Books Archives

The South Sea Company’s bonds were never meant to be a scam

More from Books

In Money for Nothing, Thomas Levenson brings us into the story of the South Sea Bubble by writing about the development of the mathematics of odds and prediction. These advances were the beginnings of actuarial science: an understanding of risk that underpins insurance. We start with Isaac Newton and his role in attempting to stabilise the currency with something we now think of as quite normal: currency revaluation (Levenson’s previous work on Newton means he’s well prepared here). Much of early modern Europe based their currencies on silver, and fluctuations in the value of the metal were a recurring issue. Ongoing wars meant England was massively in debt, and having its coins worth more (as silver bullion) than their face value in pounds was a problem.

Sean Mcglynn

Not such a hero: the tarnished legend of Robin Hood

More from Books

Britain’s two most famous legendary figures, King Arthur and Robin Hood, remain enduringly and endearingly elusive, and thus ever-fascinating: Arthur slumbering in the mists of nebulous Avalon, Robin as a hardy perennial somewhere deep in Sherwood Forest. Historians, folklorists, Eng Lit academics and cranks — the list is not mutually exclusive — enter these realms at their peril. When I did so a few years back, a headline in the Sun alarmingly proclaimed: ‘ROBIN HOOD FROM TUNBRIDGE WELLS, SAYS HISTORIAN.’ To put it mildly, that was a rather reductive and misleading summary of my research; but it certainly raised my awareness of being ambushed while ambling along the edenic Greenwood pathways.

Craig Raine

As Lucian Freud’s fame increases his indiscretions multiply

More from Books

Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the Eliots ‘ate off solid silver plate, even shepherd’s pie’. In 1968, Freud was having an affair with Perry’s wife Jacquetta. According to her, it was an addiction: ‘Completely hooked, a dreadful drug...’ After two turbulent years, she decided to have a baby by Lucian, ideally to be born on his birthday. Her husband agreed to bring up the child as his own, provided the matter was not mentioned again. The laissez-aller attitude is partly accounted for (though not by William Feaver) by the 1960s, and the way the young aristocracy embraced the hippy-trippy counter-culture. Jacquetta mentions smoking an opium spliff in Paris with Freud.

A. N. Wilson

Forlorn Plorn: The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, reviewed

More from Books

Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué like his own father, and this of course happened. Charles Dickens had fantasised in David Copperfield that the jokey version of his own father — Mr Micawber — would become a success in life by going to Australia. In real life, Dickens’s parents had been ‘hopeless’, and as he watched his own family growing up, he had a heartless fear that his dud children would be versions of parents who were sent to the Marshalsea. Sure enough, Dickens sent two of his least promising sons to Australia, hoping something would turn up.

Travis Elborough

The story of Sealand – a most improbable sovereign state

More from Books

In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never Pitch Any of These Things to Us Again’. Among a list of no-nos that included burlesque dancing and art made of bodily fluids was the principality of Sealand. They wrote: OK, so an independent sovereign state floating just outside the UK sounds great, right? Except, well it’s not really, is it? I mean, it’s not an independent sovereign state like, say, France. It’s more like a big, floating turd of mental illness in the North Sea.

1 September 2020

Dennis Duncan

Written in blood or bound in human skin: the world’s weirdest books

Lead book review

In 1791, Isaac D’Israeli — father of prime minister Benjamin — published his most famous work, the Curiosities of Literature, a collection of freewheeling mini-essays on whatever literary topics happened to tickle their author’s fancy: ‘Titles of Books’, ‘Noblemen Turned Critics’, ‘On the Custom of Saluting after Sneezing’, ‘Cicero’s Puns’. One of its joys is its capaciousness — completely unsystematic, yet seeming somehow to touch a little on everything. The book is long, but the essays are rarely more than a couple of pages, sometimes less.

27 August 2020

James Walton

My dazzling chum: Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed

More from Books

Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of four lines from Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. More fitting, though, might have been six words from the Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’: ‘Teenage dreams, so hard to beat.’ The first half of the book follows a group of lads from Ayrshire as they excitedly prepare for, excitedly travel to and excitedly attend a post-punk music festival in Manchester in 1986. The narrator is the bookish 18-year-old Jimmy Collins, whose life bears a close resemblance to O’Hagan’s at the same age and time.

