Books Archives

Playing devil’s advocate: a Mexican historian defends the Conquistadors

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Many books claim to describe junctures that changed the world but few examine ones as consequential as Conquistadores: A New History. Hailed by the Romantics as courageous explorers, the Spanish conquerors are increasingly seen as violent and rapacious exploiters. That, says Fernando Cervantes, oversimplifies the complexities of the early modern period. Cervantes, a Mexican historian, places the conquest of the Americas in Spain’s political context. In 1492, at great cost to the royal purse, Spain recovered Andalucía from the Moors. So when a charismatic Genoese navigator proposed to sail southwest in search of a new trade route to Asia, Ferdinand and Isabella approved.

Andy Miller

From cheeky mop tops to long-haired holy men: The Beatles come of age in America

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In his latest book, the veteran pop commentator David Hepworth is concerned with satisfaction, its acquisition and maintenance. On record, satisfaction was something the Rolling Stones found notoriously hard to get — ‘an itch you could never quite scratch’. In reality, it was a commodity the groups spearheading the British invasion of the 1960s — the Stones, the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five and others — discovered to be plentiful in the USA. And as Hepworth notes, it was ‘Satisfaction’ itself, a huge hit in America, which delivered the very thing Mick Jagger bemoaned the lack of in the song.

Christopher Bray

‘I wonder about his humanity’: Malcolm McDowell on Stanley Kubrick

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Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket, a ’Nam flick shot in Beckton. Ever the perfectionist, Kubrick had imported palm trees from Africa, the better that the local gas works resemble downtown Hué. Alas, he wasn’t happy. Something about the clouds over east London wasn’t right, and as for the sunsets… Meanwhile, the crew and cast and hordes of extras thumb-twiddled in the silence Kubrick demanded. Then an extra kicked up: ‘Get him off the crane.’ An assistant was despatched to find the guilty party. ‘You’re working with Stanley Kubrick,’ he lectured the rhubarbers. ‘No talking.

Diana Hendry

Dublin double act: Love, by Roddy Doyle, reviewed

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Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s a comic genius, his dialogue comparable with Beckett and that this, his 12th novel, is garnering rave reviews in America. But is not Doyle’s trademark conversation between two men in a pub not just a little interminable? Love follows on from Two Pints (a play), Two More Pints and (last year) Two for the Road – two men chewing the fat on news events from 2014 to 2019. Squibs compared to Love, which is bigger, deeper, longer — but still two men in a pub. Joe and Davy, fifty-plus drinking buddies, meet again after a long gap. Davy, now living in England, is in Dublin on a visit.

Richard Baxell

How the International Brigades were ‘thrown into the heart of the fire’

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During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight against the forces of General Franco and his supporters from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. When the volunteers were withdrawn in September 1938 after two years of bitter fighting, more than a fifth of them had been killed and very few emerged unscathed. Conflicts are by definition binary affairs, so it’s inevitable that bitterly contrasting views of the role of the International Brigades have existed ever since the civil war itself. For the volunteers and their supporters, their sacrifices were a ‘heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality’.

Juliet Nicolson

Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta

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From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political front doors. With an unerring eye for the revealing detail, Catherine Grace Katz has uncovered a fascinating generational back-story to the Yalta summit of February 1945. The three varyingly spirited daughters of Churchill, Roosevelt and Averell Harriman who accompanied their world-leading fathers to the freezing bleakness of the Crimea to thrash out terms for ending the second world war all played their crucial role.

Andrew Taylor

Older and grumpier: A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin, reviewed

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By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the many pleasures of the series is that Rebus ages in real time. COPD now makes climbing stairs an increasing problem, so he and his dog Brillo are in the throes of moving to a downstairs flat. DCI Siobhan Clarke, his former colleague, has turned up to lend a hand. She’s distracted by the murder of a wealthy Saudi student, who soon turns out not to be wealthy at all. Nevertheless, he had recently promised to invest £10 million in a real-estate development 250 miles from Edinburgh near the north coast of Scotland.

