Books Archives

Courses for horses

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With the Cheltenham Festival been and gone, all eyes are on Aintree and the Grand National. These courses feature in Tom Peacock’s Remarkable Racecourses, as do other familiar names: Ascot, Epsom, Goodwood, Chantilly and so on. But this isn’t simply a rundown of the most famous racecourses in the world. It’s more a whistle-stop, round-the-world tour of racetracks that are a bit different. What’s striking is just how much a racecourse can tell you about the culture and politics of a place. Politics does occasionally come into racing — after all, the most famous of all the suffragettes’ protests happened on a racecourse.

Daniel Hahn

Goodbye to all that | 12 April 2018

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Alberto Manguel is a kind of global Reader Laureate: he is reading’s champion, its keenest student and most zealous proselytiser, an ideal exemplar of the Reader embodied. And reading is not only his committed, devoted practice, but also the very subject of some of his best writing. His latest book to wander through this familiar domain was prompted by the traumatic experience of packing away his huge personal library, when he and his partner found themselves needing to downsize from a cavernous French barn (containing 35,000 volumes ‘in its prime’) to a small apartment in New York City.

Julie Myerson

Trouble in paradise | 12 April 2018

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1991, the Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto. The novelist Rose Tremain and the South African writer Carolyn Slaughter are enjoying a lobster thermidor and Chablis lunch. Hearing about Slaughter’s abuse at the hands of her father, Tremain finds herself telling her lunch companion about ‘something I never normally discussed with anyone: the lack of love I’d had from my mother and father, and my emotional dependency on Nan’ (a beloved nanny). Slaughter — who is training to be a psychiatrist — responds that ‘any human life, if the childhood is devoid of adult love, will almost certainly be a troubled one’, but reassures Tremain that Nan almost certainly saved her from such a fate. ‘She was your angel,’ Slaughter says.

Ben Hamilton

Snowy days in Saratoga Springs

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Alan Querry, the central figure in James Wood’s second novel, is someone who, in his own words, doesn’t ‘think about life too much’. His peculiar surname may recall the brooding, godforsaken Querry of Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, but this Querry — who lives in ‘the poshest part of Northumberland’ — isn’t much troubled by God’s presence or absence: ‘he had a notion that “the question of God” might all have been more or less sorted out in his lifetime, like Cyprus or polio.’ Called upon to visit his daughter Vanessa in upstate New York, Alan stops along the way to meet his younger daughter, Helen, and they make the journey together to snowy Saratoga Springs.

Daniel Swift

The changing face of battle

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On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or the actual business of fighting and killing — what Shakespeare wryly called ‘the fire-eyed maid of smoky war/ All hot and bleeding’. Hynes is an august scholar of English literature and particularly the literature of 20th-century warfare. But he also served as a bomber pilot in the Pacific during the second world war, and has written an engaging, plain-spoken memoir of his service called Flights of Passage, published in 1988. His two vocations, he explains in the introduction to his new book, are ‘professor’ and ‘pilot’, and here the professor not the pilot is at the controls.

Martin Gayford

Man of mystery | 12 April 2018

Lead book review

‘If you look at walls soiled with a variety of stains or at stones with variegated patterns,’ Leonardo da Vinci advised fellow painters, ‘you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations.’ By an irony of history, Leonardo (1452–1519) has come to resemble that stained wall: a Rorschach blot in which viewers discern phantoms of their own imagination. This is, of course, to some extent the fate of all celebrities, and Leonardo was the first true artist celeb — the forerunner of a long line descending through his younger contemporaries Michelangelo and Raphael down to Picasso, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst.

10 April 2018

Steerpike

Morrissey’s reading list

Morrissey caused a stir last month when he used a blog post to lambast the Indy for an article - aka 'an extreme Hate Piece so loaded with vile bile that it almost choked on its own endless capacity to be appalled' – daring to criticise him. Happily, the former Smiths frontman's latest entry is more jolly – with Morrissey discovering a tome he actually wants to read: 'We plan a release for our Back on the chain gang single for August - if the wind remains at our backs and in our sails. If you find yourself at a loose end until then, please read Douglas Murray’s The strange death of Europe.

