Books Archives

The sage of age

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Ashton Applewhite is a leading American ‘inspirer’ on how to make the most of being over the hill. She has followers to whom she dispatches her inspiration by blog, YouTube, TED, magazine column and talk-show interview. This Chair Rocks first came into the world, three years ago, as a ‘networked book’. It now presents itself in a form more congenial to ‘olders’ as Applewhite likes to call them. Whether to go large print must have been an option considered by its current publishers. Applewhite’s previous book-qua-book was Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well. ‘Upbeat’ is her middle name. There is one passing reference to her ex in This Chair Rocks and we gather she now has a partner, Bob.

Alan Johnson

Teebee or not Teebee

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On the day that Tony Blair left the Commons chamber for the last time (to a standing ovation led by the leader of the opposition) I was moved from Education to Health and, a few days later, was to accompany the new prime minister on his first official engagement — to a hospital in Kingston-upon-Thames. I wandered into the PM’s office next to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street early on that Saturday morning and noticed that something was missing. The sofa had gone. Gordon Brown had wasted no time in differentiating himself from a predecessor to whom the words ‘sofa government’ along with ‘spin’, ‘spads’ and ‘Iraq’ had attached themselves pejoratively like barnacles to a ship’s hull.

Caroline Moore

Time is the essence

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Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’ rather than ‘somewhere’. Hadley labours under perceived limitations: she is distinctively British, writes about the middle classes, and turns out, as the puff on the back rightly says, ‘the quintessential domestic novel’. Those who are put off by this description — probably mostly men — miss out on a vast range of female authors, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler.

Mary Kenny

The cult of Patrick

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St Patrick’s Day, on 17 March, is now regarded as a prime opportunity for Irish politicians to travel abroad on a mission for ‘brand Ireland’. They fly off overseas, armed with the symbol of the shamrock, alerting their hosts to the shiny new liberal Ireland which is such a fabulous investment opportunity — and don’t forget the low corporation tax! Few national saints have the global reach of Patrick: it has been calculated that church bells ring out in 800 worldwide locations to celebrate the feast day of this Roman Briton who brought Christianity to Ireland in the early 5th century. Jewish bakeries in New York sell green bagels and horses run at Cheltenham in his honour.

Nicholas Shakespeare

The name’s Sorge, Richard Sorge

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Interviewed on the Today programme on 7 March, a former executive of the gigantic Chinese tech firm Huawei admitted: ‘It is the nature of humanity to spy, to conduct espionage.’ A gold-plated incarnation of this impulse is the tall, craggy-faced German journalist who was arrested in his pyjamas in his Tokyo house in October 1941. ‘I am a Nazi!’ he insisted to the Japanese police, who, before entering his study, had politely removed their shoes. On the sixth day of his interrogation, he finally broke. He raised his vigilant, deep-set blue eyes, which could have charmed the whiskers off Blofeld’s cat, and said: ‘I will confess everything.

7 March 2019

Stuart Evers

Unexpectedly delicious

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‘Food experiences,’ writes Michael Flanagan in his paper ‘Cowpie, Gruel and Midnight Feasts: Food in Popular Children’s Literature’, ‘form part of the daily texture of every child’s life… thus it is hardly surprising that food is a constantly recurring motif in literature written for children.’ Though Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread, is far from a novel for children, it is steeped in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum, even Lemony Snicket. But this being the work of Oyeyemi, these initial influences are soon turned inside out, reimagined and repurposed by one of our most singular and inventive contemporary voices.

Stephen Phillips

Don’t call them colonies

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Where other nations disbanded their empires following the second world war, America’s underwent transubstantiation, from something solid to something more ethereal. It became a shorthand, connoting an amorphous global entity and its quasi-imperial depredations: commercial infiltration, cultural indoctrination, fomenting coups, waging war. Suitably, this construct (Coca-Cola and cruise missiles) acquired a ‘logo’, writes Daniel Immerwahr — the silhouette of the continental United States sitting athwart the northern half of the Western hemisphere, as iconic as Nike’s swoosh; on the map at least, minding its own business.

Catherine Mayer

The motherhood dilemma

Lead book review

A single survey, elevated by news organisations to scientific certainty, suggests that air travellers may be more susceptible to tears than their earthbound selves. I remembered this on a recent long-haul flight, when I wept not at a weepy, but over Sarah Knott’s Mother: An Unconventional History. The last book of similar intellectual heft to make me cry toppled from a bookshelf on to my foot. The emotive power of Knott’s social history flows from her excellence as a writer and storyteller. Back home, Lorna Gibb’s wonderful Childless Voices: Stories of Longing, Loss, Resistance and Choice stirred my emotions too. The authors’ subject matter is complementary and overlapping.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 7 March 2019

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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON Last time in this space we were talking about Harry Hotspur’s role as a shadow-self for Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One. But nor, of course, can we ignore the other pole around which the play swings: the sack-swilling anti-Santa Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations — some, among them Orson Welles, who played the fat knight in The Chimes at Midnight, have said the greatest — and, perhaps even more than Romeo, Prospero and Hamlet, has escaped the play to take on the quality of a mythological figure. Henry IV, Part One — on from April 23 at the Globe — sees Sir John in his pomp. He is not (yet) pitiable.