John Maier

A passion for pastiche: China’s Potemkin villages

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Closely inspect No. 23 Leinster Terrace, Bayswater and you might notice the house has no letter box. Push at the door and you might find it stuck; force your way in and you might find you plummet 40 feet through open space down an obsolete ventilation shaft on to the tracks of the District Line. The house is a fake; a five-storey façade; an architectural trompe l’oeil disguising a disused steam outlet on the London Underground. (Or, as the estate agent might yell down to you, the property combines an airy open-plan design with excellent transport links right on the doorstep.) Flaws notwithstanding, the white stucco frontage — owned and pristinely maintained by TfL— is, like its neighbours, Grade II listed. And the chameleon-like No.

Lee Langley

Lacrimae rerum: That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

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Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry: two short-story collections, both prize-winners, and three captivating novels. First, the baroque mayhem of City of Bohane, characters exploding on the page flashing knives and fancy footwear, its vernacular veering from Clockwork Orange argot to Joycean dazzle. A world away from the beguiling charm of Beatlebone, which imagined a stressed-out John Lennon driving across Ireland to check out the uninhabited island he’d bought years earlier as a future bolthole. Barry’s triumphant third novel, Night Boat to Tangier, long-listed for the Booker, opened with two old crims waiting at the ferry terminal of a Spanish port for the girl who links their lives, reminiscing endlessly as they wait.

Emma Beddington

Victoria Wood: stiletto in an oven glove

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Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it for a high-fibre biscuit), it was impossible not to feel Victoria Wood got you, somehow. Her death in 2016 triggered an outpouring of grief commensurate to her talent, but it also revealed how intimately, how individually, she was loved. Lazily viewed as the cosiest of national treasures, Wood was finer and fiercer than that: she distilled something essential about British character (national, regional, sexual), and her forensic skewering of middle-class aspiration, high and low culture and any and every class of stupidity managed to remain warm: a spectacular balancing act. Mainly, though, she was wickedly, consistently, funny: Acorn Antiques alone merited a damehood.

Frances Wilson

Euthanasia sitcom: What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

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What Are You Going Through is both brilliant and mercifully brief. Weighing in at 200-odd pages, it can be read in five hours flat and will leave you staring into endless night. ‘Make the audience suffer as much as possible,’ advised Alfred Hitchcock, and Sigrid Nunez, whose subject is emotional extremity, follows suit. The suffering begins at the start when the narrator, a woman of a certain age whose name we never learn, goes to a talk by a writer, whose name we also never learn. His lecture, given in a polished, emotionless voice, is about the death of the planet: It was over, he said. It was too late, we had dithered too long. Our society had become too fragmented and dysfunctional for us to fix, in time, the calamitous mistakes we had made.

8 October 2020

Tom Lathan

Helen Macdonald could charm the birds out of the trees

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When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes, she would imagine and count through the layers of the earth that lay beneath her, and then the layers of atmosphere above her. ‘It had something of the power of incantation,’ she writes in Vesper Flights, an essay originally published in the New York Times Magazine and now the title piece in this new collection of essays. Much like her previous book H Is for Hawk, this volume sees Macdonald weave together personal reflections, natural and human histories and fragments of autobiography to create nature writing that is at once intimate and expansive. Some of the essays in Vesper Flights take Macdonald to extraordinary places.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed

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After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly and persuasively briefed him on the latest secret weapon, a powerful ballistic missile, with a film to demonstrate its capabilities. Hitler was enchanted. He said: ‘Gentlemen, I thank you. If we had had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war. No one would have dared oppose us.’ Hitler made the aristocratic von Braun an honorary professor — and ordered the manufacture of 10,000 of the new rockets.

James Miller

Breakdown in Berlin: Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed

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‘I was what they call an “independent scholar”’, confides the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a middle-aged writer from New York of modest reputation who secures a three-month residency at the prestigious Deuter Centre in Berlin. While there, he hopes to write something about ‘the construction of the self in lyric poetry’ and escape the pressures of fatherhood. However, he soon finds the ethos of the centre — on transparency, surveillance and measurable outputs — counterproductive to his notions of artistic creation. Instead, Kunzru’s protagonist is pulled away by new distractions.

Jay Elwes

Shock and awe — what should we make of our Viking ancestors?

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In June 793, a raiding force arrived by boat at the island monastery of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast. The attack that followed was shockingly brutal. The English cleric Alcuin wrote: ‘Never before has such terror appeared in Britain… Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments.’ It was the first recorded Viking raid on Britain. Many others were to follow, and the image of the axe-wielding raiding party remains the stereotypical view of the Viking horde. The question that this dark, brilliantly written and absorbing book asks is: who were these people and where did all that violence come from?

