Books Archives

Sport and mind games

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Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books, he argued, are written with honest effort. Writers often devote years of their lives, whereas reviewers put in hours. Even a mediocre book that hardly anyone will ever read generally contains something worth passing on in a review. Savage reviews are usually just attempts to show off. Ed Hawkins, a respected investigative sports journalist, worked hard on The Men on Magic Carpets. But I struggle to find anything good to say about it. He starts from an interesting premise: during the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States employed psychics to win sports matches and, potentially, wars.

Jeff Noon

Mad, bad and dangerous

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Mr Todd is a lonely man, out of work, nursing a thousand grudges while he ekes out a living with his grown-up son, Adrian. He believes Adrian is dangerous, a threat to other people. But the real evil might be living inside Mr Todd’s head. This is the squalid battleground set out by Iain Maitland in Mr Todd’s Reckoning (Contraband, £8.99). Skirmishes take place in a rundown bungalow, giving father and son few places to hide. There is no relief from intimate noises and petty arguments. When Adrian brings home a girlfriend and her young child, Mr Todd’s world crumbles at the seams. The consequences are horrible. Maitland conjures madness from the inside, looking out.

Stephen Bayley

The slasher with the knife

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A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable traffic was on a mainline between Paris and New York, with modest sidings in London, Barcelona and Zurich? Was the adventure of modern art an exclusively masculine journey across the North Atlantic? Suddenly, it has been discovered that there were modernists at work in Latin America and Africa too. An exhibition of Carmen Herrera, a Cuban abstractionist, in New York’s Whitney Museum two years ago was a sensation. The more so, of course, because Herrera (now 103) is a woman. The Tate has recently shown that Dorothea Tanning was at least as interesting as her better-known husband, Max Ernst. Hilma af Klimt at the Guggenheim has astonished New York.

Alan Judd

Disputes over Putin

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These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti focuses on Vladimir Putin himself, his background, aims, tactics and strategy (if any). Andrew Monaghan takes a wider approach, analysing Russia’s strengths and weaknesses, its self-image, its perceptions and misperceptions of us, ditto ours of it. Both argue that relations between Russia and the West suffer because we are sometimes prisoners of our own preconceptions. Monaghan describes what he calls the two-part security dilemma, a problem firstly of interpretation and secondly of response.

Honor Clerk

Seas of ink-and-wash

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Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla on her return to Britain after D-Day. There was something very moving in seeing the bare navigational details noted in my uncle’s familiar hand. But then can anything be so immediate a point of contact with the past as a ship’s log as, watch by watch, the location, the wind and the weather are recorded with relentless discipline? Is there a more eloquent message than the odd water stain during a ‘fresh gale’? And if this is telling, what of the journals and diaries, sketchbooks and maps that give a graphic dimension to the mere facts?

Lee Langley

Fire and fury

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Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and misogyny, examining what the author calls ‘the violence in the male gaze’. Its blithe disregard for social norms and finer feelings is exhilarating; it’s pitiless and scathingly funny. The women invariably make wincingly bad decisions. Feminism for the Fleabag generation? Nothing is simple here, in a world as disorientating as a hall of mirrors. The novel has three parts, each with a narrator and the story is told backwards as it teasingly reveals its leading character — not a person, but a manuscript that will change all three narrators’ lives.

Sam Leith

Pass the sick bag | 16 May 2019

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It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal Lecter in it was 1974. So, ‘hotly anticipated’ is probably the phrase. The good news for readers of Cari Mora is that Hannibal is here in spirit if not in person. This is a very peculiar book, lavishly ridiculous in almost every respect and fully committed to the gothic extremes of human cruelty: just camp enough to skirt charges of outright porno-sadism. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it is. But, as I say, it’s also mad as a badger. The way I found myself describing it to a friend is as Dr Fischer of Geneva retold by Carl Hiaasen and shot by Tobe Hooper. A character with a walk-on part eats a human kidney, for instance, just because it’s there.

