Books Archives

It’s still impossible for Horst Wächter to recognise his father as a Nazi war criminal

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In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient police states of the years between the wars, with overlapping and rivalrous legal and illegal police bodies, fed by a vast army of informers and spies. Said to number around 10,000 at their peak, these men and women were to be found in every corner of Italian life, from the civil service to the Vatican, from industry to the Royal household, from the army to universities.

Peter Stanford

The dirt on King David: Anointed, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

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Michael Arditti has never held back from difficult or unfashionable subjects. His dozen novels, including the prize-winning Easter, as well as Jubilate, The Breath of Night and Of Men and Angels, explore faith in an increasingly secular modern world. Half a century ago he would have brushed shoulders with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but the ‘religious novelist’ is today an endangered species. Critically acclaimed but published by a small imprint, Arditti has an unusual voice and perspective that deserve a larger audience.

Paul Levy

Kashrut dietary laws are ill-suited to lactose-intolerant Jews

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Until fairly recently, all over the western world there were specialised eating places catering largely for Jews who respected the kashrut dietary laws. From family caffs to white tablecloth establishment, these called themselves ‘dairy restaurants’. They were nearly, but not quite, vegetarian, since they allowed (the kosher-defined) fish with fins and scales. This wondrously weird, heavily illustrated book is a threnody to the now almost vanished dairy restaurant, seeing it as a kind of paradise — though as its author, the artist Ben Katchor, writes: ‘This pleasure garden, Eden, was open to the public and naturally attracted a crowd.

Tibor Fischer

There’s no single trick to making money — just resist a noble calling

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‘Beauty is pain,’ the model Gigi Hadid asserts. She’s one of the successful, rich people quizzed by William Leith in The Trick: Why Some People Can Make Money and Other People Can’t. We all know a few of the tricks of getting rich. You start by avoiding noble, important professions that benefit everyone but pay poorly: primary school teacher, nurse, book reviewer. Those of my friends and family who’ve made money (although none has made it to rich) went into banking and business. Those who haven’t went into teaching, academic research and museum curating. That much is obvious. Has Leith unearthed a magic formula? His book is part Hunter S. Thompson, part Montaigne: a blend of gonzo journalism and rambling reflection interspersed with learned references.

9 April 2020

Frances Wilson

Excess and incest were meat and drink to the Byrons

Lead book review

‘Some curse hangs over me and mine,’ wrote Lord Byron, and thanks to Emily Brand, who is a genealogist, it is now possible to see why Byron was so darned Byronic: excess, incest and marital misery flowed in the bloodstream. The gloom that looked like a Regency pose was entirely pre-programmed; George Gordon Byron’s script was handed to him at birth. Being mad, bad and dangerous to know was as instinctive to the Byrons as howling at the moon for a pack of wolves. When he compared his family to ‘whole woods of withered pines’, the poet was not exaggerating. Every branch was rotten.

Katrina Gulliver

Globalisation is scarcely new: it dates back to the year 1000

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In Japan, people thought the world would end in 1052. In the decades leading up to judgment day, Kyoto was rocked by a series of epidemics. It seemed the end was truly nigh. Of course they were wrong, but they were hardly the only people to predict the end of humanity on a specific date. For many tenth-century Christians, the year of the expected doom was 1000 AD. Valerie Hansen’s book focuses on this non-apocalyptic but significant year as the beginning of what we would think of as globalisation. Obviously with our European perspective we’re familiar with such major events of the 11th century as the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. But this book draws us to what was going on in the Americas and Asia as well.

Simon Ings

The trade in cadavers is rife with scandal

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John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can find his interpretative dances punctuating a number of his lectures, which go by such arresting titles as ‘150 Years of the Human Corpse in American History in Under 15 Minutes with Jaunty Background Music’ and ‘Abusing the Corpse Even More: Understanding Necrophilia Laws in the USA — Now with more Necro! And more Philia!’ (Wisconsin and Ohio are, according to Troyer’s eccentric looking and always fascinating website, ‘two states that just keep giving and giving when it comes to American necrophilia cases’.) Troyer’s budding stand-up career has taken a couple of recent knocks.