James Walton

Take drugs, write songs

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If you’re unsure whether Shaun Ryder’s lyrics for Happy Mondays and Black Grape really deserve the full Faber-poetry treatment, then you’re not alone. So, it seems, is Shaun Ryder. ‘I… wouldn’t call myself a poet,’ he writes in the preface, adding characteristically that ‘I’ve never put myself forward as an anguished wordsmith… like fucking Morrissey.’ It’s also unlikely that his work would have appealed much to Faber’s original poetry editor T.S. Eliot — not when the very first lyric contains the phrase, ‘Jesus is a c***’.

David Crane

Europe’s front line

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In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways, and yet what is perhaps most moving is not the scenes of devastation, but the sight of the people below, picking up again the threads of their old lives among the shattered ruins of what had once been homes, with the resilience of a people whom history had long accustomed to the miseries of war.

Mark Cocker

Mission improbable

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Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him in postwar Baghdad, he had spent the early part of the century searching for Iraqi scientists who had previously worked on weapons’ manufacture for Saddam Hussein. Presumably the life-threatening risks entailed in that role were insufficient, because he then allowed himself to be headhunted for fresh challenges in Afghanistan. Not only was the new post more dangerous, even on paper its goals looked to border on madness.

Andrew Taylor

The root of all evil

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The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point. The novel is Sadie Jones’s fourth, and the first to be set in the present. It’s the story of Bea and Dan, a nice young couple who are struggling to make the repayments on their mortgage. She’s a psychotherapist with an outsize social conscience; he’s a trainee estate agent who yearns to be an artist. Desperate for a break, they decide to spend their meagre savings on a three month unpaid holiday in Europe. The first stop is in Burgundy, at the rundown hotel run by Bea’s brother, Alex, who has recently returned from three months drying out in the Priory.

Daniel Hahn

The gift of tongues

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English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s in it for us? And what, more seriously, are the implications if we decide not to bother? Digging deeply into these questions, Marek Kohn’s book asks what it actually means to have some mastery of another language (is that the same as being ‘fluent’, or being able to ‘speak’ another language?), and looks at language acquisition, at how the language we happen to speak can alter perception, whether there are cognitive benefits to multiple language use, and what roles the state can play in determining how languages are valued or stigmatised.

Brian Martin

Eros and Agape

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‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about Peter Abelard. In Melvyn Bragg’s narrative, Arthur is finishing his novel about Abelard and Heloise, living in Paris, separated from his wife, and visited by Julia. She gives a modern woman’s view of the behaviour of Abelard towards his beloved Heloise. ‘She didn’t ask to be a Bride of Christ,’ Julia protests; and Arthur’s telling of the great love story makes that clear. Heloise’s taking of the veil is forced upon her by her lover’s seemingly selfish logic. Arthur’s answer, and undoubtedly Bragg’s too, is that the infatuated pair must be judged in the context of the medieval church.

4 March 2019

Ben Sixsmith

The cowardice of calling for The Satanic Verses to be banned

Let us imagine that a book which Catholics find insulting is published in Britain, and a prominent Polish bishop calls for the author's death. Catholics march on British streets, burning copies of the book. One of its Latin American translators is killed. A conference is held in Italy, where one of the attendees has announced that he has plans to publish the work, and the hotel is attacked and thirty-seven people die. No one would deny that Catholic Poles in Britain face some exploitation, and some marginalisation, and even some violence. People could debate the merits of the book and whether its content is needlessly insulting.

28 February 2019

D.D. Guttenplan

Antisemitism for dummies

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Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped to write it. After all, in just the past few weeks the dumpster fire over the Labour party’s hand-ling of anti-Semitism burst into acrid flame again over general secretary Jenny Formby’s release of Labour’s record in responding to the problem — 673 complaints, 96 members suspended, 12 expelled. Labour’s failure to act decisively against anti-Semitism was also cited by most of the nine MPs who left the party.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Physician, heal thyself

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The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he took to be the primary motivations for writing books. ‘With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.’ In the case of the clinical neuropsychologist Dr A.K. Benjamin, both of these seem to apply. He is impelled by the desire for revenge, mainly on his own self-important profession, but also on women for being nuts. Or perhaps, because he’s scrupulously fair about this, that should be ‘nuts in a different way from the way men are’. As for Benjamin’s self-exposure, it’s a striptease.

Sam Leith

Getting off on Scott Free

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Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby in 1971, he’s a gaudily dressed glint from the last gleaming of the Silver Age. Like the fictional ‘Escapist’ created by Michael Chabon in his Kirby-drenched Kavalier and Clay, Scott Free is part superhero and part vaudeville act — forever wriggling free from mountainous shackles or making nick-of-time exits from water-filled coffins or tea-crates in the paths of runaway trains. But when we first meet him in this 12-issue trade paperback he’s slumped on the floor of a bathroom with a razor blade in the foreground, bleeding out from his slashed wrists.

