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Laughter and tears

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The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in 35 languages, was made into a film, and turned him overnight into one of the most listened to voices in the Arab world. What followed — Chicago, set in the city in which Al Aswany did his masters degree in dentistry, and some short stories — did not have quite the charm of his sprawling houseful of driven, troubled, passionate characters trying to survive in a country of extreme social ills. The Automobile Club of Egypt is a second Yacoubian, a saga built around an institution, rich in absurdity and colour and at the same time an important social satire and a harsh criticism of modern Egypt.

Stav Sherez

Anatomy of a bestseller

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Every four seconds, somewhere in the world, a Lee Child book is sold. This phenomenal statistic places Child alongside Stephen King, James Patterson and J.K. Rowling as one of the world’s bestselling novelists. But what makes the Jack Reacher books so successful? This is one of the questions Andy Martin, a lecturer in French and Philosophy at Cambridge, sets out to answer in this intriguing and uniquely unclassifiable book. Reacher Said Nothing, however, isn’t a work of literary criticism or a how-to guide. Martin contacted Child and asked whether he could observe the entire writing process for the 20th Reacher novel, Make Me. Amazingly, Child said yes. ‘So far I have no title, no real plot....

Alan Johnson

Of hearts and heads

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Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as men of principle even by those who abhorred their politics. Marx may have disparaged religion as the opiate of the people (and, in an even more memorable phrase, the sigh of the oppressed), but it was difficult to avoid the term ‘religious zeal’ when describing the way men like Dickie, Jock and Maurice approached their union work. By the time I knew them they’d long passed the stage of seeking converts.

Harry Mount

Altar, font and arch and pew

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John Betjeman, the patron saint of English parish churches, once warned against praising British buildings too much. Be careful before you call Weymouth the Naples of Dorset, he said. How many Italians call Naples the Weymouth of Campania? Saint John was spot on, of course. When it comes to the pure ideals of church architecture, London isn’t a patch on Rome or Florence. The Holy Redeemer Church in Exmouth Market, Islington, may be inspired by Santo Spirito in Florence, but it doesn’t match, let alone surpass, its beauties. Still, as Michael Hodges’s scatty book shows, my God, there’s an awful lot of beauty, and intrigue wrapped up in London’s 1,200 Anglican and Catholic churches. Even this hefty volume can only squeeze in 420 of them.

D.J. Taylor

Cold comfort for Gibbons fans

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One of the great fascinations of a ‘lost’ work by a famous name dredged up out of the vault after a lapse of several decades lies in establishing precisely when it was written. The jacket of Pure Juliet offers no clue, but parenthetic mention of Star Wars being on at the Odeon and an old lady who fears the depredations of the IRA suggests a composition mark sometime in the late 1970s — at any rate somewhere near the point when Stella Gibbons (1902–1989) was approaching her 80th year. Take away these half-dozen references to such sure-fire signifiers of the Callaghan era as comprehensive schools and this awful ‘punk’ music and what remains could very easily have been filed in the 1930s.

Stephen Bayley

The painter as poser

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Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was Buffet’s original backer and boyfriend, later performing identical roles for Yves Saint-Laurent, turning the sensitive designer into a global ‘luxury brand’ and turning himself into one of France’s richest men with pistonnage to spare. Foulkes is the accomplished writer on style who, in this new book, aims to rehabilitate an artistic reputation which he feels has been dissed by the narrow prejudices of the art-historical establishment. To a degree, this is true.

Tim Lewens

The other glorious revolution

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There was no science before 1572, the year that Tycho Brahe saw a new star in the night sky above him. To be sure, the Greeks had made efforts to present their knowledge of nature in a systematic fashion, but they lacked the tools — more specifically they lacked the ways of thinking — that have allowed investigators over the past 300 years to question the traditions that have preceded them, to probe the inner workings of nature, and in so doing to build increasingly informative accounts of the world that surrounds us. These ways of thinking were invented over the course of the 17th century: a period whose momentous significance for all that would come after amply justify naming it ‘the scientific revolution’.