Frank Trentmann

When Britannia ruled the southern waves

More from Books

In 1798, Tipu Sultan of Mysore sent an embassy to Mauritius. At home, he had fought the British and seen his kingdom shrink. Now he hoped to recruit Mauritian republicans in a joint fight. Mauritius had been a base for French troops attacking the British in India in the 1780s. In return for their help, Tipu promised to supply any Frenchman with provisions, except wine. And he pledged to kill every British soldier in India. Tipu’s mission is one of the many fascinating stories in this rich and stimulating new history of the world between the late 18th and the mid 19th centuries. Normally it is the French Revolution of 1789 and European revolutions of 1848 that provide the cornerstones of this period.

Frances Wilson

A story without redemption: The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, reviewed

More from Books

‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful and I resort to them when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures.’ Shortly after writing these words, Ferrante, who refuses all interviews and keeps her identity under wraps, was accused by an investigative journalist called Claudio Gatti of lying to her readers. She had allowed us to assume, Gatti revealed, that her hugely successful Neapolitan quartet — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child — was autobiographical.

Maggie Fergusson

Treasures or clutter? The problem of knowing what to keep

More from Books

Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from a first haircut falls out of an envelope and sends you tumbling back through the decades. For most of us these things are flotsam and jetsam, of momentary interest, but for Rachel Morris they are vital. It is partly that she works in museums, so is deeply invested in the past, and partly that her family history is so mysterious, fragmentary and ‘soaked in sadness’ that she relies on ‘things’ to help her piece together where she came from, and who she is. This book has two strands.

Hugh Thomson

She just keeps rollin’ along: Colombia’s Magdalena River

More from Books

As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead, this timely book explores one of the few dividends to emerge from such a terrible conflict. Large areas of the country were isolated by the war, and so spared the ravages of modern development. Unlike neighbouring Ecuador, where oil and gas exploration has done its worst, Colombia still has an essentially roadless expanse of pristine forest nearly the size of France. When I travelled in the mountains near Cali last year, I was struck by how depopulated the rural areas were. The peasant farmers, the campesinos, were only slowly returning from their exile in the comparatively safer cities.

William Cook

Never a dull sentence: the journalism of Harry Perry Robinson

More from Books

Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing biography, I was struck by how much they have in common — especially in their early lives. Both men went to public school, then on to Oxford, then into journalism, where they proved incapable of writing a dull sentence. They both divorced and remarried — and were also American citizens, for a while. Both dipped a toe into politics, but while Boris took the plunge, Harry stepped back and remained a jobbing hack until his dying day, the finest journalist of his generation. The biggest difference, however, is that Harry was born in 1859, which is why you’ve probably never heard of him. I certainly hadn’t until I read Joseph McAleer’s fascinating book.

Amy Wilentz

Toussaint Louverture: the true hero of Haiti

Lead book review

In Haiti you have to be careful which founding father you admire. The average Haitian will think first of Toussaint Louverture when talking about their island’s revolt against France in the late 18th century, and about the original idea of a full-fledged Black republic: Toussaint the stable, the intense, the military genius, courageous, careful. But for others, the real hero of the revolution is Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or Papa Dessalines, who is said to have connived with the French to remove Toussaint from power. Once France had exiled Toussaint, Dessalines turned on the French, rejecting their ‘peace’ and authority. He prosecuted the revolution to its bloody end, but without the restraint that Toussaint had often demanded from his fighters.

20 August 2020

Amanda Craig

Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed

More from Books

Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality. Her original black comedy (Crooked Heart) concerned Vee, a middle-aged suburban scammer, and the prodigiously bright but orphaned Noel, who join forces in north London’s urban village during the second world war. Evans then went back in time to tell the story of Noel’s Suffragist godmother Mattie founding a disastrous girls’ club on Hampstead Heath during the 1930s (Old Baggage). In V for Victory, the story moves forward again. It’s 1944, and Hitler’s rockets are falling all over London. Mattie is dead.

