Books Archives

… and an awesome beak

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The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the story of Michael George MacDonald Kidson (MGMK, as he was known), who taught history at Eton from 1965 to 1994 and was an influential tutor to hundreds of boys, often the wayward and the damaged. Jamie Blackett, who was taught by him there, has collected Kidsoniana from former pupils, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. What emerges is a portrait of a colourful maverick who bullied and consoled generations of schoolboys into success and happiness.

Kate Womersley

No pain, no gain

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It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed in conjunction with Agustin Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings’, Nicola Barker advises before her text gets underway. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a gimmick. But Barrios’s music strikes a deep chord with the rebellion at the heart of Barker’s 12th novel. Born in the 1880s, the Paraguayan’s playing was ridiculed because he preferred his guitar strings to be made of steel rather than fashionable gut. His dissonant art, like Barker’s today, could not be accused of courting admiration.

Horatio Clare

Formidable black talons…

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I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising — but reading David Cobham’s Bowland Beth: The Story of an English Hen Harrier I felt it again strongly. Your nature writer now has a hungry market, keen and generous publishers and a shelf in the bookshop. But anyone younger than my parents — unless they are very fortunate — has seen only a fraction of the natural richness our islands once held. And despite the sales and acclaim and translation rights, none of them — of us — has even pushed the boundaries laid down by our predecessors in the last century, when British nature really was something to write home about.

Saskia Baron

Some insights into autism

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The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a series of answers to the questions that puzzled those around him, Higashida’s lyrical explanations of his compulsions and unusual behaviours were revelatory and uplifting. Readers felt they understood the condition better as a result. Higashida was described as non-verbal; he composed his earlier book by touching letters on a card with an alphabet grid or tracing them on the palm of a hand. The spelled-out words were transcribed and the text edited by his mother. This sequel, Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight, has been edited together from Higashida’s subsequent blog posts and interviews he gave to the Big Issue in Japan.

Clinton Heylin

Pretentious rock on a grand scale

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There is many a book that has been cooked up over a liquid lunch, but rarely has one been so obviously ill-conceived as The Show That Never Ends, which comes complete with hyperbolic blurb from the esteemed novelist Michael Chabon. Yet what David Weigel provides is a masterclass in how not to write non-fiction. To paraphrase The Producers, having picked the wrong writer, the wrong editor, the wrong researcher, where did the publishers go right? The answer, sadly, is nowhere. I say sadly, because for some time there has been an abiding need for a good history of rock’s most reviled ‘aberration’: Prog (short for Pretentious Rock On a Grand scale).

Michael Tanner

The morality of conducting

Lead book review

Now he is the greatest figure for me, in the world. [Toscanini is] the last proud, noble, unbending representative (with Salvemini) of the Risorgimento & 19th-century ideals of human liberty... not just a great conductor but a symbol of discipline and spontaneity in one — the most morally dignified & inspiring hero of our time — more than Einstein, (to me) more than even the superhuman Winston [Churchill]. That is Isaiah Berlin writing in 1952, two years before his hero’s last concert, and as quoted by Harvey Sachs in this magnificent biography. Though Berlin’s encomium is extreme, it isn’t unrepresentative of the kind of things that were being written about Arturo Toscanini for many years before his death in 1957.

30 July 2017

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: starting over with Hemingway, Joyce, Hardy – and Dan Brown

The latest challenge was to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written in the style of the author in question. The pitfalls are many as an author approaches the finishing line. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster wrote that because of the need to round things off, ‘nearly all novels are feeble at the end’. He has a point, but some get it just right. Here’s what Robert McCrum has to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anything-but-feeble conclusion to The Great Gatsby (‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

27 July 2017

Sam Leith

Our thoughts on the Man Booker’s longlist

This year’s Man Booker longlist is a good one, I think. Lots of variety; big names and small ones; and an impressive geographical spread. Leans towards the experimental – and no harm in that. I’m pleased/relieved to say that The Spectator reviewed all but three of these books when they came out (Kamila Shamsie is forthcoming) – so I’m posting links here where appropriate. We liked almost all we reviewed, though a minority report was posted on Sebastian Barry and our Caroline Moore was cooler on Arundhati Roy than others have been. Apologies to Mozley, Fridlund and McCormack.

Julie Burchill

A cacophony of complaint

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What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old and subsequently goes on to eat herself to over 40 stone? Probably the sort of monster who’s never read a book about fatness as a feminist issue which she found convincing. Here we go again: ‘This is what most girls are taught — we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. And most women know this — that we are supposed to disappear.’ This ignores the fact that plump women were a benchmark of beauty in the past — when women had no rights whatsoever — and still are in cultures where, again, women have very few rights.

Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

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Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam. But this is a quibble. This is Cynthia Ozick, for goodness sake.