Jay Elwes

The nightmare of Okinawa made Truman decide to use the atom bomb

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The US operation of 1945 to take the island of Okinawa was the largest battle of the Pacific during the second world war. Seven US divisions were used in the operation, approximately half a million men, along with the entire US Pacific fleet of 1,457 ships. The initial assault was led by a landing force of 183,000, which brought with it 747,000 tons of cargo. It was, according to this superbly researched, well-written book, ‘the greatest air-land-sea battle in history’. The US side was led by Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr, the son of a famous Confederate general. His opponent on Okinawa was Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, whose force of 60,000 was vastly outnumbered — but the terrain was in his favour.

David Honigmann

For Ravi Shankar, music was a sort of religion

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When musicians from outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream achieve success in the West, there are conflicting reactions. Seun Kuti, the Afrobeat star, once complained to me that most world music celebrities are people who play much the same music as their peers to much the same standard and simply get lucky when a record company stumbles across them. In some cases, musicians from Asia and Africa have to be rocketed into orbit by the boost of an association with a pop giant, even if they then drop away: thus Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Paul Simon, or Buena Vista Social Club with Ry Cooder. Another explanation is offered by the Alchian-Allen theorem, which suggests that goods exported across borders tend to be of higher quality than domestic ones.

Robert Colvile

Have we reached the end of ‘The Great Acceleration’?

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Ah well. It was a nice try. A few years ago I wrote a book called The Great Acceleration, arguing that the world around us is speeding up and that this is on balance a good thing. Enter Danny Dorling with a new book called Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration and Why it’s Good for the Planet, the Economy and Our Lives. Cue a mischievous commission from The Spectator’s literary editor, doubtless hoping for a good old-fashioned nerdfight. The problem with this cunning plan is that Dorling, an Oxford geography professor and demographer, has written a very strange book indeed — and one that shows the extent to which the modern left has driven itself into an intellectual cul-de-sac. Let’s start with the part that’s relatively uncontroversial.

Francis Beckett

Britain can be as prone to fascism as any other nation

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It’s easy to dismiss the fascistic ideologues who populate Graham Macklin’s book as reactionary cranks of no significance. It’s also a mistake. Fascists have edged uncomfortably close to the mainstream of British politics ever since the British Union of Fascists was founded in 1932 by Oswald Mosley, who two years earlier had been a government minister. In 2009, two British National Party candidates were elected to the European Parliament. The seats were lost in 2014 because the BNP votes transferred en masse to Ukip. If you doubt that the spirit of the BNP infused Ukip, you have only to look at what has happened to it since Nigel Farage decamped.

Andrew McKie

A paranormal romance that seems to go nowhere: NVK, by Temple Drake, reviewed

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NVK, which is the IATA (International Air Transport Association) code for Narvik’s old airport, is in this instance Naemi Vieno Kuusela, a Finnish femme fatale whom we first meet in this novel in North Karelia in 1579 and later in the company of Zhang Guo Xing, a wealthy Chinese businessman, in a Shanghai nightclub in 2012. This surely offers a clue about her. But, as she says on page 118: You think you know what I am. You have no idea. I’m not in any of your books. You try to catch me. Your hands grasp empty air. I’m not a story you can tell. That doesn’t sound like a promising basis for a novel, but its author gives it a go.

Jason Goodwin

Consigned to a living tomb: Aziz BineBine endures 18 years in a subterranean prison

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Imagine being on indefinite lockdown, imprisoned in a dark, underground, 6’ x 12’ cell, freezing in winter, boiling in summer and infested with cockroaches and scorpions. The bed is a narrow concrete ledge, where you can only sleep on your side. The toilet has no U-bend, and your cell, No. 13, at the end of a run of cells, receives all the waste and floodwater from the others. There are no windows. Aziz BineBine spent his young adult life there, 18 years from 1973 to 1991. His crime was to have participated unwittingly as a young cadet officer in an abortive 1971 coup against Hassan II of Morocco. He escaped, bewildered, from a bloodbath at the palace without having fired a shot. He turned himself in, was tried and imprisoned.

4 April 2020

Tom Williams

Wordsworth may have been partially eclipsed by his fellow Romantics, but his life was far from dull

Lead book review

Between 1798 and 1807 William Wordsworth revolutionised English poetry, giving voice to the marginalised in poems such as ‘The Idiot Boy’ and anticipating modern psychology in his exploration of childhood. Today, his ability to articulate the connection between man and nature can still bring us up short, as in these lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’: ... And I have felt,A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man...