Eric Weinberger

Staying put

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Publishing a ‘New York’ novel in the months after 11 September 2001 is a surefire, if accidental, way to make it immediately out of date. Especially one about parking. There’s certainly a parking novel to be written in the age of global terror and suicide attackers, but it will have a more security-conscious bent than the amusing small novel Calvin Trillin achieved that dreadful autumn, about a diffident late-middle-aged New Yorker looking for a spot to park from which, as the title suggests, Tepper Isn’t Going Out. Bollards and concrete impediments, armed assault teams, helicopters overhead and a discarded parking ticket or Syrian passport in the glove compartment: those are the sorts of details the novel for the new age will bear.

Rose Prince

Carrots — and no stick

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Never mind teaching children to cook: they need to be taught to eat. Obvious? Totally, but this is the choosing part of eating, not the chomping and swallowing we are born to do. Yet, terrific survivors that omnivores have proven to be, they do not know poison from medicine unless told so. So, if you were a cave baby all those eons ago, your cave parents would have pointed out the poisonous berries from the nutritious ones, and later on taught you which animals to hunt. Today’s infants face rather more complicated food lessons, and their parents a horrendous task if they are to bring up a brood with good eating habits and perhaps more importantly a relationship with food that is just as healthy.

Hilary Spurling

One for all

Lead book review

Mei Fong tells the routine story of a girl who managed to conceal an illegal pregnancy until the baby was almost due, when family planning officials surrounded her hiding place at night. ‘She ran and ran and ran until she came to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck. She stood there and began to cry.’ Through her tears she explained that she needed the baby to stop her husband and his parents abusing her for not producing a son. This was the mid 1990s, but the same thing could have happened in rural China at any point in the past 1,000 years, except for the dénouement. Officials dragged the girl from the water, and hauled her off to hospital where the baby was killed.

7 January 2016

Sarah Crompton

Dancing like a demon

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‘Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough,’ said Gustave Flaubert. He might have been talking about this slim volume, which takes a slimmer subject and inflates it to an epic of noble proportions. The subject is unpromising. ‘This is the story of a man who took part in a dance contest,’ runs the opening line. It’s hardly one to set many hearts racing, especially since the event in question is no glitzy Strictly Come Dancing, screened on television for millions. Instead, Leila Guerriero’s focus is the world championships in malambo, an obscure Argentinian dance, whose annual apogee takes place in Laborde, a town of 6,000 inhabitants in the middle of the flat, fertile pampas.

Tom Miller

A separation of powers

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In 2014, Beijing and Moscow signed a US$400 billion deal to deliver Russian gas to Chinese consumers. Construction of the Power of Siberia pipeline began last summer on the banks of the Amur river, known in Chinese as the Black Dragon river. It marks a rapprochement between two powers who have warily eyed each other across the frigid water of the Amur, which forms the border, for more than three centuries. According to Beijing’s man in Moscow, ‘China and Russia are together now like lips and teeth.’ In Black Dragon River, Dominic Ziegler attempts to explain how they got there.

Lewis Jones

A posh Del Boy

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The Art of Smuggling comes garlanded with fraternal encomia from Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks, Phil Sparrowhawk (author of Grass) and Maurice O’Connor (author of The Dealer), but it seems the author was hardly a master of his chosen art. As Eddie the Eagle was to skiing, so was Francis Morland to drug trafficking. Spectacularly unsuccessful but heroically persistent, he was busted six times and spent more than 15 years in jail. A better title might have been How Not to Smuggle. I was more than once reminded of an Only Fools and Horses Christmas special, featuring a tall Del Boy with a posh accent.

Philip Clark

More terrible beauty

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At some point during your reading of this book the realisation might dawn, if you didn’t already know about his creative double life, that Richard Skelton demonstrates an unusual sensitivity to sound. Barbed wire unfolds over a dry-stone wall, an image which he reimagines as a mutant stringed instrument. ‘What harmonies would result if all were sounded in unison?’, Skelton asks — a question which he is uniquely placed to answer. Beyond the Fell Wall is a graceful meditation upon the relationship between landscape, language and sound, written by the most strikingly original composer of electronic music currently working in the UK — a man who spends his days exploring and gathering in the sounds of the fell land that borders his Cumbrian home.

Jeff Noon

A choice of crime novels | 7 January 2016

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It’s often the case that present-day crimes have their roots in the past. Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild (Orion, £19.99, Spectator Bookshop, £16.99) uncovers abuse and ill-treatment in a care home in the 1980s, and the murder of a teenage boy. That terrible act echoes through the years. When three people receive threatening notes, and two of them end up being murdered, the Edinburgh police fear that more will become victims. Enter John Rebus in his 20th outing. Retired now, but as canny as ever, he picks at the connections between the present and the past with a sure, unblinking eye. The search for justice gives him life. Rankin puts his books together in a methodical way; line by line, idea by idea, the story builds up and takes you over.

