Books Archives

Alice’s restaurant

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Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known celebrity cook, the person who inspired the planting of Michelle Obama’s White House vegetable garden, the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Légion d’Honneur, vice-president of Slow Food International, the founding figure of California cuisine. She is the mentor of Sally Clarke and, claims Wikipedia, of René Redzepi and Yotam Ottolenghi. It all began in 1971 with a simple French restaurant in Berkeley, California, which she called Chez Panisse in homage to the films of Marcel Pagnol. It served a no-choice menu, costing $3.95, consisting of the traditional dishes she’d tasted during her year abroad in France.

Andy Miller

Having your cake

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For those in the know, Jimmy Webb is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, up there with Lennon and McCartney, Brian Wilson, Goffin and King, Holland, Dozier and Holland, and Bacharach and David. The hits he wrote for Glen Campbell alone earned him his place in the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame: ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Galveston’ and of course ‘Wichita Lineman’, the dying fall of which — ‘And I need you more than want you/ And I want you for all time’ — is so perfect that I am fighting back tears even as I type it. The song was written in an afternoon at the request of Campbell who, after the success of ‘Phoenix’ was looking for ‘something about a town’.

A.N. Wilson

Trials and Trinitarians

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John Calvin believed that human nature was a ‘permanent factory of idols’; the mind conceived them, and the hand gave them birth. Isaac Newton acquired a copy of Calvin’s Institutes when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661 as a teenager. By the time he was a mature man, however, Newton’s determined effort to strip the mind of superstitious superfluities had far outstripped the austere predestinarian of Geneva. As a Fellow of Trinity, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1669 onwards, Newton was obliged to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. It was noted that, most unusually for a Cambridge academic at this period, he refused to take Holy Orders.

Katrina Gulliver

Ratings war

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Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years. The first and second world wars were the most anticipated conflicts in history. Military strategists and popular novelists all published the wars they envisioned in the decades before. Whether in the spycraft of Erskine Childers or the science-fiction of H.G. Wells, the reading public was warned of the carnage to come in many imaginative forms. But all that anticipation did little to avert the bloodbaths. In this book, Lawrence Freedman offers a detailed analysis of how we have planned (or failed to plan) for conflict. Into the 20th century, military planning suffered from still focusing on the model of the Napoleonic wars, with the notion of the decisive battle.

Christian Wolmar

Going places

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Stations, according to Simon Jenkins, are the forgotten part of the railway experience. People love the trains, the journey, the passing countryside, the leisurely pace and the locomotives, especially steam ones. The stations, however, have been rather ignored. Sure, the ubiquity of Prêt, Upper Crust and all those coffee chains on station concourses has made the experience somewhat tawdry at times, but even the worst is better than an airport. Brief Encounter would not have worked in a departure lounge. As Jenkins discovers, there is still plenty to celebrate and enjoy, and the modern disdain of stations is partly borne of our reluctance to linger in the face of modern life’s myriad competing demands.

Andrew Taylor

Apostle of gloom

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Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of the grim and darkly fascinating Wallander series of Swedish crime novels, though he also produced a formidable body of other novels, as well as plays, screenplays and children’s books, before his death in 2015. After the Fire is his last book, now published in an admirably smooth English translation. It reprises the main setting and many of the characters of an earlier book, Italian Shoes, including the narrator. Fredrik is a former surgeon whose medical career was destroyed after he botched an operation. Now nudging 70, he lives alone on a bleak island in the Stockholm archipelago. The novel opens one autumn night when he wakes to find his house on fire.

Philip Hensher

Of his time

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Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In each case, one suspects, the subjects hardly realised they were being observed.

21 September 2017

Harry Ritchie

Learning to talk

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One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been blessed by such great popularisers — your Attenboroughs, your Sagans, your Dawkinses. Alas, there is one inglorious exception to this marvellous rule — linguistics. A discipline that has produced enormous and enormously important advances over the last century — but not one linguist who has managed to tell the rest of the world about them. Steven Pinker did have a bestseller with The Language Instinct, but he was moonlighting from his day job in neuropsychology.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Demonised by history

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Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the Great.’ In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost quality: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals’. Remind you of anyone?

Richard Davenporthines

Muddled in minutiae

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‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his quarterly review of literature, the Criterion, which had its first issue in October 1922. Eliot wanted an eminent French author as a contributor: ‘the only name worth getting is Proust’, he told Ezra Pound. As the founding editor of the New York Times books website, Goldstein is attuned to cultural fashions, publicity drives and the politicking of literary factions. And so he makes a painfully reductive explanation of Eliot’s remark: ‘The importance of Proust was publitical above all.’ 1922 was the publication year of P.G.

Neel Mukherjee

Deep learning

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Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate career in non-fiction. He trained as an academic (English literature, mathematics, linguistics and computer analysis of stylistics), taught for several years in the US and in South Africa, and continues to translate, write essays and reviews — most notably for the New York Review of Books — and introductions to books. This third volume of non-fiction pieces, Late Essays 2006-2017, gathers a selection mostly from the NYRB and from his introductions to a series of novels translated into Spanish and published by the Spanish-language press El Hilo de Ariadna.