Roger Lewis

Beauty and the beast: Jane Birkin’s love affair with Serge Gainsbourg

More from Books

I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward plays and a cabaret singer who’d worked with Charles Hawtrey, and when I invited her to a party once she drove her Mini up the steps and into the hotel lobby. Jane’s father, David, had a good war, his boat picking up pilots and spies hidden by the Resistance on the Breton coast. He told me ’Allo ’Allo wasn’t a comedy, it was documentary realism. He endured many operations on his optic nerve. A piece of hip bone was grafted to his eye socket. His lungs, as Jane says, were weakened by ‘too many anaesthetics’. The Birkin fortune came from Nottingham lace. There were aristocrats (the Russells) in the background.

Ian Thomson

Should we all be prepping for the end of days?

More from Books

In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody believed Noah until it was way too late. Bunker: Building for the End Times, a hybrid of reportage and philosophical musing, considers contemporary survivalist culture in all its manifest craziness, from the doomsday realtors who sell bomb-proof, virus-free bunker space to the Bible-belt survivalists who pack their INCH bags (I’m Never Coming Home) and bug out to bunker encampments in Wyoming in anticipation of the Final Judgment. In the modern concrete bunker Bradley Garrett sees an extreme expression of our fear of nuclear, chemical, biological and climatic calamity.

Justin Marozzi

In just eight years Selim I became ‘God’s Shadow on Earth’

More from Books

Faber must take a rather dim view of British readers’ historical awareness these days. This is a biography of one of the greatest Ottoman sultans in the empire’s 600-year history, yet the publishers cannot bring themselves to mention his name in the book’s title. Perhaps they thought Selim I was too obscure, and maybe they’re right, but their reticence is not shared by Alan Mikhail’s American publishers, who rightly give the sultan his due. Never mind. Mikhail, chair of Yale’s history department and a specialist in Ottoman history, makes it his mission to demonstrate how this utterly compelling leader helped define his age, bending the world to his will. And he succeeds with a flourish.

Max Fletcher

A rainy day in the Highlands: Summerwater, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

More from Books

There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of Lake Semerwater. A beggar comes looking for alms but is turned away by everyone, save for a poor couple. As he is leaving, he curses the proud townspeople and water rises up and floods their houses, leaving only the couple’s hovel high and dry. In Summerwater, her seventh novel, Sarah Moss moves this tale north to a holiday resort by a Scottish loch and transforms it from a moralistic parable into a complex reflection on the contemporary situation. But she retains the haunting images of rising water and strangers being refused hospitality.

Alex Massie

Sport, for the English, has always been a defiant assertion of liberty

Lead book review

The English cannot be understood without some appreciation of their attachment to their games, and yet this is an area of their story often overlooked by historians. Or perhaps it is simply considered beneath their interest. This is the central message of Robert Colls’s superb account of England viewed through the medium of its sports and pastimes.

13 August 2020

Claire Kohda

Who is telling the truth in Kate Reed Petty’s True Story?

More from Books

This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’ is billed as one story told in four different genres: memoir, horror, noir and thriller. It even has four covers. There is a reason for this, as Kate Reed Petty explains in an author’s note: In borrowing these forms from popular culture, I was looking for ways to push against the simplistic assumptions we too often make about power, abuse and gender — assumptions that lock us into the same stories, again and again and again. She raises certain questions. Who does a story about assault belong to? Whose version is most likely to be believed? Can the way it is told be damaging? Is the version that is true for one person necessarily true for another?

Peter Pomerantsev

The power of disinformation is that it’s so readily believed

More from Books

On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a leaflet from the Ku Klux Clan: A foul stench spreads out from the East River and hangs over New York like a pall — the greasy sweat of the Black Races and the Yellow Races of Asia which have invaded the United Nations. It is enough to make every White Protestant American vomit. It ended with a threat: the delegates better stay close to the UN buildings and the ‘brothels of Harlem, and not defile the hotels and restaurants of the White City’. FBI officers investigating the correspondence noted a couple of oddities. First, some of the language was off: it called for delegates to be ‘tanned and feathered’ rather than ‘tarred and feathered’.

Diana Hendry

Unreliable memories: Laura Laura, by Richard Francis, reviewed

More from Books

Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard Francis’s 12th novel, is a retired history professor who fears that ‘chunks of his life might go missing’. Laura Laura describes a year in his life which, in seamless flashbacks, encompasses most of his past. It opens with Gerald’s late-night encounter with a homeless, possibly suicidal, waif called Laura. She revives his suppressed memory of a previous Laura, a research student with whom he’d had an illicit fling, best forgotten.