Sarah Perry

Worlds within worlds

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The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia; a memoir; a handbook on how not to write a novel; and two irreverently erudite guides to the canon. The variety of these accomplishments indicates Newman’s roving and playful intelligence, together with a kind of wilful unpredictability and a deep engagement with literary forms and traditions. These qualities have attained a sublime height in The Heavens, a work of remarkable skill and invention, linguistic brio and righteous political intent, and one which gleefully defies categorisation. ‘Ben met Kate at a rich girl’s party,’ the novel begins.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

From fame to shame

Lead book review

Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a kind of embalming fluid, it has long been suspected that they enjoy wielding their pens more like a cosh or a scalpel. Victorian writers were especially nervous about the prospect of a biographer prodding and slashing away at their reputations. Tennyson worried that he would be ‘ripped up like a pig’ after his death, and many of his contemporaries did all they could to present their best face to posterity: hand-picking an authorised biographer; making a bonfire out of any embarrassing letters; discreetly muzzling friends who might be tempted into unflattering reminiscences.

9 May 2019

Jonathan Powell

The agony of the ‘almost man’

Lead book review

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the uncensored memories of his wives and mistresses, as well as George Packer’s own racy writing, makes this a fascinating and compulsive read.

Philip Womack

Daughters of Troy

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In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a few: Barry Unsworth’s elegant The Songs of the Kings enhanced the narrative with psychological flair; Alice Oswald’s beautifully distilled Memorial brought a disquieting focus on to the deaths of lesser heroes, as well as the electric beauty of the Homeric similes drawn from the natural world; and last year’s The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, which successfully imagined the Iliad with Agamemnon’s slave-girl as the narrator. Natalie Haynes, with A Thousand Ships, a retelling of the war and the stories around it, has entered a crowded field. Haynes’s central premise is that heroism is vested as much in women as in men.

Brian Martin

Cat and the King

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The scene is London in 1667, the city recovering from the Great Fire the year before, with 80,000 people homeless and refugee camps established on the outskirts. Andrew Taylor introduces his readers to life as it survived there and involves them in the politics of Charles II’s court. Cobblestones are ‘slick with rain’, rushlights smell vile because of the rancid fats they were dipped in; in Covent Garden, thieves, peddlers and beggars ply their trades ‘like lice in a head of hair’ — and if you want to travel on a Sunday you must acquire a magistrate’s warrant. The King’s Evil is the third in Taylor’s trilogy about the Great Fire of London, but stands in its own right.

Andrew Lycett

Amusing Queen Victoria

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The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and then as an example of an attraction at the rebuilt Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1864. But he is the star of John Woolf’s breezy personality-driven history of the ‘freak’ show, an intriguing sub-set of that wider field of leisure activity. Tom is first introduced there 20 years earlier when, aged six and standing just 25 inches tall in red velvet coat and breeches, he performs before an enchanted young Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace, together with his manager, P.T. Barnum.

Christopher Priest

Darkness visible | 9 May 2019

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With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like to stay in a chain hotel, Will Wiles seems determined to corner the market in unpromising literary subjects. His latest novel, Plume, is about a chap who lives in a rented flat in London and who works in an office. Hooray! — the sainted few who are already Wiles fans will learn this with their hearts pumping with anticipatory happiness. Mine certainly did. A quick summary is appropriate, as Wiles’s novels remain, for now, under-regarded. Care of Wooden Floors (2012) was exactly what it said on the tin. The narrator flies to a European city to house-sit an apartment of an absent friend called Oskar.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe: good golly, Henry V has some thumping lines

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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/ Or close the wall up with our English dead…’ Good golly, Henry V has some thumping lines, doesn’t it? The final play in this summer’s Henriad at the Globe — partnered with Merian — shows us Prince Hal fledged as a king, and a war leader at that. The subjunctive mood of the previous plays has become indicative; even imperative. And it’s a play where British (OK, in this case English) identity comes galloping back to the fore as it has not done since John of Gaunt popped his clogs in Richard II. Our concern is no longer civil strife but foreign wars.