Allan Mallinson

Break-out and betrayal in Occupied Europe

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Für dich, Tommy, ist der Krieg vorbei. However, many British servicemen, officers especially, didn’t want their war to be over. Or, at least, didn’t want to spend it in a PoW camp. One of the enduring myths of the second world war is that officers had a statutory obligation to escape, but nothing in King’s Regulations required it. Most just saw it as their duty to rejoin their units. The German military courts that tried escaping officers generally viewed it that way too. Besides escapers, there were those evading capture, particularly downed airmen. In December 1939 a special meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee discussed how to help them.

Brian Martin

Appearances are deceptive: Trio, by William Boyd, reviewed

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Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives are the issue. Wing’s long-suffering agent tells her if you want to know what’s going on in people’s heads, ‘behind those masks we all wear — then read a novel’. The main setting of Trio is Brighton in revolutionary 1968. The actress says: ‘I’m meant to be a famous film star who’s making a film in Brighton.’ That’s the core of the novel. William Boyd is one of our best contemporary storytellers; remember An Ice-cream War and Restless. He tells this morality tale with sustained humour; remember the Nat Tate hoax.

Philip Hensher

De Profundis: the agony of filming Oscar Wilde’s last years

Lead book review

Somewhere or other Martin Amis remarks that the reason we have very little idea of what it feels like to go into space is that no astronaut so far can write. If we know very well what it felt like to go through a tropical typhoon, that’s because there was a Joseph Conrad able to tell us about it. Something similar might be said about the experience of real stardom. Although many great actors have published autobiographies, with or without the help of ghost writers, there are vanishingly few that combine honesty with an ability to write.

1 October 2020

Philip Marsden

Surrounded by sea and sky: the irresistible draw of islands

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Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the earth’s topographic features, islands are the most elastic, the most adept at accommodating the wilder projections of our imagination. Why it should be so is a question that has exercised writers from D.H. Lawrence to Oscar Wilde, Annie Dillard to Adam Nicolson. The cultural geographer John Gillis identifies it as a curiously western trait, an extension of the metaphysical thirst for definition, the need to cut everything up into discrete entities in order to understand it. Island Dreams is Gavin Francis’s own contribution to the debate, based on his decades-long attraction to islands.

Sam Leith

A cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history

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Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando, The Cat That Walked By Himself, Gobbolino or Behemoth in The Master and Margarita, he really existed. Protagonist of the most anthologised section of the mad poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the eccentrically spelled ginger tom now takes a fresh lease of fictionalised life in this jeu d’esprit. Oliver Soden’s ‘biography’ of Jeoffry takes its most obvious bearings from another novelised animal biography, Virginia Woolf’s life of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush. It is, if you’ll forgive me, a pretty feline performance.

Susan Hill

We all love a poltergeist story

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There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists seem to have gone quiet, or at least unreported; but before then they were everywhere. In 1938, poltergeists kicked off in Thornton Heath, Surrey, and a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and psychic investigator, Nandor Fodor, was alerted to strange happenings in the home of a 34-year-old housewife there. The list of happenings is familiar in all poltergeist stories. Furniture moves, light fittings shatter, crockery, money, knick knacks, even small pictures are thrown through the air, sometimes seemingly aimed directly at individuals.

Bart van Es

The ‘unremarkable’ life of SS officer Robert Griesinger

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In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It concerned an armchair that her mother had recently taken for re-upholstering. The chair was something of a family treasure. As a child growing up in Amsterdam, the woman herself had always sat on it as she did her homework and it featured in countless family photographs. When her mother returned to pick up the chair, however, the upholsterer had addressed her in outrage. He did not work for Nazis, he said. The loved chair, it turned out, contained a hidden cache of SS documents, all stamped with swastikas. The woman at the party felt contaminated by what her mother had told her: throughout her childhood she had been in close proximity to these objects from the Fascist past.