Ian Thomson

The cult of Holy Bob

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The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy Cliff as the country boy Ivan Martin, who becomes a Robin Hood-like criminal outlaw amid the ganja-yards and urban alleys of the Jamaican capital of Kingston. The film’s director Perry Henzell, a ganja-smoking white Jamaican who had been sent to board at Sherborne school, was influenced by the gritty ‘newsreel’ school of Italian neo-realism (Bicycle Thieves, Obsession), which aimed for a documentary immediacy off the street. The soundtrack, assembled by Henzell in under a week, effectively introduced reggae to white British audiences. Without the soundtrack album, it is fair to say, reggae would not have taken hold in Britain in the way it did.

Owen Matthews

The hunger

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In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black Packard automobile would draw up to the door of the handsome pre-revolutionary mansion her family shared with other senior Party cadres to take her father to his job as Party boss at the Kharkov Tractor Factory. When he returned in the evening her father would be carrying bulging packets of sausages and meat from the factory canteen. Lenina did not remember wanting for anything. Yet in reality Kharkov, like all Ukraine’s cities in that terrible year, was an island of plenty in a sea of starvation. All over Ukraine millions of peasants were dying of hunger in a massive, man-made famine deliberately unleashed by the Soviet state.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Harsh, but entertaining

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When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal. Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption. Henry Dunbar is an 80-year-old Canadian mogul who founded and developed the world’s second-most influential media conglomerate. His older daughters, Abigail and Megan, want the wealth and power; his youngest daughter, Florence, wants only his love.

Jane Ridley

Britain über alles

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David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had known. In the 1960s the town planners demolished much of Victorian Birmingham. The bulldozing of 19th-century cities coincided with — and helped to cause — a boom in Victorian history, led by Asa Briggs. As a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Cannadine wrote a thesis on Birmingham’s 19th-century aristocratic landowners. Since then, there has been a torrent of academic research on 19th-century history, and this has had a ‘deadening and dampening effect’. The Victorians have gone out of fashion. Historians have migrated to the rich pastures of the 18th century or the newly available archives of the 20th.

14 September 2017

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 September 2017

Low life

The army patrols at Nice airport go around three abreast, steely-eyed, fingers on the trigger. They walk slowly and scrutinise the passengers carefully, assessing each individual for minute clues to their psychology. They take the incredibly boring job incredibly seriously, or appear to do so, which must be great comfort to those with honourable intentions but a nervous disposition. Contrast, then, these highly disciplined men with the armed pair I saw recently patrolling the floor of the departures lounge at Bristol airport. One had a comic, fall-guy, laughter-prone face, as characterful and funny to look at as George Formby’s. His boon companion looked like a great fellow to sink a few pints of cooking lager with, then go to a football match.

Jenny Colgan

A game of cat-and-mouse

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All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive, it took various voices from the gangs, from families left behind and the thin blue line, joining them in a rousing cacophony that made up a frightening mosaic of a hot, heady, violent time. In Safe, he returns to more recent history, choosing the 2008 financial crisis to chart a game of cat-and-mouse between Ghost, a drug-addict turned federal safe-cracker (who has stolen a large amount of money to fund the father of his dead lover’s sinking property business) and Glasses, the gang member tasked with getting the money back. There are two problems with this.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How not to be a boy

In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the comedian and writer Robert Webb — whose moving and funny new book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls “The Trick”: the gender expectations that he identifies as causing many of the agonies of his adolescence and young manhood. What is it to be a man? Are we doomed to lives of inarticulacy, shagging, fighting and drinking — giving pain and fear their only outlet in anger? Sounds good to me — but Webb thinks there might be a better way… You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Craig Raine

Sappho in America

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We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography of the choreographer Twyla Tharp, Joan Acocella acknowledges this in an untroubled way. If you want to know what Baryshnikov was like in bed, she advises, look at p. 208 in a bookshop: ‘Tharp gives him better marks than [Gelsey] Kirkland’ in her 1986 autobiography Dancing on my Grave. On the other hand, we have our settled idea about Elizabeth Bishop, a famously unconfessional poet, marked out from Lowell, Sexton and Berryman by her continence, her wry tone, her meticulous descriptive accuracy and her beautiful containment.

Jonathan Mcaloon

Looking back, losing bits

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As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he was born. He has a tendency almost to romanticise his loneliness, turn it into witticisms. It ‘would have been sad,’ he thinks, ‘a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his childhood. Looking for the girls he’d fancied 40 years before. Finding them.’ He is followed by a man who claims to be called Ed Fitzpatrick, and to know Victor from school. ‘Everything about him was abrupt, a bit violent.’ Victor can’t place him.