John Self

Stone walls do not a prison make

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There’s no getting away from that title. I will never see the world again. It catches your eye on the bookshelf. I will never see the world again. It’s there, at the top of every page. I Will Never See the World Again. It’s a killer opening, before the book has even begun, and it’s all true. Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s leading writers, in 2016 was arrested on charges of providing subliminal messages to coup supporters, and has since been sentenced to life imprisonment: Never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets. I would not have my room to write in, my machine to write with, my library to reach for. I would not be able to open a door by myself.

Lynn Barber

Back to the fabulous Fifties

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Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by Bloomsbury), when she was just 19. It was a memoir of her life as a 1950s debutante — the ‘weeds’ were the chinless wonders she met at debs’ dances — and it became an instant hit in 1963. She then wrote another 33 bestselling novels and co-wrote, with her husband Terence Brady, various TV series, including Upstairs Downstairs. But when he was dying of cancer two years ago, she suddenly skipped back to the 1950s and picked up the story of Coronet Among the Weeds where it left off. The result was a very surprising memoir called MI5 and Me, published last year, to which Spies and Stars is the follow-up.

Andrew Motion

Village voices

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Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his wife, and whose efforts to look after their two children, are shaped by the appearance in his life of Hughes’s celebrated figure of the Crow, a real/metaphorical creature who is on the one hand disgusting, violent, abusive, anarchic and gloating, and on the other bracingly vigorous, unkillable and transformative. The bird’s dynamism blows apart familiar structures of narrative and prevents any one point of view from achieving a steady control.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

God’s messengers

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A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at a vicarage supper party after finishing Peter Stanford’s highly informative book about angels, which had left me angel-obsessed and an angel bore. No one came up with the answer. ‘Of all things visible and invisible, of course!’, I declared triumphantly. Once you see it, it’s obvious that the ‘invisible’ are the angels, but it had never occurred to me before.

Philip Hensher

‘Working late at the Bauhaus’

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Walter Gropius (1883–1969) had the career that the 20th century inflicted on its architects. A master of the previous generation in the German-speaking lands, Otto Wagner, could create his entire oeuvre without venturing outside the city limits of Vienna. Gropius found himself thrust into one unprecedented role after another, uprooted and exiled repeatedly. His work was carried out wherever he landed — in Germany, England or America. Despite the huge disruptions of history, he displayed extraordinary single-mindedness. From the 1914 Fagus factory onwards, his buildings argued for the modernist position of function over ornament. By the time of his death, in America, the vast majority of practising architects, if not the public, were converted to his position.

27 February 2019

Sam Leith

Spectator Books: how angels have changed through history

In this week’s Spectator Books I’m talking to Peter Stanford, author of Angels: A Visible and Invisible History. Why is it that, according to some polls, more people believe in angels than believe in God? Peter takes us on a tour through history, theology and literature to find how the winged cherubs on our Christmas cards got there, and why they look as they do. Along the way he addresses some of the vital questions. Do angels have wings — and if so, how many? What are they made of — light, or compressed air? Are they above or below humans in the hierarchy of creation? Which is the friendliest archangel: Michael, Gabriel or Raphael? And how many can dance on the head of a pin?

23 February 2019

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems about struggling to write a poem

The call for poems about the difficulty of writing a poem attracted a far-larger-than-usual entry. A.H. Harker’s punchy couplet caught my eye: I’m stuck. Oh ****. Elsewhere there were nods to Wordsworth, Milton and ‘The Thought Fox’, Ted Hughes’s wonderful poem about poetic inspiration. The winners below earn £25 each for their travails. Brian Allgar I struggled with my verse time after time, Yet somehow I could never make it work. It scanned quite well, but there’s no use pretending My couplets had a satisfactory finish. The words at their conclusion never matched; They would not rhyme, however hard I rubbed My head. The wretched quatrains fell apart, And I despaired of mastering the skill.

21 February 2019

John Burnside

An epic quest

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Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit, never mind The Lord of the Rings), anyone who falls asleep while watching a tedious Joseph Campbell-formula flick such as Star Wars, anyone saddened by the 2014 BBC poll of adult readers that included six fantasy books among its top ten British novels of all time may well approach Marlon James’s latest offering warily. With a cover puff from Neil Gaiman that invokes Tolkien (as well as Angela Carter) and comparisons elsewhere to George R.R. Martin and Charles R.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 21 February 2019

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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON We’ve been looking at various aspects of Richard II, which has just opened at Shakespeare’s Globe. Now to turn our attention a little further into the future. Richard II was only the opener for the remarkable run of history plays that are the centrepiece of the theatre’s summer season this year. The second half of April will see openings for Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two and Henry V; and on ‘Trilogy Days’, theatregoers with especially resilient bottoms will have the chance to see all three in a single day.

Anne Sebba

A life in pieces

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When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried on walking through the wall until she emerged as a plaster statue: At that moment I realise… that Budapest is absolutely crammed with statues that were once people, people who had simply walked through the walls and become stylised allegorical figures, that this was their fate, hers, and mine too, come to that. This exquisitely told memoir is crammed with similarly evocative and occasionally deeply unsettling images.