Books Archives

The art of negotiation: Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, reviewed

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Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace negotiations — reflects: ‘Peace talks settle into this repeating pattern after a while, a pattern like that of the floor carpets in places like this conference centre, in which a polygonal weave mesmerises the eye almost to a vanishing point.’ He is commenting on the lonely, relentless routine of the talks, walks, meals and drinks, as official negotiations inch forward, stall, reverse and proceed again over the course of months.Alongside the diplomatic conference, another type of peace talk is underway: the meandering, intimate prose of the novel’s first-person narrative from Edvard to his wife Anna.

Peter Parker

Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure

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When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. ‘Every blockhead does that,’ Banks replied. ‘My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.’ It was a wise decision, and his voyage on HMS Endeavour would be the making of him.

Daniel Rey

The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?

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Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to developers, the countryside is ingrained in our collective consciousness as our unspoiled national haven. It is Albion’s Garden of Eden, with its Holy Trinity of village church, local pub and cricket ground.Englishness itself, as much as cricket, is the main theme of Michael Henderson’s genre-melding And That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket. The title alludes to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Going, Going’, and the last summer was 2019, when Henderson, sportswriter and cultural critic, took a journey around the cricket grounds of his past.

30 April 2020

Ian Thomson

From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini

Lead book review

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff-armed Roman salute after the handshake was considered fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras. For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him.

Peter Parker

Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

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Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’. In the Victorian language of flowers the plant denoted pride or haughtiness, but its tendency to turn its head to the sun led Byron’s abject Julia to use its image on a seal for her final letter to Don Juan with the accompanying motto Elle vous suit partout.

Duncan Fallowell

Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?

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People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that may be true. But the drag of the past is still great, and I can think of only two major works between classical and recent times that celebrate same-sex love openly: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Light began to break through after the Great War, but largely for fellow insiders. Auden and Isherwood were timid in what they published in their prime. Proust did gay, but stuck to sordid. Only Gide spoke out positively in Corydon, but the journals are almost mute on his sex life. It took Genet, Burroughs and Warhol to place a bomb under the whole culture-wide taboo and proclaim the news: that males could be magically sexy to other males.

Stephen Bayley

René Dreyfus: the racing driver detested by the Nazis

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I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A racing car is a fearsome environment of engulfing pyroclastic heat, metaphor-testing noise, vision-blurring vibration and nauseating centrifugal forces. Ninety years ago it was even worse. The cars had tyres with little grip, feeble brakes and no crash protection whatever. Hot oil would continuously spray over drivers, who raced in linen caps; and an off, as they call excursions, would often result in mutilation or immolation. Faster is the story of René Dreyfus, who flourished in this atrocious atmosphere, in a culture where the public found the achievement of speed a transfixing spectacle.

Philip Hensher

Short stories to enjoy in lockdown

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In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust now, as the days stretch ahead and the horizons shrink to an hour’s walk a day, when is it going to happen? But it seems much more likely that reading is going to contract, and the most you’ll realistically manage is a short story a day. Fortunately, some of the greatest literature of the last couple of centuries has come in the shape of the short story. Here are nine long-standing favourites of mine that manage to repay repeated re-reading — the definition of a classic. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is one of those classics that most people think they know but which infallibly surprises.

Colin Greenwood

Would you kill for a cup of coffee?

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In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup told the story of El Salvadorean coffee, from seed to cup. America was the world’s biggest consumer, drinking nearly 60 billion cups a year. It opened with a picturesque image of local Indians in traditional costume dancing under the Santa Ana volcano. A trade commentator intoned: Far to the south, high in the mountains of Central America... studded with volcanic peaks, rich in tropical grandeur... Here at the beginning of the coffee season we find gaiety and laughter. Bankrolled by the coffee planters, it portrayed a Potemkin village of plantation life.

John Maier

Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?

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It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached his four-film contract, preferring to settle out of court. Actors have lodged their public regret at working with him. He is one of Hollywood’s notable sinking stars. In March, following a demonstration by staff, Hachette pulped this book. ‘Everybody should take responsibility for their actions,’ one protesting employee told the Guardian — anonymously, and apparently without irony. The New York Times called him ‘a monster’. And if you think that’s social rock bottom, in 2016 the Clinton campaign refused his donation. Imagine that: money so tainted that not even the Clintons will bank it.

Rose Prince

When Idi Amin threatened to shoot the cook

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Private chefs keep many secrets and are expected to go to their graves without sharing a morsel of gossip about their employers. Whether cooking for a pop star, tycoon or member of a royal family, chefs must guarantee confidentiality. Chatter can be career-ending or lead to lawsuits. For a few such cooks, revelations could even end in execution. When the Polish journalist Witold Szablowski came up with the winning idea of writing a book about what some of the world’s most notorious dictators ate, it proved a difficult task. Finding just a few living examples of their chefs took more than two years; persuading these individuals to tell their secrets even longer. Many years after their former bosses had died or been deposed, they were still afraid of their past.