Simon Ings

An admirably elegant theory

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On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s Burlington House, the ‘lights went all askew in the heavens’. That, anyway, was the rhetorical flourish with which the New York Times hailed the announcement of the results of a pair of astronomical expeditions conducted in 1919, after the Armistice but before the official end of the first world war. One expedition, led by Arthur Stanley Eddington, assistant to the Astronomer Royal, had repaired to the plantation island of Principe, off the coast of West Africa; the other, led by Andrew Crommelin, who worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, headed to a racecourse in Brazil.

2 May 2019

James Robins

A nation born in blood

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Turkey greets you with a chilly blue eye, a flared eyebrow, a cliff-like cheekbone. The face of the republic’s founder glares imperious from almost every office wall, shopkeeper’s kiosk and airport terminal. Turkish citizens regard Mustafa Kemal reverentially: the nation’s first president, courageous leader of the 1919–1922 war of independence, deliverer from the great powers’ imperial cleaver. An impenetrable cultish mythos envelops him. Even for Istanbul’s young cosmopolitans, any word against Kemal spurs a visceral reaction.Recep Erdogan, the current president, whose politics are anathema to Kemalist ideology, still has to invoke him for the purposes of propaganda.

Mia Levitin

A spiral of deceit

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The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ - see above left (emet) is comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the alphabet. Truth, scholars say, pervades all things. Talmudists add that the aleph, mem and tav that form emet are balanced, grounded characters, while the letters that make up the word for‘lie’ – see above right (sheker), teeter precariously on the page. In our post-truth era of Pinocchian politicians and social media spewing falsehoods, however, it may well be truth that sits on shakier ground. Like Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s previous novel Waking Lions, Liar considers the consequences of a moment of misjudgment that unfolds as if fated.

Bryan Karetnyk

Looking back on Baku

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The discovery of oil in Baku brought Ummulbanu Asadullayeva’s family respect if not respectability. Peasant-born, her grandparents ranked by the time of her birth among the richest in the Russian empire, thanks to the abundance of black gold unearthed on their doorstep. Yet while oil barony went hand in hand with fantastic wealth and political prestige, the changes it wrought privately, such as they were, did little to convert her family into paragons of refinement and cultivation. Luckily for us, the result makes for some very fine reading.

Louis Amis

To hell in a handcart

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An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This is actually the entire plot of a novel entitled Only Americans Burn in Hell. Of course, as in Jarett Kobek’s previous book, I Hate the Internet, the fictional element is a foil, with most of the pages devoted to sociopolitical diatribe laced with various kinds of life writing. It’s also basically the same diatribe in both books, against a global society in which ‘everyone’s life is still dominated by the whims of the very rich and the social mores of the slightly rich’.

Leyla Sanai

Two men and no baby

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The sorrow of involuntary childlessness is profound. The award-winning novelist Patrick Flanery and his husband knew this pain. Their craving to love and nurture a child left them with an intractable emptiness. Flanery has no siblings; his parents lived abroad, and he had a difficult relationship with his father. So his desire was to create the close-knit family he never had. I sympathised deeply with the couple. Their tenderness and dedication to parenthood is obvious, but when they investigated the options open to them, they found most doors if not actually locked, then spring-loaded shut.

Frances Wilson

The gifts of Gabo

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Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and 300 interviews, including one with Fidel Castro. So what does Solitude & Company add to the fairytale history of ‘Gabo’, as Latin America’s greatest teller of historical fairy tales is generally known? In the year 2000, when García Márquez was still alive, Silvana Paternostro began conducting her own interviews with Gabo’s family, his ‘first and last friends’, his agents, editors and fellow writers. She has now cut, spliced and transcribed the tapes in order to create the effect of a bar full of drunks interrupting one another. ‘Is that tape recorder off?