Tim Martin

Madness in Manhattan

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Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel — as though, these days, anyone needed reminding. Set in New York and running between the start of the Obama administration and the rise of Trump, this book about gangsterism, art, dynastic ambition, secret identities and the tragedy of plan-making charts the descent of America into satire-killing oddity and social danger as it follows the lives of the Goldens, a family of larger-than-life Indian squillionaires who come to live in Manhattan in the wake of the 2008 Bombay terror attacks. The Goldens are Nero, a Gatsbyish businessman whose past and business interests are murky, and his sons Petronius (Petya), Apuleius (Apu) and Dionysus (D).

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Christianity triumphant – and destructive

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In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of being overcome by lust at the sight of their own bodies. Some concealed their nakedness in outfits woven from palm fronds. One designed a leather suit that also covered his head. There were holes for his mouth and nose, but not, apparently, his eyes. There was a monk who spent three years with a stone in his mouth to remind him not to speak. Another wept so hard, his tears dug a hollow in his chest. There were those who went about on all fours. St Anthony, one of the founders of monasticism, chose to make his home in a pigsty. St Simeon Stylites stood on a pillar for 37 years until his feet burst open. What are we to take away from all this?

John Jolliffe

Swagger and squalor

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This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is certainly a useful summary, with much illuminating detail to carry the story forward: describing the opulence that was so much in evidence, Simon Heffer mentions the diamond which adorned Lord Randolph Churchill’s cigarette holder. He kicks off with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee of 1877, and Disraeli’s proclamation of her as Empress of India. At home, swagger and squalor went side by side, and living conditions, both rural and urban, were often appalling. The population increased from 35 million in 1881 to over 40 million by 1906.

David Crane

Raising Cain

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It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the odd one might have heard of Benjamin Lay. In many ways this is understandable enough, but if anyone deserves to muscle in on the mildly self-congratulatory and largely middle-class pantheon of Abolitionist Saints, it is the gloriously improbable and largely forgotten Quaker throwback and hero of Marcus Rediker’s generous and absorbing act — his own phrase — of ‘retrospective justice’. There was probably only one period of English history in which Lay would have found himself at home, and that period, along with all the hopes and aspirations it had given birth to, had ended 20 years before he was born.

Christopher Ondaatje

Courting trouble

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Desmond de Silva was born in the colony of Ceylon in the early months of the second world war, the only son of a barrister. After the Japanese entered the war in 1941, Ceylon was in the front line and it faced an onslaught. Winston Churchill appointed Lord Mountbatten as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, based at Peradeniya, just outside Kandy. De Silva’s grandfather George E. de Silva was a member of the Ceylon war council, and Mountbatten, for Desmond, was ‘Uncle Dickie’. Four decades later, he was to marry Mountbatten’s great niece, Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia. De Silva’s life, as seen through these episodic memoirs, has a Boy’s Own quality.

Ian Thomson

Redcoats and runaways

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Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during President Michael Manley’s socialist experiment, Maroons were hailed as forerunners of Black Power. Rastafari militants and back-to-Africa ideologues saw a nobility in Maroon descent. The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey had claimed Maroon ancestry for himself; as has, more recently, the British Jamaican hip-hop singer Ms Dynamite (whose debut album, A Little Deeper, remains a UK drum and bass masterwork). In Jamaica, at any rate, Maroons fought exclusively for their own liberty, not for the overall liberty of the island’s enslaved Africans.

Houman Barekat

Folk-tale redux

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Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter, eking out an autarkic existence as squatters on land belonging to the unscrupulous Mr Price; on a typical day they are engaged in woodwork, plucking mallards or tickling trout. Price’s personal fiefdom operates outside the law of the land, with violent henchmen enforcing his will. The children’s father had once worked as a fixer for him before turning renegade, rallying Price’s exploited workers and tenants into collective action to improve their lot. Price’s vendetta against him is pursued with icy determination across the pages of Fiona Mozley’s debut novel: ‘He must return to the fold.

Hilary Spurling

True grit | 14 September 2017

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As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered their offices with mildly erotic female images, Claire Tomalin stuck up pictures of sexy men: ‘Some found it hard to believe I could do anything so shocking.’ Double standards, casual sexism and blanket prejudice were normal at the time, even on a relatively civilised national paper. I know because I had the same job a few years earlier at The Spectator. Men ran the world and women answered the phone. Claire had come down from Cambridge with a first in 1955, but the BBC refused her a job on the grounds that it did not employ female graduates.

Sam Leith

The journey of Adam and Eve

Lead book review

Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we observe it has never been the easiest of things. But heaven knows, people did try. Well enough known, I suppose, is the work of the 17th-century Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who totted up all those begats to establish that the creation of the earth took place at six in the afternoon on 23 October 4005 bc. (‘He added,’ reports Stephen Greenblatt, ‘that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday, November 10.’) In like manner, in the 18th century, a French mathematician called Denis Henrion calculated, from a bunch of what were presumably dinosaur bones, that Adam had been 123’ 8” tall and that Eve had been 118’ 9”.