Amy Liptrot

How not to get away from it all in the Hebrides

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Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not to’ guide. Within a few pages it’s clear that Tamsin Calidas’s decision to decamp with her husband to a tiny Hebridean island is highly ill-advised. They take on too much: buying a derelict croft, hoping to renovate the place and live self-sufficiently, with no farming experience. It’s not much of a surprise, especially to anyone with experience of life in the Scottish islands, when the relationship founders and her husband leaves. It’s a gripping start. Surely she won’t remain on the croft alone? Surely things can’t get worse? Astoundingly, both happen.

Brian Martin

A Wiltshire mystery: A Saint in Swindon, by Alice Jolly, reviewed

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This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled, it reflects the way we are now living. Inspired by the collective imagination of a Swindon book group, Alice Jolly has written a prophetic story. The narrator is Janey, married to the older Phil and running Hunter’s Grove, a B&B in the Swindon suburbs. Phil is an impediment: ‘Retirement — twice as much husband and half as much money.’ Tuesday afternoons mean tea and sex with Len the builder — ‘Tea with Len, Cider with Rosie, what’s the difference?’ Other than that, Janey is visited by her girl friends, among whom is Carmen, who claims to be a modern-day illuminatus, a confusion of religious thought.

Matthew Adams

Sadness and scandal: Hinton, by Mark Blacklock, reviewed

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In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to confess to bigamy. A theorist of the fourth dimension, he had looked destined to forge a career that would align him with the most renowned academic figures of the age. Now, with a conviction, a brief imprisonment, and ‘illegitimate’ twin sons attached to his name, his reputation was ruined. Unable to find employment, he fled with his first family to Japan. Mark Blacklock’s novel tells us what happened next. We initially encounter Hinton at Yokohama harbour where, with his four sons and his first wife, Mary, he is about to board ship to America.

23 April 2020

Susan Hill

Pity the poor stepmother — the most reviled character in folk literature

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Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but as humans do not change in certain essentials it seems likely that reactions centuries ago were similar to reactions now — when it is adults who often find many of them gruesome and unsuitable for those of single-figure age. Wicked stepmothers plot torment and murder; small children are banished alone to forests; wolves dress up in grandmotherly bonnets and shawls to deceive — and eventually to kill and eat — rosy-cheeked little girls; beautiful princesses are locked in high towers or tricked into taking poison to fall asleep for 100 years. These tales would not be out of place alongside True Stories of Serial Killers.

Owen Matthews

Moscow rules in London: how Putin’s agents corrupted the British elite

Lead book review

In the past year alone, Russia-watchers have been treated to books entitled The Code of Putinism; Putin’s World; Putin vs the People; The Putin System and We Need to Talk About Putin — just to mention the ones with Putin’s name in the title. In addition, Robert Service’s Kremlin Winter, Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of the Russian Leviathan and Andrew Monaghan’s Dealing with the Russians have also offered their own insights into the history, politics and future of Putin’s Russia. In this crowded field, is there a place for Putin’s People? Happily, there is.

Ian Garrick-Mason

For Jack Tar, going to sea was the ultimate adventure

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Seafaring and the rule of the waves — as the song would have it — was an integral part of Britain’s sense of identity for centuries, a fire in the national imagination arguably first sparked by the exploits of Sir Francis Drake and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rising to full flame with the Battle of Trafalgar and the expansion and consolidation of the Empire, and finally dwindling to embers as imperial ambitions failed and ownership of the seas passed to the United States. It’s a story often told, and known almost too well.But this is not the story that the journalist-historian Stephen Taylor tells.

Stephen Bayley

Clean lines and dirty habits: the Modernists of 1930s Hampstead

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With its distinctive hilly site and unusually coherent architecture (significantly, most of it domestic rather than civic), Hampstead has always had a singular character. But it is as much a state of mind as an address. Although two of England’s greatest native artists, Keats and Constable, made it their home, over the past three centuries Hampstead has notably attracted waves of exotics: French, Spanish and Jewish. These immigrants, struggling with heavy baggage labelled ‘high culture’, have had a huge influence on the neighbourhood.

Helen Parr

A story of skill, courage and imagination: how Britain’s Sea Harriers stole victory against the odds

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‘The world,’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have said, ‘is full of ships.’ With this comment, unlike in many other things, she lacked a common touch. I do not know what she thought about planes, still less jump jets, but no doubt she would have shared the sentiment of Rowland White’s Harrier 809 about their pilots: brave, selfless individuals who showed daring and ingenuity in overcoming the numerically superior Argentine air force to steal victory against the odds. White is an aviation enthusiast, knowledgeable about the technical and logistical challenges fighter pilots face and adept at crafting a fast-paced narrative.