Christopher Hawtree

The great inscape

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‘I am 12 miles from a lemon,’ lamented that bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith on reaching one country posting. He was related to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a priest who, in the popular imagination, would quite possibly balk at the offer of a lemon. After all, 30 years before Prufrock, Hopkins did not dare to eat a peach, fearful of its delicious savour when offered one by Robert Bridges in a Roehampton garden. Hopkins was a complex man who delighted in simple things. Our sense of his view of the world has been complicated by the circumstances of his publication. Forbidden to publish his great ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, he largely squirrelled away, or burnt, his work.

Timothy Snyder

Between the woods and the water

Lead book review

At the beginning of the historical record, the lands that we now call Ukraine were a reservoir of fantasy. Achilles probably did not sail from a Greek port on the north of the Black Sea up the rapids of the Dnipro River to find his final resting place, as some Greeks once believed. Nor is it likely that Ukraine, or the Pontic steppe as the Greeks had it, was the homeland of the Amazons. That said, it was Herodotus who supplied the south-to-north physical geography that Serhii Plokhy wisely follows: the ports of Crimea and the coast, the rich steppe heartland, and the forests. For Plokhy, the formation of Ukraine is the establishment of a unity among these three zones, and his themes are ‘geography, ecology and culture’.

Tibor Fischer

The wandering Jew

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It’s been a long time coming for György Spiró. However much Hungarian writers complain about the isolation forced upon them by their non-Indo-European agglutinative language, the big names have always got through, maybe to a global shrug from the reading public, but they have made it out. And in fact, recently, the Magyar dead have done particularly well: Bánffy, Szabó, Szerb, Márai and Karinthy have found many British fans. Though he’s better known as a dramatist in Hungary, Spiró’s massive novel Captivity was published there in 2005 to great acclaim.

31 December 2015

James Delingpole

The best things in the world spring up by accident

Columns

Since no one has bothered to ask what my must-read book of last year was I’m going to tell you here: it’s Matt Ridley’s Evolution of Everything. I don’t think it has appeared on nearly so many recommended lists as his previous bestsellers Genome and The Rational Optimist, nor has it been so widely reviewed. And I have a strong inkling as to why: its message is so revolutionary as to alienate pretty much everyone across the spectrum, from Christians and Muslims to corporate bosses, historians, feminists, educationalists and conspiracy theorists, from Greens and socialists all the way across (if there’s a difference) to Conservatives like George Osborne and David Cameron.

Elisa Segrave

The rarest blend of white and gold

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This unusual book is beautifully written, produced and illustrated, but its subject — the small Slender-billed curlew — is strangely absent. In his ‘introduction to a ghost’, Horatio Clare explains that, when he was commissioned to tell the story of the western world’s rarest bird, it did, at least officially, still exist. This grail of the birding world, which he has never seen, he describes as a beautiful creature, a species of curlew plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plump common curlew, with a thinner down-curving beak which makes it look as though it is chewing a stem of grass. He tries to trace it in Sicily, Italy, the Peloponnese, the Balkans and Turkey.

Christopher Howse

Agony and ecstasy in the garden

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I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of Hippo in the spring of 1966, after lunch and his first taste of brandy, in frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli at San Gimigniano. The quattrocento painter showed a figure with an academic air, in a gown and cake-tin-shaped hat, sitting beneath a tall, smooth-barked fig tree in the garden of a villa, his head in one hand and the fingers of the other on some lines of script in an open book on his knee. Beside him stands a man gesturing towards him. This scene is the heart of an intense (if extensive) study by the ancient historian and garden master of New College of a man ‘educated to write like a marvel’.

Alan Judd

A step too far

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Captain Robert Nairac was a Grenadier Guards officer serving in Northern Ireland when on 14 May 1977 he was abducted and murdered by the Provisional IRA. Mystery surrounding the circumstances of his abduction and the fact that his body has never been found have provoked a minor literary industry. This must be the most comprehensive account yet. Nairac was serving in South Armagh as a liaison officer between the army, the SAS and police Special Branch. He was not a member of the SAS but had vastly more freedom of action than most soldiers, able to travel where and when he chose in civilian clothes with a pistol under his left armpit.

