Books Archives

Books Podcast: Can Anna Karenina save your life?

My guest this week is the comedienne and writer Viv Groskop, and our subject is the greats of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature. In her new book The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Viv tells us (among other things) how Dostoyevsky can calm you down, how Anna Akhmatova can cheer you up and how Alexander Solzhenitsyn can keep you going when things look grim. Can Russia's gallery of madmen, drunks, suicides and exiles — with their canon of work about madmen, drunks, suicides and exiles — really be corralled into the self-help genre? If anyone can make the case, it’s Viv — who offers an enlightening, funny and quietly erudite tour of Russian literary history.

Brian Martin

Not for the fainthearted

More from Books

In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for the manslaughter of Angel Melendez. Alig, leader of New York’s Club Kids during the 1980s and early 1990s, features as a minor character in Jarett Kobek’s breakneck, crazed ride through NYC’s nightlife from 1986 to 1996. Although the novel is set in the club and drug scene, filled with addicts, gays, trans, queens and freaked-out weirdos, its main themes are serious and compassionate. Repeated constantly is the mantra that history repeats itself; but most important is the theme of enduring friendship. Despite the decadence, Kobek is optimistic.

Andrew Taylor

Riddles wrapped in a mystery

More from Books

His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students can only dream of. A psychological crime novel set in 19th-century Scotland, it became a surprise bestseller — and it was also shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. It is not an easy act to follow. Perhaps wisely, Burnet has chosen to make his next novel, his third, very different in both setting and tone. The A35 in question runs through north-eastern France between Strasbourg and Basel. One evening, at some point in the 1970s, a wealthy lawyer named Bertrand Barthelme is killed when his Mercedes goes off the road as he is driving home to the town of Saint-Louis. The death seems accidental.

Marcus Nevitt

Another Eden

More from Books

In December 1996 Martin Amis told listeners of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs what would relieve his solitude were he to end up cast away in paradise with one piece of music, a luxury and a book for company. He chose Coleman Hawkins’s version of the jazz standard ‘Yesterdays’ as his only record — seduction music, he suggested — and opted for the luxury of an unlimited Sky Sports subscription package. Amis’s preferred book, in this company, sounded similarly butch: John Milton’s Paradise Lost as edited by Alastair Fowler for the Longman Annotated English Poets series in 1968.

Steven Poole

Wonders will never cease

More from Books

Different people find different things impressive. Some claim, for instance, to experience a sense of wonder at the fact of being alive. But one has nothing to compare it to, so why find it surprising? Another sensibility will find joy in the observation of E.M. Cioran, the sardonic Romanian philosopher who wrote: ‘It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.’ Between these two poles, this book offers a charming compendium of the astonishments that may be experienced in a human life. It is, if you like, a miscellany of the sorts of things at which a secular reader may experience some analogue to religious awe. (Religion is mentioned late on, mainly for its social benefits.

Martin Gayford

Sex and the city | 23 November 2017

More from Books

‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this. Degas is after all one of the greatest names in European art, but there is much about him that remains enigmatic. Some of his works seem secretive, even surreptitious — the extraordinary monotypes he made in Parisian brothels, for example, or the many wax sculptures he created but neither cast nor exhibited. These and many other aspects of this curiously sympathetic man are explored in Degas: A Passion for Perfection by Jane Munro (Fitzwilliam Museum, £40), a fine book accompanying the current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (until 14 January 2018) marking the centenary of his death.

Juliet Nicolson

Listen with Auntie

More from Books

The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with a refuge from attack. Inside, a gender-segregating blanket divided the employees’ emergency dormitory in two. But such propriety masked the energy, idiosyncrasy and influence that ballooned within the Portland Place walls during the wartime years. From the morning of 3 September 1939, when Neville Chamberlain used the wireless to announce that Britain was at war with Germany, the same day that the Alexandra Palace indefinitely shut down all television broadcasting, radio became the nation’s indispensable source of up-to-the-minute information.

David Crane

Mother of the nation

More from Books

It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets of the Holy Roman Empire was to provide the royal families of Europe with some of their most dismal consorts. In the century and a half after George I came to the throne in 1714 Britain imported more than its fair share, but if in Caroline of Brunswick we drew quite possibly the rummest of the whole lot, in another and largely forgotten Caroline, Wilhelmine Karoline of Ansbach, the wife of George II, 18th-century Britain and Matthew Dennison struck, if not quite gold, then at least a good solid lump of iron.

20 November 2017

Robert Adès

Boozing and bitching with Germaine Greer: David Plante’s Difficult Women revisited

Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three David Plante New York Review of Books Classics, 2017, £10.99 Worlds Apart: A Memoir David Plante Bloomsbury, 2016, £10.99 Becoming a Londoner: A Diary David Plante Bloomsbury, 2014, £9.99 The novelist David Plante has been keeping a diary of his life since 1959. Now running to many millions of words, it covers several decades of literary and artistic life in London and Europe, and is archived every few years in the New York Public Library. His first foray into its publication came early, too early, with Difficult Women in 1983.