Alan Murrin

Guilty pleasures that fail to satisfy: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed

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In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing it. ‘No,’ he says. ‘The life of freed instincts is composed of layers. The first layer leads to the second, the second to the third and so on. It leads ultimately to abnormal pleasures.’ A hunger sated only uncovers a darker, more rapacious need. There is no endpoint to desire, no fulfilment that can snuff it out entirely. The protagonist of Cleanness, a novel in the form of connected short stories, is an American teacher living in Bulgaria who will be familiar to readers of Garth Greenwell’s much lauded 2016 debut, What Belongs to You.

Emily Bearn

Alexandra Shulman’s unlikely career in fashion journalism should have made a Hollywood movie

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Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her clothes, and given us some scintillating reading. For despite having edited British Vogue for 25 years, until she retired in 2017, Shulman’s relationship with fashion at times reads less like a love affair than a marital tiff. Take, for example, the bra, which is the subject of chapter three. ‘There’s a point in most women’s lives when shopping for bras is consigned to one of those special places in hell,’ Shulman writes, revealing that, aged 17, she gave up, and didn’t wear a bra again for 20 years. (‘It wasn’t anything to do with lofty feminist ideals but simply that I hated how they felt.

Ariane Bankes

Arthur Jeffress: bright young person of the post-war art scene

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The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history. ‘Small but subversive’ could describe the man as well as his collection: his fabulous wealth, inherited from Virginian tobacco plantation-owning ancestry, coupled with his rampant homosexuality, shaped a life of compulsive and conspicuous extravagance, in which art and sex vied with one another for supremacy against the backdrop of Belgravia and a palazzo just off the Grand Canal in Venice.

Joseph Williams

How Brighton’s gangs became increasingly radicalised

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Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes, travelled to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist militia and one of the main jihadist groups fighting the Syrian army. A dozen more young people from Brighton were also eager to go. Radicalisation had swept through the group like a ‘contagion’, catching parents and police unawares and baffling counter-extremism experts. In his disturbing No Return, Mark Townsend traces the various hidden causes of the Deghayes case, events that he claims ‘transformed the entire approach of the government’s counter-extremism programme, both in policy and ideology’.

16 April 2020

Philip Hensher

The cult of Sappho in interwar Paris

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I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for the first time; the results were compelling. At the beginning of a novel by one of them, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the terror of masculine traditions is concisely stated: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’, cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.

Derek Turner

Our rivers, as much as our oceans, are in urgent need of protection

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Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers and fertilisers, fishing grounds and spiritual metaphors, power-givers and flushers of poisons. They are the veins of terrains, which like our own veins carry oxygen or pathogens, and extinction when they fail. They inspired Babylonian and Roman legal codes, outlining ideas about access, drainage, fishing, irrigation, maintenance, navigation, pollution and sharing that still course through 21st-century jurisprudence.

Stuart Jeffries

We all need to be let alone —not just Greta Garbo

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‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains for most people a pleasure that, whatever its social significance, can be enjoyed in entire solitude, and a pleasure that remains entirely individual. At the time, 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women were regular smokers. Smoking was not just a means of inhaling death and of escaping the dead hand of others’ sociability, but briefly put the unbearableness of life behind a smoky veil.

Horatio Clare

Heated debate over Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition

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How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it. Ernest Coleman’s story of his search for clues to Franklin’s fate is delightfully prejudiced and pugnacious. The purpose of No Earthly Pole is, he writes, ‘to speak out in opposition to the clustering together of some academics and experts who have closed their minds’. Middle-aged lieutenant goes to the ends of the earth to defend the reputation of Queen Victoria’s Navy would make a lovely film.

Boyd Tonkin

Sinister toy story: Little Eyes, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

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We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a plush animal toy with camera and wifi implants) that creates a private but silent connection between its owner anda single, remote watcher.

Stuart Kelly

Mysteries of English village life: Creeping Jenny, by Jeff Noon, reviewed

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I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and postmodernism. If that makes Jeff Noon’s third outing of the private detective John Nyquist sound like a niche affair I apologise, as it is a rollicking and goose-flesh- inducing novel. Writers such as the late Gilbert Adair have already used the forms of the murder mystery to explore avant-garde ideas, especially in his Evadne Mount trilogy. Noon — the author of those modern classics Automated Alice and Vurt — has created the ultimate mash-up with his Nyquist novels. There is a small joke for bibliophilic readers on the back cover.