Books Archives

The final frontier

Lead book review

In 1932, the Daily Plainsman of Huron, South Dakota, ran a feature about a local woman convalescing in hospital. Grace Dow had been visited by her sister, Carrie Swanzey, who read a children’s book to her. What made this mundane story newsworthy was that the book was called Little House in the Big Woods, and the women sharing it were the sisters of its author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book told of their family’s decision 50 years earlier to leave the Big Woods of Wisconsin and head west as pioneers, travelling by covered wagon through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota and into South Dakota, where they eventually settled in nearby De Smet, in 1879.

13 December 2017

Peter Carty

Puffing through the Punjab

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‘I went to a restaurant the other day called Taste of the Raj. The waiter hit me with a stick and got me to build a complicated railway system.’ The comedian Harry Hill’s gag is an acerbic commentary on the British empire, but there can be no doubt that India’s modern history is intimately intertwined with its railways. They grew into a vast realm of their own within the sub-continent and embodied all the vagaries of imperial rule. Who better to chronicle them than Christian Wolmar? He is a railway obsessive who has now produced his 11th book on rail and its history. This time round he has given himself one of the greatest train sets any boy ever had to play with. The story he tells begins in the mid-19th century with a series of formidable engineering challenges.

Andrew Michael Hurley

Here We Come A-Wassailing

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Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut novel, The Loney, was an unsettling gothic horror story set on a bleak stretch of the English coast. It was first published in October 2014 by Tartarus Press, a tiny independent publisher. It won the Costa First Novel Award in 2015 and went on to be named Debut Fiction Book of the Year and Overall Book of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards. Stephen King called The Loney ‘an amazing piece of fiction’. His new novel Devil's Day is just out from John Murray. Getting older, he felt more and more like a passenger trapped on a fast-moving train Peace. It had been a rare thing all day. Ian and Jane had come with their other halves and all seven grandchildren, who, after handing over their gifts and cards, had been split by gender.

Sinclair McKay

The best television ever made

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Now, if someone were to spray stun gas through the keyhole of my front door, and I were to collapse on my sofa only to regain consciousness in a slightly kitsch 1960s serviced apartment, outside which lay an exquisite Italianate village, a stretch of sparkling coast, a startlingly cheery populace all speaking in RP accents and social order maintained by means of a gigantic white plastic ball bubbling out of the sea… well, to be frank, I’d be thrilled. Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six, on the other hand, is seething about it from the start; and the film director Alex Cox, who sat watching The Prisoner as a 13-year-old in 1967, does a terrific job of giving a fresh interpretation to what must be the world’s most analysed television series.

Hermione Eyre

Golden lads galore

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Stephen Fry has had a go at the Greek myths, in a competitively priced hardback, just in time for Christmas. And he has done it jolly well, actually, so lower that collective eyebrow, please, all of you purists who think entertainers ought to stay away from the classics, and remember that as one of our top TV deities, Fry can do what he likes. Born wearing tweed, he was dipped by the heel in the River of Wisdom (though some say it was only the Trickle of Cleverness) and ascended via the Cambridge Footlights into the Equity-approved pantheon. He is loved, as the Greek gods were loved, not only for his talents, but for his failings and vulnerabilities too. He could get away with anything, except perhaps denim. In Mythos, he is clearly enjoying himself.

Christopher Meyer

Rats in the ballroom

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At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market — expensively produced, replete with beautiful photographs, a text as undemanding as the tinkling notes of a cocktail-bar pianist, and the whole thing massively heavy. It is a beautiful — and heavy — book, with fine photographs by Luke White. But what distinguishes it is the skill and acuity with which James Stourton has written the commentary, making it a serious and engrossing work of history. His text takes the form of an introductory essay on the changing nature of diplomacy over the centuries, a model of elegant concision, followed by the histories of 26 embassies and ambassadorial residences scattered around the globe.

A.S.H. Smyth

Fair tradesman

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Ole Thorstensen has been a carpenter for 25 years. A master craftsman, in fact. He is busy working on a minor job — ‘replacing a few windows, putting down decking and doing a number of other odds and ends’ — when he gets invited to bid for a loft conversion in a 19th-century apartment block in Oslo. ‘The Petersens have mentioned their desire for quality while avoiding unforeseen expense.’ No shit. The conversion will include a bedroom, bathroom and an office mezzanine and has all to be insulated, plumbed, wired, plastered, painted, floored and fitted out with furniture before a staircase can connect it to the floor below.