5 April 2018

Elizabeth Frood

A beautiful enigma

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Often dubbed the Mona Lisa of the ancient world, the bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti is as immediately recognisable as the pyramids and the Rosetta Stone. Yet almost everything about this sculpture is mysterious at best, or bitterly controversial at worst, from the context of its creation to questions surrounding its acquisition by the Berlin Museum. The cultural and political capital of ancient culture is sharply in our awareness — think of the Elgin marbles or Palmyra — so writing a biography of Nefertiti’s bust requires the author to navigate hotly competing opinions.

Stuart Jeffries

The great seducer

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Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise taciturn psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, communicated. ‘He was convinced that the farts and burps which Lacan, as a free man, did not restrain in public, were meant to signal to Peyrot the two syllables of his name,’ recalls Catherine Millot. A translator’s footnote helpfully explains that in French pet means fart and rot burp. I love this story as told in this beguiling memoir by Lacan’s last lover — and not just because it evokes a time when deference to Gallic intellectuals was such that even their airy nothings were submitted to bravura semiotic analysis.

Oliver Balch

The incredible journey

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Sweet lovers, Shakespeare reminds us, love the spring. How can they not? All that wonderfully wanton colour, all that sensual fragrancy, all those budding promises of new life. And, lest we forget, all those yummy insects. For birds adore spring as well. Every year, regular as clockwork, hundreds of millions of our feathered friends take flight and head north. To hear their happy birdsong is to know that winter’s lugubrious cloak has lifted and that longer, livelier days lie ahead. No species is more symbolic of the season than the swallow. Before the age of smartphones and calendar apps, we relied on these fork-tailed speedsters to inform us of spring’s arrival. People would stare from their kitchen windows in anticipation.

Nicholas Shakespeare

Hooked for life

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In Havana, one week before President Obama unthawed half a century of cold relations with Cuba, I talked to the last fisherman to have known Ernest Hemingway. Oswald Carnero came from Cojimar — where the writer kept his boat, the Pilar — and was one of the villagers to whom Hemingway dedicated his Nobel Prize after publishing The Old Man and the Sea. Carnero had met him in 1950, aged 13. ‘He was bringing in a big marlin on his boat. He asked me if I could skin the fish.’ Thereafter Carnero sold Hemingway turtle flesh for soup and ran errands, scurrying back to the Pilar with bottles of White Horse, and going up to his house, the Finca Vigía.

Mark Vanhoenacker

Clouds with silver linings

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Over the years I’ve been in touch with a number of middle-aged professionals who, despite the success they’ve found in their chosen careers, have asked themselves whether perhaps they should have become pilots instead. Among these correspondents (the fly-curious, we might call them), architects make up the largest contingent. It’s hard to know why this might be. But in the absence of a better explanation, I’ve come to enjoy the idea that both pilots and architects have found inspiration in realms that, despite popular associations with freedom, are in fact unusually constrained: by simple or not-so-simple physics; by the corporeal realities of humans; by elaborate rules and strict regulations.

Julie Myerson

Babes in the wood

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Mona — single, childless, pushing 60 — sells wooden dolls made by a carpenter friend, which she delicately costumes from odds and ends of fabric sourced in charity shops. But her business has an odd spin-off: mothers who’ve suffered past stillbirths can come and ‘order’ a lump of carved wood made to the specified birthweight of their dead child. By cradling this weight and imagining the future the baby never had, they work towards a kind of closure. Meanwhile, Mona herself — who grew up in Ireland but lived in Birmingham through the IRA bombings — has a tragedy of her own on which she has little or no closure.

Brian Martin

An act of piety

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Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from town A to town Z taking a census. The father, the narrator, knows he is dying. As a retired doctor he can interpret the fatal signs of his disease. His is a bizarre family; his wife, who has pre-deceased him, trained as a clown. Condemned to death and left with his disadvantaged son — ‘Our lives, my wife’s and mine, bent round him like a shield’ — he decides to register as a census-taker in an Orwell-ian state office. He asks questions of those interviewed, to which he sometimes but not always gets an answer The novel becomes a parable, or rather a series of parables, complete with riddles.

Julie Burchill

Scooby Doo, where are you?