Adam Nicolson

Spirits from the vasty deep…

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‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays called The Sea Inside and now RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR together make a loose, meditative trilogy on people, the ocean, its inhabitants, its threats and delights, the comings and goings, the whole tidal business, its excitements and its ever-present grip on our minds and imaginations. The sea ‘deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike’, he says, and that all-pervasiveness is both his subject and his method. The rather exciting slidtogether words of this title (and of all his chapter titles) give a hint of what the book is about. This is not the sea in any historical, scientific or practical sense.

Emily Rhodes

The dark side of creativity

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In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a film in the 1960s — champagne, drugs, threesomes, gangsters, a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, hula-hooping girls and Pucci scarves flung over smears of vomit. Underneath, however, lies an intellectual question. The film is an adaptation of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, a story about obsessively trying to understand the secret key that unlocks an author’s work: ‘The idea that governs the whole and gives it meaning… a string that my pearls were strung on.’ (Ought I admit that I enjoyed Quinn’s saucy 1960s screenplay, spliced between chapters of the novel, more than James’s original?

Stuart Ritchie

Rules of behaviour

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It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid enough that it won’t be embarrassing in a few years when the science has moved on. Full scientific rigour entails tedious jargon and even more tedious equations, and nobody wants that. But neither should the messy, uncertain world of scientific research be oversimplified. In his lengthy new book, Behave, the Stanford neuroscientist primatologist Robert Sapolsky walks this tightrope as he explains the biology of humanity’s ‘best and worst’ behaviours. Behave is a crammed compendium of scientific findings, organised in an ingenious way.

Sean Mcglynn

Black prince or white knight?

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We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture of his aggressive temperament and brutal conduct in war; for others it derives from his armour, as displayed on his tomb at Canterbury Cathedral. The cover of Michael Jones’s splendid new biography of this compelling warrior depicts the latter, with Edward arrayed in his suit of plate, his long moustache drooping over the mail of his aventail and the palms of his gauntlets pressed together in prayer, as if seeking God’s forgiveness for all the death and misery he has wrought in his bloody career. Jones convincingly argues that Edward should not be too readily condemned, as he often is by a more censorious modern age.

D.J. Taylor

His own worst enemy | 27 July 2017

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One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out of the London Library. Here, alas, John Lodwick (1916–1959) scores particularly badly. If The Butterfly Net (‘filled with a lot of booksy talk and worldly philosophising,’ Angus Wilson pronounced in 1954) has run to all of five borrowers in the last five years, then The Starless Night (1955) seems not to have left the shelves since 1991. All this suggests that the title of Geoffrey Elliott’s valiant attempt to reconstruct Lodwick’s lost, vagrant and sometimes violent life is painfully accurate.

David Sexton

Down – if not out – in Paris

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Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who set off on an orgiastically murderous road-trip round France. In 2000, she became notorious when she collaborated on the hardcore film of the book, which ran into certification problems, with Alexander Walker fulminating about the complete collapse of public decency. Despentes has now published some 15 novels altogether, celebrated in France as grunge or ‘trash’ fiction — and a polemical, erratically feminist, memoir, King Kong Theory, describing her own experience of rape and prostitution, and calling for a new aggression in female sexuality.

Hugh Pearman

Towering extravagance

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The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying out for a big spike of concrete, steel and glass filled with a mix of superluxury hotel, ultraprime apartments and loads of speculative offices right above London Bridge station, with an expensive viewing gallery as a sop to public accessibility. Had it never happened, we would not regard the air it did not fill as a waste of atmosphere. The Shard is merely a gigantic financial speculation, majority-funded by Qatari money. And yet it is a very good piece of architecture. Its veteran Italian architect, Renzo Piano, succeeded in designing a (by London standards) startlingly tall tower that is not like other very tall towers.

Peter Parker

Drowning in mud and blood

Lead book review

George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne out by the centenary commemorations. The focus of each year so far has been Gallipoli, the Somme and now the Third Battle of Ypres, popularly known as Passchendaele. The basic story is familiar. On 31 July 1917, in torrential rain, General Haig launched an attack against German positions in the Ypres Salient. The troops had to advance over ground that rapidly turned into a quagmire, shells having already destroyed the area’s network of drainage ditches. The attacks would continue sporadically, against the advice of those on the ground and often in atrocious weather, until November.

20 July 2017

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Summer reads

This week, with the holidays approaching, I’m joined by the critic Alex Clark and Damian Barr — memoirist and host of the Savoy’s Literary Salon — to talk about summer reading. What do you take? What do you regret taking? Kindle, dead-tree or — 19th-century-style — cabin trunk full of books sent on ahead? Our discussion yielded a host of recommendations — from the brand new to the reliable old friends — that we hope will help you plan your own travelling library. For those who like the sound of some of these, we’ve picked them out and listed them below for your convenience….