Tanya Gold

There’s nothing romantic about Cornish fishermen, whatever tales they may spin

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Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual. There is a tendency, as old industries die, to watch them covetously and with awe; to paint them a paradigm of all that is lost. In the 19th century, fishwives posed for the artists of the Newlyn School on the quayside. Today, journalists are found at the Star Inn, which featured in Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, buying pints for Ben Gunn, a ‘celebrity’ fisherman, for a tale. Ash is a woman who can lose herself ‘along the simplest of paths’. She immerses herself in the real Newlyn, which is doughty, and the Newlyn of her imagination, which is mournful and filled with legends.

Graham Robb

Has Notre-Dame ever been a symbol of unity for the French?

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From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — any more. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’.

Keith Miller

At last, a novel about the art world that rings true: Annalena Mcfee’s Nightshade reviewed

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On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from the stuccoed comforts of what was until recently home towards a studio in the East End, where a much younger lover lies waiting. Observations, generally of a caustic nature, about the comédie humaine encountered along the way and the state of the wider world jostle in the artist’s febrile mind with an apologia for the previous nine months’ events.The artist is a woman, Eve Laing, but the tropes past which Nightshade flits like an Underground train are strikingly, almost mundanely, male — the ageing, status-anxious creative, the mid-life crisis, the much younger lover, even the caustic observations.

Sarah Ditum

Annie Ernaux looks back at her teenage self – and sees a stranger

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How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this dress worn at that party, the taste of that alcohol on this boy’s mouth — but restore the world in which these things took place, and the self who acted and was acted upon. Is it possible to be your own Orpheus and yank the Eurydice of your former self from the underworld of forgetting? This is the problem that Annie Ernaux sets herself in this slim, transfixing memoir of young adulthood and first sexual experience. It’s 2014 and Ernaux is looking at a picture. The picture was taken in 1958 and the girl in it is 17. The girl is Ernaux, and also she isn’t.

Matthew Adams

His son’s death may have inspired some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, but he never recovered from the loss

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Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a young woman who finds herself comatose following a near-fatal car accident. And a recent piece of non-fiction, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), gave an account of O’Farrell’s own numerous brushes with mortality.Her latest novel returns to this pre-occupation with the undiscovered country. In it she sets out to tell the imagined story of the life and death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who perished at the age of 11, four years before his father wrote the play that would share his dead son’s name — in Elizabethan England, the spellings Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.

Allan Mallinson

The Far East Campaign of 1941-5 is the new focus of Daniel Todman’s comprehensive history

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To begin not at the beginning but at the end of the beginning. Or rather, to begin at another beginning, where Daniel Todman’s book ends. In January 1948, Clement Attlee’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, told the Commons that ‘the free nations of western Europe must now draw more closely together’, for western Europe was not just a geographic entity but a global presence: If we are to preserve peace and our own safety at the same time we can only do so by the mobilisation of such moral and material force as will create confidence and energy in the West and inspire respect elsewhere, and this means that Britain cannot stand outside Europe and regard her problems as quite separate from those of her European neighbours.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Violence and infidelity on sun-drenched Hydra: A Theatre for Dreamers, by Polly Samson, reviewed

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The beautiful Greek island of Hydra became home to a bohemian community of expats in the 1960s, including the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian lover and muse Marianne Ihlen. The legacy of their relationship is the songs ‘So Long Marianne’, ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ and ‘Bird on the Wire’. Their story is so intoxicating that it seems surprising it has not featured in a novel before, but perhaps others have been discouraged by the prospect of portraying someone as dauntingly well known as Cohen. Polly Samson rises beautifully to the challenge in her supremely accomplished A Theatre for Dreamers.

Claire Kohda

The devastating effects of bigamy: Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones, reviewed

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Conservative estimates place the number of those in America with more than one spouse as up to 100,000, but the figure is much higher. Bigamy, which is outlawed in 50 states, takes place in secret, with only a handful of people knowing about it. ‘It’s a shame that there isn’t a true name for a woman like my mother Gwendolyn,’ says Dana Lynn Yarboro, the ‘other’ daughter of her father’s ‘other’ wife, in Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow, a novel that examines the multitudinous effects of bigamy — how it can extend families, break them, confuse identity and damage lives. ‘There are other terms I know,’ Dana continues.