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There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had to. It’s fair to say that women figure predominantly in the first group and men in the second, hence the preponderance of male fans of science fiction and fantasy — and dewy-eyed reminiscence about children’s television. I’ve been in many female friendship groups and can’t remember a single occasion on which we’ve sat around thinking about past puppets. On the contrary, the childish things we typically recall are our awful choices of make-up and clothes, and our adoration of the pretty-boy pin-ups in our teenage bedrooms: that is, the things we used to hasten the arrival of longed-for adult life.

Andy Miller

The executor’s song

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In 1999, Patrick Hemingway published True at First Light, a new novel by his father Ernest. In his role as literary executor of the late writer’s estate, Patrick edited an unfinished manuscript of some 200,000 words down to a more marketable ‘fictional memoir’ of less than half that length. The book hit the bestseller lists but received largely negative reviews, most notably from Joan Didion in the New Yorker. ‘This was a man to whom words mattered,’ she wrote. ‘His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.’ To which the man charged with safeguarding Papa’s posthumous reputation responded, somewhat plaintively: I think it’s a very valid argument.

Graham Robb

A heartwarming spectacle of desolation

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In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’. This was a more solemn, grown-up Basil Fotherington-Thomas, the effete schoolboy of the Molesworth books who prances about in puerile pantheistic ecstasy, saying, ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky’. Ten years on, there is barely a British landscape that has not been visited by the species. He sits in a car until he reaches the chosen spot. Then, winding down the window, stunned by emptiness and silence, he savours the momentary disconnection from global networks. The void is soon filled with childhood memories, poems learnt at school and Wikipedia articles.

Laura Freeman

Tawdry lustre

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‘Nine hours,’ boasted my friend the curator about his trip to the Prado. Nine! Two hours is my upper limit in a gallery. After that I’m gasping for the tea room and gift shop. Knowing my lack of stamina, my own trip to the Prado was focused: just Velázquez and Goya. Then lunch. And a bit of Rubens, because that large room of lovely bottoms is so ‘Hello, sailor!’ it would be rude not to look. It helps to have a mind’s gallery of Diego Velázquez portraits while reading Amy Sackville’s novel Painter to the King. Not essential, but definitely enriching. If you haven’t a Madrid mini-break booked, have a nose around the Prado collection online.

Philip Hensher

Something in the air

Lead book review

’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the centrepoint of a long accumulation of radical protest. It began with duffle-coated marches against nuclear war, a well-mannered and respectful movement whose spirit persisted to the end of the decade. (In October 1968, a rally against the Vietnam war finished with demonstrators linking arms with policemen and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’). It continued into the 1970s with real political violence — the Baader-Meinhof gang and many other groups. It is not very much like 1848 as a year of political upheaval, more the symbolic statement of a large-scale change of mind. That change of mind is probably still happening.

29 March 2018

A.S.H. Smyth

The weird world of the hapax legomenon

Today is National Indexing Day (#indexday) – at least according to the UK's Society of Indexers. 'Celebrating book indexes, indexers, and the profession of indexing.' As I write, they're wrapping up their annual jamboree, at London's Foundling Museum. A few months back, I was out walking the dog and listening to Dracula on my phone when I could've sworn I heard a character described as 'indexy'. Now, audio recordings are not always perfect, and glitches – digital or human – do creep in (I recently heard one narrator trip over a word, say 'sorry', then repeat the word and carry on – all of which remaining in the finished version). But I thought I'd give Greg Wise, narrating, the benefit of the doubt. I rewound the tape. Nope: 'indexy', for certain.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Waiting for the Last Bus

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to Richard Holloway about his new book Waiting For The Last Bus. Richard is famous for having, as some would think rather inconveniently, “lost his faith” while serving as Bishop of Edinburgh. He talks to me about how it’s all a bit more complicated than that, and about how being half in and half out of Christianity has given him a special perspective on old age, death and dying. Does he look to an afterlife? Not since a particularly momentous walk in the Pentlands. And how is it that he maintains Philip Larkin — who wrote of religion as a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade” — had “the soul of a priest”? Listen in and find out.

28 March 2018

Derek Turner

Preachers, princes and psychopaths

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On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in protest at the anti-Protestantism of Bohemia’s King Ferdinand, soon to be elected Emperor Ferdinand II. The defenestration was only injurious to dignity, and had farcical aspects, a rebel shouting: ‘We shall see if your Mary can help you!’, only to exclaim, ‘By God, his Mary has helped!’ when the men landed in a midden. This sparked what C. V. Wedgwood termed ‘the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict’ — the bloodiest campaign ever waged on German soil.