Houman Barekat

A choice of short stories

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It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that intuitive critical impulse? Gordon Lish, who is best known as the editor of Raymond Carver’s short stories but has also written plenty of fiction in his own right, is familiar with this dilemma, and in White Plains (Little Island Press, £18.99) he has fun with it. These stories are replete with parenthetical um-ing and ah-ing over synonyms, punctuation and grammatical solecisms — a prolix testament to the agonies of prose composition: ‘Losing tone here, not retaining purchase on stance here, falling to pieces with the coward’s frolic along the phraseological here.

Daniel Hahn

The cold grip of fear

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A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the views stunning, the isolation splendid. He rented the home through Airbnb — surprisingly cheaply, as it happens. He has come to this place for a family holiday with his wife Susanna and their four-year-old, Esther, but also to get some peace and quiet in which to concentrate on his current job. His last movie, Besties, was a smash hit, and now the producer wants a screenplay for Besties 2, and the sooner the better. And as we read through his notebook, in which he’s hoping the screenplay will take shape, the whole set-up seems quite promising, really.

Henry Keswick

By Patten or design?

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My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to the TV set. I’m more assiduous: I have actually read this book under review. And Chris Patten’s latest memoir is a very enjoyable read — the account of a life of considerable privilege. Born into a middle-class family in suburban London, Patten won an exhibition to Balliol before — after a brief dalliance with US politics — he became a Conservative apparatchik and, in due course, an MP.

Alan Judd

The infamous four

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Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy to forget that we also spawned a few who worked for the Germans in the second world war. This book concerns four of them: John Amery, wastrel son of a Conservative cabinet minister; William Joyce, the Irish-American Nazi propagandist better known as Lord Haw-Haw; Harold Cole, soldier and petty criminal who sent 150 or more Resistance members to their deaths; and Eric Pleasants, a circus strong-man who disavowed national loyalties while donning German uniform. Their motives were mixed but, treachery apart, they had one thing in common: an insistence on their own rightness and thus their entitlement to whatever they wanted at the expense of all others.

James Walton

Playing Stalin for laughs

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Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even though The Zoo tackles subject matter that should, by rights, make for a punishingly bleak read. The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose misfortunes start with the fact that he’s growing up in Moscow in 1953 — and that a road accident when he was six damaged his brain, leaving him with a curious set of symptoms that couldn’t be worse suited to life under Stalin: a total lack of guile, a tendency to ask awkward questions and a face so angelically trustworthy that everybody tells him their deepest secrets.

Graham Robb

Something in the water

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‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built on and out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold village of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the limestone Karst region of western Slovenia, and the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence.’ From a strictly demographic point of view, it isn’t even much of a coincidence: about one quarter of the world’s population lives in limestone country or depends on it for its water. But the mind of a poet can feed on the slightest chance connection.

Ian Thomson

The new age of the refugee

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After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with some British West Indians for over half a century of exile. Yet 100 changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. The first mass immigration to British shores occurred in the late 19th century, when Ashkenazim arrived by the thousand after escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names and even their accents. The trappings of orthodoxy — beards, sidelocks — left them vulnerable to anti-Semitic abuse as they settled in cramped London streets north of Whitechapel Road.

Mick Brown

A strange vibration

Lead book review

Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of the so called ‘summer of love’ in 1967 the British historian Arnold Toynbee, on a visit to San Francisco, made his way to the Haight-Ashbury district — hippy central — to catch a concert by one of the Bay Area’s most popular bands, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Just what Toynbee, who was 78 at the time, made of the group’s epic exercise in free form, psychedelic improvisation, ‘The Fool’, Goldberg does not mention.

18 July 2017

David Butterfield

Would Jane Austen be amused or bemused by her £10 note quotation?

So, the new tenner has been unveiled today. Two centuries after her death, Jane Austen replaces Charles Darwin, who has enjoyed a 25-year sojourn with his hummingbirds. And yet it feels like this new note has been in the air for a while, though obscured by the hazy fug of controversy. First there was the (largely vegan) stew about animal tallow remaining part of the production process. All protests about what we’re doing with the natural world are worth hearing, so long as they are proportional. Quite what percentage of society occupies the intersection of the Venn diagram where strict boycotters of plastic bags, soap and cosmetics overlap with those who shun vehicular transport (tyres), candles and latex, I’m not sure.

13 July 2017

Jeff Noon

Latest crime fiction

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Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city and a small unruly town surrounding an oasis. One man is on the run through the desert regions: he has no name, no memory and no clue as to why he’s being pursued by at least three different parties, all intent on doing him harm. Other characters inter-mingle with this tale of woe: ineffectual detectives, a glamorous sales agent, a commune of hippies, and a paranoid spy whose sense of purpose evaporates in the midday heat. The sun bakes the streets, the sand, people’s faces. And their minds. The amnesiac really does suffer, painfully at times, running blindly from one problem to the next.