Patrick Marnham

When Paris was the only place to be

More from Books

For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The enchantment dates back to the end of the 19th century, when ‘le bordel de l’Europe’, in words quoted by Marie-José Gransard, was transformed into ‘la capitale de l’amour’. In Twentieth Century Paris she traces the growth of the community of mostly foreign artists and writers who created this international brand. By the 1890s Paris had recovered from defeat by Prussia and the atrocity of Bismarck’s bombardment in 1870 and had become the capital of more than ‘l’amour’.It ran a colonial empire powerful enough to deprive the Kaiser of his ‘place in the sun’.

Ian Garrick-Mason

The crusaders were not such incompetent zealots after all

More from Books

One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to as our civilisation’s mentalité is the almost complete attenuation of memory about what the crusades were, why they were fought and what part they played in a multi-century struggle between two successful, expansionary and universal religions. Though this struggle is still being waged today, we’ve become expert at not noticing it. Even at the level of military history, the crusaders have been written off with a hastily scribbled judgment that amounts to: ‘Invaded the Middle East and captured Jerusalem. Eventually driven into the sea by the brilliant generalship of Saladin.’ In 1954 Major General J.F.C.

Clinton Heylin

When the King of the Delta Blues came home — the family life of Robert Johnson

More from Books

Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was certainly a life that mattered, but it was lived at a time when black lives mattered not a jot to white America. The circumstances of his death in 1938, at the age of 27 (he was probably poisoned by a jealous rival), demonstrate the disenfranchised existence of any peripatetic black performer in Depression-era USA. The murder was never investigated and his body was dumped in an unmarked grave.

Leaf Arbuthnot

Private tragedies: Must I Go, by Yiyun Li, reviewed

More from Books

I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a Chinese industrial town in 1979, it opens with one woman’s death and closes with another. The pages in between are jammed with misery meted out by scalpel: treacherous friends, underfed children, craven officials, all have their turn upon the stage, while school choirs sing unfalteringly in praise of the communist party. Her latest book, Must I Go, is more cheerful, if only by a whisker. It’s the first time Li has set a novel squarely in her adopted America, with a faded Californian babe as its heroine. Lilia Liska is 81 and thrice widowed. She is spending her final years in a retirement village that she tolerates.

Alex Diggins

Magic and miasma: Mordew, by Alex Pheby, reviewed

More from Books

Mordew ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, as Elton John nearly sang. If they escape the ravages of lung worm, then they could stray into the Living Mud — a foul, oozing substance that spawns barely animate beings called ‘dead-life’. That’s if they avoid being packed off to serve the Master, the city’s Grand Inquisitor, who broods in his Manse, demanding regular tributes of children, his magic twitching throughout Mordew. The world of Alex Pheby’s fourth novel is dizzying. But stick with it, and his splicing of Dickensian social satire and rackety, steampunk fantasy is beguiling. The titular city is exuberantly realised, the sort of setting H.P. Lovecraft and Hogarth might cook up on a mescaline binge.

Hugh Thomson

The pleasures — and trials — of knowing Bruce Wannell

More from Books

Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete penury, he would dress in perfectly tailored cashmere and, with a shawl swept over his shoulder, fix his attentive listeners with a glittering eye and a voice that could sweep dangerously low when he was about to cast aspersions on someone else’s cooking or scholarship. As this affectionate compilation of tributes by friends and admirers shows, Bruce himself ‘not only spoke Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili, be amiable in Amharic, Spanish and Greek and could lecture in French, Italian or German’.

Stephanie Sy-Quia

A toast to brotherhood: Summer, by Ali Smith, reviewed

More from Books

The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the past three novels find themselves flung together at the eroding eastern edge of England. Daniel Gluck, our centenarian from Autumn, now 104, has been moved out of his care home (thank God, given that we know what’s coming — this is February 2020) and into Elisabeth’s mother’s house in Suffolk. There are some fresh faces too. Sacha and Robert are two children who tag along with Charlotte and Arthur (whom we came across in Winter) to meet him. The children’s parents voted differently in 2016, so now their dad lives next door with his girlfriend, Ashley.