17 November 2017

Sam Leith

A h(a)ppy ending for Nicola Barker – a true experimentalist

Nicola Barker has just won the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction with her new novel H(a)ppy. She earned it. If anyone is writing fiction that deserves to be called experimental at the moment (the rubric for the prize is 'fiction at its most novel'), it’s Nicola Barker. Everything she does, as far as I can tell, is completely original – her work has included medieval jesters, dyspeptic golf pros, Indian mystics, Paraguayan guitarists and David Blaine – and each novel finds its own completely new form.

16 November 2017

Max Décharné

In cold blood

More from Books

If you search Google Images for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered top hat, or the determined features of the world champion boxer Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, the ‘Aldgate Sphinx’. In between falls a picture of the crime writer Ted Lewis perched on a stool at a cable-strewn film location in 1970, portable typewriter on his knees, cigarette on his lip, and a sardonically knowing look which says that after years of struggle, overnight success has finally arrived. The film was Get Carter, anote-perfect transcription of Lewis’s hardboiled masterpiece Jack’s Return Home, published in February that year.

Stephen Daisley

The twice-promised land

More from Books

If books about the Israeli-Arab conflict were building blocks, the Palestinians would have their own state already and then some. Most volumes bring little that is fresh or challenging, so selectivity is key. Daniel Gordis and Benny Morris are essential, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev unavoidable. Take time on unsexy stylists like Mustafa Kabha or Anita Shapira; they will reward you. Anything by John Pilger or Ilan Pappé should be tossed aside like an iffy shawarma wrap, and for the same reason. Disconcertingly, Ian Black defies this framework. Enemies and Neighbours, his history of a century of blossoming and bloodshed in the Holy Land, is not revelatory and yet it is quietly compelling.

James Evans

Catfight at court

More from Books

Apart from glorying in a memorable name, Lettice Knollys has chiefly been known for her connections — with her second husband, Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester; with the woman who was deeply in love with Dudley, Queen Elizabeth I; and with her hot-headed son who, as Earl of Essex, for a time enjoyed a flirtatious closeness to the older Queen. Until now, there has been no biography of the Countess of Leicester in her own right. Elizabeth, having been close to Lettice in her youth, was enraged and embittered by her marriage to Dudley, the one man in the Queen’s life who was ‘completely off limits’, according to Nicola Tallis.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Melvyn Bragg on William Tyndale

In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to Melvyn Bragg about his fascinating book on William Tyndale — which makes a case for the greatness of this dissenting British preacher who lived his life in exile and met his end on a bonfire, but whose translation of the Bible into English laid the foundations for the King James Version and seeped everywhere into the language of Shakespeare. Melvyn talks about why Tyndale never quite got his due — and why Thomas More wasn’t nearly as nice a chap as posterity tends to think. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like this every Thursday.

Stuart Kelly

It’s grim up north

More from Books

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the Costa First Book Award. His new novel, Devil’s Day, is equally good, even though its similarities slightly muffle the surprises. Like his debut, it is a work of gooseflesh eeriness. The Loney artfully described the north-west coast of England; Devil’s Day as proficiently conjures the fells of an area hazily between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Loney featured a damaged family on a religious retreat encountering old paganisms; Devil’s Day has our protagonist, John Pentecost, returning to the family farm for the funeral of his grand-father, the Gaffer, which coincides with a ritual for placating the devil before the flock is brought in for the winter.

Laura Freeman

Pulling through

More from Books

Grief is not being able to eat a small boiled egg. ‘Could you face an egg?’ the widowed Jean asks her daughter Eve in Susie Boyt’s sixth novel, Love & Fame. It is not long after Jean’s husband, Eve’s father, John Swift, a sitcom actor, a national treasure, has died. Eve can’t face an egg; Jean has lost her appetite for anything but eggs. One small boiled egg, morning, noon and night. This is a clever, wise, often sad book about failure, dashed hopes and bereavement. It could be bleak, but Boyt is fiercely funny, skewering fads and self-help trends. A professional de-clutterer in the Marie Kondo mode is called ‘the Prim Reaper’. The novel opens with a stop-start list of modern platitudes and wellness nuggets: You tried Tranquiltea?

Rose Prince

On the wild side

More from Books

The terroir of the Kentish coast is faultlessly represented in The Sportsman (Phaidon, £29.95), a book of recipes from an acclaimed pub restaurant in the village of Seasalter, close to Whitstable. On the bill of fare (it’s that English) you will find slip soles and thornback ray, salt marsh lamb and oysters, seaweeds of all sorts, wild berries, venison and much else from this landscape with its watery edge. The food is seasoned with home-panned sea salt and the kitchen churns its own butter. The Sportsman’s chef-proprietor,Stephen Harris, writes that terroir is a troublesome word that has come to mean too many things, especially with wine. The French have perhaps deliberately mystified it, he says.