Nicky Haslam

Littering castles all over the land

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I rashly discarded this book’s dustjacket when I received it, and thus saw only the unlettered cover, a faded photograph of three generations of an aristocratic family, somewhat camera-shy in their silken breeches. Oh I see, I thought, this is one of those books on the foibles of the aristocracy, always an entertaining subject. How wrong can one be? Instead, it’s a polemic against crats aristo, auto, mono or pluto; and the author apparently yearns for any crat of a different stripe — not just demo and bureau, but mobo, neo and probably ochlo to boot. Naturally I went immediately to the index, to look up my family.

Rowan Pelling

Toys for us

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It’s hard not to love a book that starts with its author fearing a police sting while flogging sex toys at a hen party in Texas. The year is 2004 and Hallie Lieberman is attending grad school in Austin and supporting her studies by working as a home party organiser for Forbidden Fruit, local purveyor of marital aids: ‘Christy is rattling off her order: a jelly vibrator, a cock ring, a bottle of Eros lubricant.’ Just one snag; devices that are intended ‘primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs’ are deemed illegal in the state of Texas. They’re illegal to this day in Louisiana.

Josh Ireland

Recipes for disaster

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Halfway through Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book Lucy Moore takes a moment to regret the vast tracts of the past that are lost to us. How lucky we would be if more examples of our ancestors’ daily interactions with others, what she calls ‘the scraps of daily life we take for granted’, had been preserved. Instead, of course, we must make do with the flotsam that has survived, and to try to coax quotidian objects into offering up glimpses into lives that might otherwise have remained obscure. Court records, depositions and wills have all been interrogated by historians, as have more unlikely items, such as the collections of culinary and medical preparations compiled by women from ‘receipts’ given to them by their friends and relations.

Claudia Massie

Hot dogs

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There are currently 151,000,000 photos on Instagram tagged #Dog which is 14,000,000 more than those tagged #Cat. The enormous number shouldn’t surprise us. We’ve been obsessively depicting our dogs since prehistoric times, when we painted them on walls, carved them in ivory and buried them with bones and blankets for the afterlife. A Dog a Day is one of two marvellous new books that feed this atavistic devotion. A handsome collection of Sally Muir’s dog portraiture, it demonstrates the artist’s technical range and her keen understanding of essential doggishness. The images are deft sketches that capture the particular hang of a hound’s head, the Mikado-sticks jumble of lurcher legs or the crazy glint in a spaniel’s eye.

James Walton

Easy on the hard stuff

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It’s one of the more mysterious features of human history that people of every era and in almost every place have regularly striven to reduce their intelligence, impair their reflexes and generally ensure that everything about them functions far less well. So what is about getting drunk that we love so much? According to Mark Forsyth’s breezy new book, the best answer comes from somebody not often thought of as a classic roisterer: William James, the American philosopher and brother of Henry. ‘Sobriety,’ James wrote, ‘diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.’ And the way Forsyth tells it, drink has caused us to say yes to an awful lot.

William Cook

Comfort and joy

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John Julius Norwich loves Christmas dearly. ‘I just wish it didn’t come round about every three months,’ he says. I know how he feels. Christmas does seem to arrive sooner every year — not just because time seems to speed up as you get older, but because our avaricious shopkeepers can’t wait to start cashing in earlier each autumn. We all harbour fond memories of childhood Christmases, and do our best to recreate them for our children. We just wish the whole thing were confined to a few weeks rather than dragging on for half the year. It’s hard to feel full of Yuletide cheer when shopping centres put up their Christmas decorations before Bonfire Night.

Sara Wheeler

In the land of the Thunder Dragon

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This charming collection of individual photographic portraits of Bhutanese citizens intentionally highlights the two central features of the kingdom today: cultural tradition and the encroachment of modernity. The photographer A.J. Heath lived in Bhutan for a year. Over three weekends he set up an open-air studio in the main square of the capital, Thimphu, and invited people in to be snapped. The subjects, mostly young, range from teenagers to a miner and a royal bodyguard. Opposite each picture Heath reproduces the questions he asked his subjects, and how they replied. The conversations reflect the duality I mentioned earlier: Heath asks for example what makes people feel Bhutanese.