Andrew Scull

When six of her 12 children went mad, Mimi Galvin did her best to make to light of it

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Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts. Just before Don was about to be shipped out to join the fighting in the South Pacific, Mimi called from New York to say she was pregnant. A rushed wedding across the Mexican border in Tijuana followed: a not uncommon wartime story. But Mimi’s pregnancy turned out to be the first of a dozen, each accompanied by severe morning sickness. Between 1945 and 1965, a procession of children arrived, ten boys and then, at last, even after Mimi’s gynaecologist had warned that further pregnancies might prove life-threatening, came two girls. Don had remained in the Navy after the war, but his career stalled.

Alex Clark

Even Anne Tyler can’t make a solitary Baltimore janitor sound interesting

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Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his rare moments of whimsy — slipping into a foreign accent on Mondays when the week turns to floor-cleaning and ‘zee dreaded moppink’ — come to seem like unfathomable caprice. Indulging a sudden hankering for a takeaway barbecue is as wild to him as one of Hunter S. Thompson’s most lurid binges. The reasons for his cautious mundanity are unclear: he emerged from a chaotic family, but so did his convivial, cheerful sisters; he’s no stranger to romantic disappointment, but then who is?

28 March 2020

Alan Johnson

From Liverpool’s Cavern to the world stage: how the Beatles became a global phenomenon

Lead book review

When the Beatles’ first authorised biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know everything we could possibly know about the Beatles and they’ll disappear soon’. In that same year, the philosopher Bryan Magee adopted an incredulous tone in the Listener: ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be ... part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’ But here in the recently released statistics for the Top Ten global recording artists of 2019, among the Taylor Swifts and the Ed Sheerans, 50 years after they broke up — let me introduce you to the band you’ve known for all these years.

Lara Feigel

Where would any writer be without a room of their own?

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If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana, that there’s a pen on the desk, mid-novel, and it feels as though he’s about to return from a day’s fishing. You might encounter, as Hermione Lee did visiting the novelist Elizabeth Bowen’s beloved ancestral home in Ireland, only a pile of grass and stones, because the building has been razed to the ground. Or you might discover, as Kate Kennedy did seeking out the Gloucester mental asylum where the poet and composer Ivor Gurney was incarcerated, that it has been turned to a new use.

Robert Skidelsky

What makes Thomas Piketty so sure he can save the world?

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The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the Twenty- First Century. In it he documented a ‘fundamental force of divergence’ in the capitalist system, which he represented by the equation r>g — the tendency for returns to capital to grow faster than national income, and therefore for wealth to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. This tendency was reversed between 1914 and 1980 by the impact of two world wars, the Great Depression, social democracy and the trade unions, but it has since reasserted itself, restoring levels of inequality last seen 100 years ago.

Hermione Eyre

Greg Jenner’s survey of celebrities through the ages has a distinctly Horrible Histories feel

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Good writing about celebrity is scant. It has few poets, because it takes depth to go truly shallow (I’d nominate Roland Barthes, Peter Conrad, Kenneth Tynan, Clive James, Marina Hyde, Lynn Barber and the New Yorker’s Lauren Collins). It all runs the risk of becoming instantly dated. As a magazine interviewer myself, I’ve learnt to expect anyone blabbing about their marital bliss and vegan awakening to be divorced and setting up a burger chain by the time the piece comes out. After celebrities die they are stratified; the very good or very bad get biographers. But the mere celebs get Greg Jenner.

Peter Stanford

To hell with hell: Bart Ehrman debunks the Christian belief in perpetual torment

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Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend money are doomed to spend eternity in a pit with filth up to their knees. This is not the verdict of some radical, online, anti-capitalist echo chamber but of the second-century Apocalypse of Saint Peter, an early Christian text in the form of a graphic tour of heaven and hell, ascribed to the leader of Jesus’s apostles, though not actually written by him. It offers scant comfort too for those who have sex before marriage: their bodies will be torn to shreds in the afterlife. And for women who have the temerity to plait their hair to make themselves look more attractive: they are damned forever to hang by that same hair over the eternal flames.