Carey Schofield

A class act | 2 May 2019

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Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well as an acclaimed poet (awarded an MBE in 2018 for services to literature) who has nurtured a generation of successful young migrant writers. In 2006 she was one of the judges for the Foyle young poets of the year award. Seven years later, seeing how the winners were scything through Oxbridge and networking ‘like an artsy version of the Bullingdon Club’, she wanted the same opportunities for her own pupils, ‘not just the poetry, but the sense of entitlement’. She was teaching at a comprehensive in east Oxford, a generally unloved institution, ‘record-breakingly under-subscribed’, where more than 50 languages were spoken.

Fiona Sampson

Lost and found | 2 May 2019

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One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event venues must be the Foundling Museum. The handsome building on Coram’s Fields houses what remains of the London Foundling Hospital, which opened on the site in 1745. Its imposing rooms are lined with oil portraits of past patrons and among the artefacts on display is the original score of George Frideric Handel’s fundraising The Messiah, which he donated to the hospital. In the 18th century the Foundling Hospital was a fashionable cause, and the great and good flocked to associate with its charitable works. But some of the museum’s cases tell another story — the history not of great names but of the anonymous children of the desperate poor.

A.N. Wilson

Conning the dons

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In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians of his generation but also a former intelligence officer, fascinated by tricks, lies and fraud. He himself wrote a mischievous series of anonymous articles for The Spectator, purporting to emanate from the 17th-century pen of ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’,which gave a hilarious picture of his contemporary dons at Oxford and their crazy ways. One of his funniest books was an exposé of the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, a benefactor of the Bodleian Library, whom Trevor-Roper proved to have been a forger and liar on a heroic scale.

Stephen Bayley

An idea made concrete

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Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture which has defiled our cities? Two books look at its influence abroad after 1933 when the Nazis put the jackboot in. The Bauhaus was nothing if not modern — even if ‘modern’ is now a historical style label and the Bauhauslers were as trapped in their historical circumstances as we are in our own. This was noticed and ridiculed by Tom Wolfe in his 1981 squib, From Bauhaus to Our House, a book as bristling with cheerful spite as with clever wordplay. Although not quite so simple, the Bauhaus was dedicated to the idea that the prospects for all mankind could be determined by engineering and metaphors of engineering.

Adam Nicolson

Dispatches from the underworld

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Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke was about continuity and connectedness. ‘Vegetables,’ he says, in one of the great pre-Romantic sentences, ‘are not sublime.’ Vegetables are beautiful because they are constant and continuous, and because beauty is the quality of perfect continuity: ‘The sense of being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents and declivities is a better idea of the beautiful than anything.’ The sublime is the opposite, needing deep distances, withdrawals and chasms —the Abgrund, in the resonantly expressive German word for ‘an abyss’.

Philip Hensher

Women of the Raj

Lead book review

Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the East India Company warned them off, citing difficulties of climate, disease, morality, religion and culture, a few managed to travel there all the same. By the late 18th century their numbers had increased considerably, making women some of the most interesting witnesses to the British Raj. In this way, the white Christian woman became a significant face of imperial rule. She would usually be caricatured as one who, having failed to find a husband in London, cast her lot in with the ‘fishing fleet’ in Bombay; or portrayed (by E.M.

30 April 2019

Mark Dooley

What Roger Scruton can teach his detractors

I thought I knew everything about Sir Roger Scruton. I had already written two books on his life and philosophy and was just about to embark on the last volume in my Scruton trilogy. This was to be a book of conversations that encompassed all facets of his biography and intellectual interests. Over three days at his farm in Wiltshire, we discussed everything from religion, architecture, wine and music, to sex, farming, family and fame. Scruton spoke to me not as a fellow philosopher or journalist but as a long-time friend. As such, our conversations revealed Scruton at his most intimate and humorous. It was, however, on the last night of my visit, while cooking dinner to Rossini, that he casually said something for which I was totally unprepared.