Emma Williams

The hopes and fears of Bethlehem

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Before a certain baby was born there, Bethlehem was famous for its sweet water. Shepherd boys like the young David, king-to-be, herded their flocks into the town and drank from the fountain at the gates. Water, as well as Jesus Christ, helped shape Bethlehem’s story. Its aqueduct enabled nearby Jerusalem to function and expand as a city and pilgrimage site: every invader from the Seleucids to the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British and, in 1967, Israeli forces, has seized control of the water supply in order to take Jerusalem. As a result, Bethlehem was militarised from its early days. Having lived in Bethlehem for a number of years, Nicholas Blincoe knows the area intimately.

Mervyn King

Murder, fraud and bankruptcy

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Hamilton, created by the remarkable Lin-Manuel Miranda, has brought the financial musical to the London stage: a serious biography of a great man translated into rap. What comes next? Now we know. It is the story not of one individual but of a national institution — the life and times of the Bank of England. I can’t wait for David Kynaston’s new history to reach the stage. We may have to call on Tim Rice, a revolutionary himself in the world of musicals, to generate a libretto from the long original text. But there is a wealth of material in this fascinating book. Often seen as a rather traditional and staid institution, the Bank of England’s more than 320-year life has been remarkably eventful.

Simon Drew

Spot the classical music

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Amanda Foreman

Man of the hour

Lead book review

Last year, more than 6,000,000 people visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. By contrast, barely 80,000 went to General Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb in New York City. Some would argue that the neglect is no better than Grant deserves. But others, notably Ron Chernow, believe it’s time for a rehabilitation. Why do Americans pay so little attention to the man who beat the South in the Civil War and went on to become the 18th president of the United States? At least part of the answer can be found in the terrible alchemy of war. It spews out vast quantities of lead but, for some people, also spins gold. Grant was a failure in his early life. He was born in Ohio in 1822 to a domineering father and emotionally distant mother.

7 December 2017

Anne Margaret Daniel

A complicated man

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‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ Lord Henry Wotton said that. It is always better to read Bob Dylan than to read about him. I said that. Two new books by Dylan, and two about him, prove my point. Just out in a lovely slim hardback is Dylan’s Nobel lecture (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). Its 32 pages have already been well picked over and much written about, but Dylan’s own account of the way he took ‘folk lingo’ and ‘fundamental’ literary themes — by way of Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and the Odyssey — to write ‘songs unlike anything anybody ever heard’ should be both read and heard.

Marcus Berkmann

Fiendishly puzzling

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There can be few challenges more daunting for the assiduous reviewer than a pile of Christmas ‘gift’ books sitting on his desk exuding yuletide jollity. But this year’s aren’t bad at all. Some are serious works of quasi-academic research, others are tooth-pullingly funny and one or two are utterly bizarre. For sheer magnificent pointlessness, you should look no further than Great British Pub Dogs by Abbie Lucas and Paul Fleckney (Robinson, £12.99). Lucas (a photographer) and Fleckney (a journalist) have, for no doubt pressing reasons of their own, roamed the nation to identify the ‘wonderful variety’ of Britain’s pub- dwelling dogs. Oh, and one pig, Frances Bacon.

Valentine Cunningham

Literary mafia boss

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Edward Garnett, radical, pacifist, freethinker, Russophile man of letters, was from the 1890s onwards for many years the pre-eminent fixer of English literature. D.H. Lawrence’s widow Frieda hailed him as ‘the midwife’ of Lawrence’s ‘genius’. And so he was; while he also nurtured Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Liam O’Flaherty, H.E. Bates and Henry Green. He presided as ‘reader’ over the shoals of expectant manuscripts piling up daily at the publishers — starting out at Fisher Unwin, doing the business for Heinemann and Duckworth, putting in long stints at Dent and ending up at Cape. Jonathan Cape headhunted Garnett for his new firm in 1921 as ‘the best reader’ in the land.

Claire Kohda

Perturbed spirits

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The events of this book take place where the world of the living and the world of the dead rub shoulders. Mama, 12-year-old Jojo’s grandmother, hears the voices — singing, talking, crying — of ghosts; Leoni, Jojo’s mother, sees her brother — ‘given, that he’s been dead 15 years now’ — sitting at the table, in the car, on the sofa between her and her friend, and every time she is high; and Richie, a 12-year-old boy whom Jojo’s grandfather, Pops, knew in prison, haunts Jojo, searching for a way ‘home’.