Aleks Sierz

Look back in anguish

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Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink drama. What was less clear at the time was the extent to which it was autobiographical, based on Osborne’s failed first marriage to the actress Pamela Lane. In the play, Jimmy, the working-class anti-hero, harangues his wife, the cool, emotionally distant and upper-middle-class Alison, attacking her parents and her background. When Lane saw the play she immediately recognised this portrayal. When asked, many years later, about her reaction, she said: ‘I felt as though I had been raped.’ The play was a theatrical version of revenge porn.

Alex Colville

Fire and brimstone

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Industrial factories huddle at the very edge of our world view. Most of us have never visited one, but we know what to expect. The ugly buildings. The dull work of the shop floor. The worker reduced to a mere fleshy extension of a machine, his existence condensed into a series of jerks, twists and spasms. A life at best eroded by monotony — an eternal inhabitant of Dickens’s Coketown, ‘to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart to the last and the next’ — or at worst snatched up and tossed onto the sacrificial flames of Fritz Lang’s modern ‘Moloch’ of the 1927 epic, Metropolis. They are places either too boring or too bleak to be of interest.

Emily Rhodes

Love’s myriad forms

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Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction, erotica, fable and horror. In these electric stories, the author explores the challenges and promises of women’s bodies with forceful verve. In ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, a mysterious illness makes women gradually fade away; many of them ask a seamstress to stitch their disappearing bodies into the fabric of dresses. In ‘The Husband Stitch’, a woman gives herself completely to her husband and son, insisting only that they never touch the ribbon she always wears around her neck. When this tiny privacy is not permitted, we see just how much unravels.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Everything we know is wrong

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Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are Truman. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, this is Peter Weir’s 1998 fable in which Jim Carrey discovers he is unwittingly the star of the most successful reality-TV show on the planet. His world is a film set and everything that happens to him has been plotted by a brilliant if somewhat pretentious director named Christof. Truman has this thunderbolt moment. It’s part Aristotelian anagnorisis, which is to say the realisation of something horrific, and part Camusian absurdity. But at the same time, it’s incredibly liberating. He sees that he can do whatever he wants.

Nick Hilton

The strangest Icelandic saga

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Everyone in Iceland has heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur. They were two (unrelated) men who disappeared in 1974, albeit ten months and several miles apart. Gudmunder Einarsson was a teenage labourer who loved to arm-wrestle; Geirfinnur Einarsson a construction worker and family man. Other than shared national hysteria in a country where people rarely go missing, there was nothing to link these mysteries — until, one by one, a ragtag group of petty criminals started to confess to their murders. The investigation was the biggest in Iceland’s history. It spanned decades, and saw ten people arrested in relation to the crimes, some of whom spent several years in prison. But as the fever for justice gradually gave way to journalistic scrutiny, the entire narrative began to unravel.

Justin Marozzi

The hell-raiser from Baghdad

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You know you’re in good hands when the dedication reads: ‘To the writers, drinkers and freethinkers of the Arab and Islamic worlds, long may they live.’ Abu Nuwas was all three, and a complete hoot. Why he is so little known in Britain should be a mystery. But outward-looking as we are as a nation, we remain peculiarly parochial in our literary tastes outside the Western canon. Born in the late 750s in Ahvaz, Abu Nuwas came to Baghdad during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al Rashid in what was Islam’s golden age. In and out of favour as much as he was in and out of prison, he led a free-spirited, wine-drenched, sex-filled life, recorded in electrifying verse.

Katrina Gulliver

Not all bunk

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This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David Andress thinks everyone has. I can’t say I disagree, being a subscriber to the Hourly Outrage, also known as Twitter. Andress refers to Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and Marine Le Pen’s rise in French politics as things that should have been ‘punchlines’, comparing those who voted for them to dementia sufferers. And that’s just in the first couple of pages. So I’m guessing that as a Leave voter, I’m not the intended audience — nor do I, as someone with a PhD in history, fit into Andress’s analysis of uninformed and delusional Brexit voters.