Rabeea Saleem

A melting pot of mercenaries: Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed

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‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map.’ That part of the world is East Africa, particularly what is now Tanzania, whose early-20th-century history is the backdrop to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. The novel spans the years preceding and during the first world war, when East Africa was colonised by the Germans and British. The turbulent history of the region is relayed through the unanchored lives of three adolescents — Hamza, Ilyas and his sister Afiya. For various reasons, they find themselves uprooted and isolated from their families. Their life paths cross via Khalifa, a merchant of Gujarati Muslim descent with a generous spirit. His house forms the nexus of their colliding fates.

Boyd Tonkin

Full of desperate longing: Unquiet, by Linn Ullmann, reviewed

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The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live mostly apart —the former in Sweden, the latter in Norway or New York — and the trio fails to bond: ‘It was never us three.’ Her famous father is a migratory sage with ‘a unique talent for partings’, obsessively orderly and punctual but happy to let this youngest child (of nine, by five wives, and the girl’s unmarried mother) grow up ‘without any plan or direction’. Her mother, often dubbed the father’s ‘muse’ (though never by the father), fills the planet’s screens with beauty ‘of the sort that belongs to everyone and no one — like a national park’.

Daniel Swift

What the sonnets tell us about Shakespeare

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When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a sonnet: an exchange of 14 lines, expressing mutual love and ending with a neat rhyming couplet and a kiss. It is a touching, haunting moment, and like so much in Shakespeare, it also has an opposite. A little earlier in the play, Juliet’s mother Lady Capulet tries to praise Romeo’s rival Paris, and describes the hapless Paris in a horrible string of six rhyming couplets (‘This precious book of love, this unbound lover,/ To beautify him, only lacks a cover’). These 12 lines fail as a sonnet, where Romeo’s and Juliet’s exchange succeeds. One love is complete and perfect, while the other is broken and false.

Tom Hodgkinson

Gazing heavenwards: the medieval monks who mapped the planetary motions

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We can probably blame George and Ira Gershwin. It was that brilliant duo who, in 1937, penned the memorable lyric ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round’. The song has been recorded by at least 15 artists over the years, from Fred Astaire to Lady Gaga, and is embedded in the consciousness of the West. But its headline message — medieval people are stupid — is total nonsense. No one, as Professor Seb Falk points out in this brilliant study of medieval astronomy and learning, ever disbelieved the world was round, and medieval people were far cleverer than they get credit for. Half the population, for one thing, he says, were literate.

Madeleine Feeny

Opposites attract: Just Like You, by Nick Hornby, reviewed

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Babysitters are having a literary moment. Following Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age, Nick Hornby is the latest author to mine the potential for blurred lines and crossed boundaries bred by the employer-childminder dynamic. Throw race, class, sex and Brexit in the mix, and you have a juicy plot that’s both vintage Hornby and totally contemporary. Hornby has been chronicling north London’s romantic and cultural obsessions since 1992, and Just Like You doesn’t stray from home turf. It is 2016 and Joseph, a black 22-year-old from Tottenham, works Saturdays at an Islington butcher. While enduring the innuendos of drooling white women, he meets pretty, unaffected Lucy, who asks him to babysit her sons.

Philip Womack

Julius Caesar’s assassins were widely regarded as heroes in Rome

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It’s not as if Julius Caesar wasn’t warned about the Ides of March. Somebody thrust a written prediction of the assassination at him as he marched to the Senate on the fateful day. Alas for Julius, as Peter Stothard notes in this gripping, gorgeously written new account of the killing and its consequences, the dictator stuffed it away, unread, into the folds of his toga. Secreted in the folds of his colleagues’ togas were the daggers that would shortly destroy him. The major themes of Roman (and therefore European) history are here writ large: tyranny vs freedom; politics vs self-preservation. We are at a crossroads in time when, if this one event had happened differently, everything might have changed.

24 September 2020

Adam Begley

French lessons, with tears: inside a Lyonnais kitchen

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You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration of Italian gastronomy, Bill Buford announced that he would be crossing the Alps: ‘I have to go to France.’ And here he is, in Dirt, another rollicking, food-stuffed entertainment, determined to unearth, as it were, the secrets of haute cuisine. Lyon, being the gastronomic capital of France, is where he decides to dig in, having uprooted his family (wife, twin toddlers) to facilitate his investigations. Gourmets and gourmands will savour this account of his five-year adventure — and so will students of the author’s curious, compelling character.