Paul Levy

Loving in triangles

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Dora Carrington (1893–1932) was at the heart of the Bloomsbury story. As an art student, she encountered the love of her life, the homosexual biographer Lytton Strachey; and this pair of Edwardian virgins actually managed to consumate their relationship in 1916. She loathed her given name, and insisted on her new friends, such as Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and the entire large clan of Stracheys using her surname alone. Whatever her merits as an artist, the dramatic story of her life with the Bloomsbury group, and death by her own hand, is so enthralling that it was made into a film, in 1995, with Emma Thompson playing the title role. Like her frustrated suitor and fellow Slade student, Mark Gertler, she painted at least one masterpiece.

Tanya Gold

What will Katie do next?

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In her memoir Rude, the former Mail Online columnist Katie Hopkins reveals her true self. She does this by accident, because she has no self-awareness, but it is there, on page 233: It may we’ll [sic] be that by the time you are reading this I will be going through a dominatrix phase… a fierce bedroom warrior, nipples pinched tight by clamps, an orange in my gob, more buckles than a boot store, locked into a metal girdle with only my front bottom on show. Oh Katie! Don’t you know anything? The dominatrix doesn’t wear the nipple clamps; she doesn’t suck the orange; she isn’t locked into a metal girdle. This is the costume of the masochist.

Jeff Noon

Close up and far away

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It’s difficult to keep a crime series going after 11 books but Boris Akunin manages it well in All the World’s a Stage (Weidenfeld, £20). His hero, Erast Fandorin, is now in his fifties. It’s 1911 in Russia, and while the Bolsheviks gather their power, another revolution is taking place in the theatre, and the Noah’s Ark Company are at the forefront of this new expression. When their star actress Eliza Altairsky-Lointaine’s life is threatened during a performance, Fandorin is called in to investigate. He’s working undercover as, of all things, the writer of their next production. This is a traditional crime drama in which members of the company are killed off one by one in ever more mysterious circumstances.

Andy Miller

From Bradford to Belgravia

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In her debut novel, Adelle Stripe recounts the brief, defiant life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. Dunbar was raised on the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford, one of eight siblings. Her first play, The Arbor, which premiered at the Royal Court in London when she was just 18, originated as a CSE English assignment. She was, according to one tabloid newspaper at the time, ‘a genius straight from the slums’. Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) was also a hit at the Royal Court and was subsequently filmed by the director Alan Clarke. Dunbar wrote one more play, Shirley, and died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990. She was 29.

Stephen Bayley

Cold comfort | 7 December 2017

Lead book review

Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the few tasks she could begin and end to total satisfaction. In this way are refrigerators evidence of our struggles, our hopes and our fears. Moreover, if you accept that the selection and preparation of food is a defining part of our culture, then you must acknowledge the primacy of the refrigerator in human affairs. In 2012, The Royal Society declared refrigeration to be the single most significant innovation in food technology since Fred Flintstone invented the barbecue. Me? I wrote these notes while chewing chilled sapphire grapes from Brazil, via Waitrose, messengers from our refrigerated global food chain. Your domestic fridge is your autobiography.

30 November 2017

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Richard Flanagan

This week in the books podcast I’m talking to Richard Flanagan, the Man Booker prize winning author of Gould’s Book of Fish and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about his new novel First Person.Drawing on Richard’s own experience of working as the ghostwriter for a celebrated con-man, First Person tells the story of a struggling young literary writer brought in to help write the memoir of a man who scammed Australia’s banks and public institutions out of millions. I talk to Richard about fiction and lies, what it means to be an Aussie writer now, post-Booker madness, Flaubert’s despair… and why North American writing really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Louis Amis

Only connect | 30 November 2017

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This newly translated novel by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina is really two books, spliced together in alternating chapters. One is a deeply researched account of the squalid peregrinations of James Earl Ray, who spent two months on the run after murdering Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. The other is a memoir charting the gradual attainment of personal and professional happiness on the part of the author himself. The reader feels confident that both protagonists will eventually arrive at their historically appointed destinies: handcuffs at Heathrow airport for Ray; a career as a celebrated author for Muñoz Molina. But considerable suspense surrounds the question of what on earth these two stories will have to do with each other.