Julie Burchill

Gathering moss

More from Books

Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I’ve been for the past four decades. It’s hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I’ve met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive in the Antipodes, while my colleagues were regularly flown to the USA and supplied with groupies and cocaine as if they themselves were rock stars. And then punk came along and rocked the gravy boat — and the internet finished the job. Last time I saw a copy, it was lying wanly in a bin marked FREE — PLEASE TAKE ONE.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Problems of her own

More from Books

If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato nation, it will make you feel great affection for it. Sprawled on L-shaped sofas with comfort cushions or slobbering dogs on their tummies, or sitting side by side on armchairs with a vase of carnations on a doily between them, the programme’s chosen telly-watchers make what must be the most unselfconscious, and therefore genuine, remarks spoken by anyone on air. There’s no doubt in my mind that Giles and Mary are the most watchable of all the watchers.

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 16 November 2017

Lead book review

Daniel Swift I spent too much of this (and last) year reading anaemic updatings of Shakespeare plays: pale novels which borrowed plots and missed points and, oddly, always misunderstood the minor characters. After these, Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press, £9.99) came as a relief and a surprise. Her novel is big, beautiful, and most of all bold: a rewriting of King Lear, transplanted to modern day Delhi, which is both a dazzlingly original reading of the play and a full novel in its own right. A masterpiece, and by a long way my book of the year. Graham Robb Mike Lankford’s genial and sassy biography Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci (Melville House, £19.25) has none of the stuffiness of that exhausting genre.

9 November 2017

Laura Beatty

Angel and demon

More from Books

Read cover to cover, a book of essays gives you the person behind it: their voice, the trend of their thinking, their tastes and the nature of their engagement with the world. So, here are two, one from each end of the human spectrum. Think of Milton’s Archangel Raphael, intellectually wide-ranging, lucid, informative and fair, and you have Francis Spufford. Think of his darkly glittering Satan — vivid, passionate, partisan and fatally persuasive — and you have Martin Amis. Read these books together and you have, in essay terms, a Miltonic whole. These are collections of what might be called ‘pre-loved’ pieces, not originally designed to cohere, so they have been washed and brushed for resale.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Anthony Powell

In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to Anthony Powell’s biographer Hilary Spurling about why A Dance to the Music of Time, far from being a museum piece, is a subtly avant-garde work. We talk about the rise and fall of literary reputations, why Powell wasn’t a snob, his rivalry with Evelyn Waugh, and — unexpectedly — how her biography of Matisse bears on her work on Powell. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Daniel Hahn

The art of deception | 9 November 2017

More from Books

Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a charismatic Nazi concentration camp survivor, and more. In January 2005 he addressed the Spanish parliament to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is, everyone agrees, an extraordinary man. Heroic, almost. The thing is, his extraordinary, heroic biography is at least partly a lie. But which parts? In The Impostor, the novelist Javier Cercas seeks to disentangle Marco’s lies from those small provable truths supporting them.

Stephen Bayley

High wire act

More from Books

‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation that turned PR and branding into art forms, wanted homegrown creative heroes. In design there were Charles Eames and George Nelson with their homey hopsack suits and wash’n’wear shirts, their sensible Wasp homilies: a counterattack against imported — and often baffling — exotics from the Bauhaus. It was the same in fine art. Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) was a roughneck from cowboy country in Wyoming who became a darling of the media, not least because of his readily reportable deplorable behaviour.

Ian Thomson

Italy’s road to ruin

More from Books

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without.

Mary Keen

The future isn’t rosy

More from Books

Emotional geography is now a recognised academic subject. Is emotional botany heading the same way? This is a year for thoughtful books about plants and the way they affect lives, what they make people feel and how we can respect nature. Many of the year’s works might appeal to non-gardeners. Readers hoping for rose-tinted pages may be disappointed. Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £14.99) is ostensibly a diary of his allotment over a little more than a year. But, he writes: ‘Sometimes, when I think of this book, I am almost bewildered. It has taken such a turn. It was to be about gardening... with personal stuff added in.’ The editor of the Observer food magazine, Jenkins grows exotic vegetables and describes them lusciously.

Claudia Massie

A blunt instrument of war

More from Books

It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura lamenting ‘the number of bad books that have been written and will be written’ about it. Fortunately, James Attlee’s study of Picasso’s superstar work of art is not a bad book and he builds on a solid cultural and historic understanding of the painting to collate 80 years of evolving reaction to it. Attlee begins in May 1937, when, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republic commissioned Picasso to create a painting for its pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. They hoped the famous artist would help secure sympathy, funds and, significantly, political intervention in the Republican cause.

Hugh Thomson

Blowing hot and cold | 9 November 2017

More from Books

I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how capricious Homeric weather can be. In the space of a few days the wind shifted dramatically to three different points of the compass — and none of them was the gentle westerly Zephyr that brought Odysseus and his men back to almost spitting distance of their homeland. Almost, because just as they approached, the crew became suspicious of the goatskin bag in which Aeolus had helpfully packed away the other hostile winds and let them all loose. Nick Hunt tries to track down a few of Europe’s more errant and potent winds. He starts with the homegrown Helm, which blusters across the Pennines.

Nigel Jones

The revolution devours its children

More from Books

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of his native Georgia, and was an avid reader of history, novels and Marxist-Leninist theory, marking the pages of the 20,000 books in his library with expletives scrawled with the same coloured crayons with which he signed mass death warrants and international treaties: ‘Rubbish!’, ‘Piss off!’, ‘Fool!’, ‘Scumbag!’, ‘Ha-Ha!