have 20 to choose from before long. Here is mine. Robert Crawford’s Eliot after The Waste Land (August 23, FSG), the second volume of his biography of T.S.

substack

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Falling in line with Sinclair Lewis

In 1920 Warren G. Harding was elected president of the United States, after campaigning on a promise to the American electorate to return the country to what he called “normalcy.” Exactly one hundred years later, Joe Biden assumed the same office having offered the same thing, in different language. In July 1922 Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt, a bestselling novel about a normal middle-class American businessman living in a normal small-sized Midwestern city: the quintessential personification of “normalcy.” Around the middle of the same decade, H.L. Mencken, a good (if necessarily patient) friend of Lewis’s, predicted that America would “blow up” in a hundred years. 2022 is Babbitt’s centennial year.

babbitt
Charles Moore

The endless tiny errors of the NHS

From our UK edition

I wrote recently elsewhere about Jeremy Hunt’s good new book examining unnecessary deaths in the NHS. Someone should write a companion volume about the other end of the scale of seriousness – the literally millions of small mistakes and obstructions effected by ‘the envy of the world’. Since 2014, I have found myself in hospitals many times, though never as a patient. Four close family relations or in-laws have died in hospital in that time, and several living members of my family have received various treatments. This has involved, I think, eight NHS hospitals and dozens of visits. In only one case has a major misdiagnosis contributed to otherwise avoidable death, but almost every encounter has been strewn with error or delay.

Bruce Anderson

The perfect pairing of books and wine

From our UK edition

In the West End of London there is an alley which insinuates its way between the Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane. It is called Cecil Court, and the Salisbury pub is close at hand. Those are clues. The area around Cecil Court has been owned by the Salisbury branch of the Cecil family since the 17th century. For a long period, it was not a salubrious area. At least one local was hanged. Others were transported. There may have been a whorehouse or two. The ambience resembled a cross between Fagin’s kitchen and Mistress Quickly’s Boar’s Head, with Doll tearing the sheets. Then everything changed, thanks to Victorian morality and political pressure. The Third Marquess of Salisbury was a devout churchman as well as a prime minister.

Sunday

Theo Hobson

My Sally Rooney conversion

From our UK edition

I tried to dislike the writing of Sally Rooney. But I failed. I retain some resistance to Sally Rooney the cultural phenomenon, because this is largely about television adaptations of her books, which can only accentuate the negatives. I have an old-fashioned view of these things: only literature can represent a glamorous world with nuance, real satire, barbed detachment; the interiority of writer and reader is a counterweight to the allure of worldly things.  The adaptation of her first novel, Conversations With Friends, which begins this weekend, is unlikely to challenge my view. It might, for example, attempt to show that Nick is vain and selfish as well as handsome and amazing at sex, but handsome and amazing at sex will win.