Samantha Ellis

Telling tales | 31 December 2015

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Medea says ‘hiiiiiiii’ on the first page of Mallory Ortberg’s hilarious book, which puts smartphones in the hands of literary heroes, heroines and their writers; ‘it’s Glauce right??’, Medea continues, squealing ‘when is the WEDDING/ I hope you guys have the Argonauts as groomsmen/ and they do the sword thing/ you know where they make the little roof with their swords/ and you run down underneath it’. From this startling opening, Ortberg romps through the canon. Hamlet has teenage tantrums about the sandwiches his mother brings up on a tray. Keats gushes about ‘THIS URN’ and Mrs Danvers upbraids Rebecca for bringing in ‘BAGGED tea?

Honor Clerk

Lost, found and lost again

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This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct boarding school where he buys, for £8, a painting catalogued as a half-length portrait of Charles I, ‘supposed’ to be by Van Dyck. In mid-19th century Britain a Van Dyck is a known and immensely desirable object, but from the outset Snare thinks that he has found a painting by Diego Velázquez, whose work is, by comparison, little known at the time here. He thinks he has, in fact, found the ‘lost Velázquez’, painted in Madrid in 1623 when the 22-year-old Prince Charles travelled incognito to Spain to seek a marriage alliance with Philip IV’s younger sister, Maria Anna.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Family divisions

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The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David Pryce-Jones’s extended family. Emotionally and financially competitive but interdependent, benefactors and beneficiaries, Jews and gentiles of various sexual proclivities are depicted grinding away against each other like so many incompatible tectonic plates. Pryce-Jones offers a candid expression of filial impiety for which Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards surely cannot be entirely to blame, although it is true that education far from home, from an early age, has been known to piss children off, as they say. Young boys banished to boarding school may feel tormented by Oedipal yearnings and resentment of paternal indifference.

Ben Hamilton

Scratching a living

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John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a standard text for anyone set on a life of writing about books, was intentionally truncated, ending its chronology before Gross’s own time of eminence. Two decades after the book’s publication in 1969, Gross explained in a new afterword that he had not wanted to comment on his peers and colleagues, for fear of misunderstanding or offence. A perfectly justifiable approach, but it made the book uncomfortably tantalising for those who prefer their gossip to be at the expense of the living. The Prose Factory is dedicated to Gross, and partially overlaps with The Rise and Fall, beginning in 1918.

Philip Hensher

A touch of class | 31 December 2015

Lead book review

The New Yorker, not far off its centenary now, has moved beyond rivalry to a position of supremacy among American magazines. It has attained this not by taking a particular political position, although it certainly has one — it represents, obviously, a metro-politan, liberal, outward-facing attitude to the world. Rather, its pre-eminence is down to its valuing, above all, the quality of writing. Of course, aspects of the New Yorker have always irritated people. It possesses a somewhat supercilious quality — the one-page comic sketch, ‘Shouts and Murmurs’, invariably leaves me straight-faced, and sometimes even a bit depressed. I can never decide whether the restaurant reviews are meant to be a joke, so absurd do they make their subjects sound.

26 December 2015

Anthony Horowitz

Books will survive the age of the Kindle

The Kindle doesn't seem to be doing too well. According to Waterstones, sales of the e-reader have virtually disappeared, while in America, the Nook is losing $70 million a year. I’m not sure whether this is something to mourn or to celebrate; a triumph of bibliophilia over the new technology or the loss of an opportunity to promote reading. My old Kindle is useful on planes, but the technology is actually quite clumsy: the pages sometimes refuse to swipe and I’ve never quite got used to finding my place at ‘location 15,597’ or wherever. Anyway, I’ve always believed that books have an aesthetic quality, that they are more than the sum of their contents.

15 December 2015

Matthew Parris

Spectator books of the year: Matthew Parris on a rattling great history of the railways

Simon Bradley’s compendious yet rattling The Railways: Nation, Network and People (Profile Books, £25) achieves magnificently a difficult double. Learned and deeply researched, it will not only impress railway buffs but tell even them a great deal they didn’t know; yet this is also popular history, which will engage and entertain any lay reader remotely curious about train travel in Britain.