Books Archives

‘Teaching someone to draw is teaching them to look’: the year’s best art books

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Colour, the painter Patrick Heron once proclaimed, is a continent that artists have yet to explore. The mammoth two-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen, £150) catalogues numerous attempts to map this mysterious chromatic domain, from the late 17th century to the mid 20th. It quickly becomes clear that this area is infinitely vast. One only has to glance at the plates of the ‘Viennese Colour Cabinet’ (1794) – a whole column of blue-greens – to realise that. The effect of these technical diagrams is beautiful in the manner of abstract art.

Mathew Lyons

A rare combination of humour and pathos: the sublimely talented Neil Innes

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Fans of that beloved British cultural institution Doctor Who are wont to talk about ‘their’ doctor – that is, which iteration of the character was their entry point to the franchise. The same might be said of fans of Neil Innes, the much loved songwriter, musician and comedian who died in 2019, aged 75. Creating happiness seems to have been one of Innes’s gifts, in public as well as private In the 1960s, Innes was a key member of the exhilaratingly unpredictable Bonzo Dog Band, whose blend of verbal, musical and visual humour remains matchless in its absurdity, breadth and daring.

Brian Martin

Learning difficulties: The University of Bliss, by Julian Stannard, reviewed

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You have been warned. First, David Butterfield has excoriated Cambridge University in these pages, leaving its standing devalued. Now Julian Stannard, a poet and novelist, delivers in fiction a devastating evisceration of other current universities. The University of Bliss belies its title. This is a work of high satire and Stannard vents his frustration with more than a touch of Swiftian saeva indignatio. His ridicule is extreme and addictively readable. The novel follows the career of the newly appointed vice chancellor Gladys Nirvana, partial to foot massages which transport her to regions signalled by her surname and give her acute sexual gratification.

Allan Mallinson

The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed

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Who could forget the Polish squadrons in RAF Fighter Command when, in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, a British squadron leader, frustrated by the excited radio chatter on being allowed into action at last, orders ‘Silence! In Polish!’ Or the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, whose commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, played by Gene Hackman in A Bridge Too Far (1977), thinking the venture disastrous, growls ‘God Bless Field Marshal Montgomery’ as he jumps from his Dakota? Commander Eugeniusz Plawski, the captain of the Polish destroyer Piorun which first spotted the Bismarck and charged at her to draw fire, might be better known if he had featured in the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! – but that wasn’t expedient, with the honours going instead to a Royal Navy officer.

Jonathan Meades

British architecture according to the Great Man school of history

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Simon Jenkins has, over the years, assembled a winsome array of higher coffee-table books about the kind of building which welcomes National Trust mobility scooters and the beige brethren aboard them. This is a man who knows the cardigan market. And he knows his stuff, mostly. He subscribes to a version of the Great Man school of history, which casts the great man as an exigent client who believes himself the maker or author. But, sadly, the grim-faced Bess of Hardwick did not install the glazing herself. And another promoter ever anxious for an attribution, God Almighty, did not personally carve his supplicants’ chantries. It might be his house, but he delegated the design.

Andrew Rosenheim

Rebels and whistleblowers: a choice of recent crime fiction

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No one joins the CIA for the money, which might explain the spate of thrillers now emerging from former officers. The latest addition, The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit Press, £7.99) by I. S. Berry, comes festooned with praise from other CIA officers turned authors. Set in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, the novel is told in the first person by Shane Collins, a veteran CIA officer nearing the end of his tour there. Divorced, estranged from his son and engaged in a desultory affair with the wife of a colleague, Collins is weary. As his source Rashid declares: ‘This is your problem. You have no expectations... You are like this air. Empty.’ Rashid is one of the leaders of the increasingly restive dissidents in Bahrain, whose corrupt king lives distanced from his subjects.

26 November 2024

Peter Pomerantsev

Besieged Odesa is still caught in a conflict of identities

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How can you break the mental manacles of an empire that has occupied not only your physical world but also your education, publishing, media, high culture and popular entertainment? In his endearing memoir of Odesa, Undefeatable, Julian Evans quotes the Ukrainian author Viktoria Amelina, who describes growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine surrounded by all things Russian. She attended a Russian school, acted in children’s Russian theatre, listened to Russian rock and prayed in a Russian Orthodox church: ‘There was an entire system in place that aimed to make me believe that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the centre of my universe.’ When she was 15, Amelina felt flattered to be invited to Moscow for a Russian language contest. She was thrilled to be interviewed on state television.

David Honigmann

Who’s still flying the flag for Britpop?

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There’s only one Cincinnatus in the Cotswolds, and it’s not Boris Johnson. Over the Rainbow tells the story of how, once again, Alex James was torn from his life in a very big house in the country to fulfil his national duty to play bass with Blur. The tale comes in the form of a diary, like Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year with Swollen Appendices, except that this is a year with inflated egos. To make sure our sympathies are in the right place, it begins with a preamble at the end of December 2022, during which the author attends a series of parties, each more wearisomely smug than the last. Then he sets up the stakes of the plot.

Scott Bradfield

The subversive message of Paradise Lost

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For those of us who have long loved (or hated) Paradise Lost, this is one of those rare and refreshing books that invites us to compare our feelings with other committed readers over the centuries. The poemmay well be the only major work in the western canon that nobody can avoid for long – even if it comes down to making a decision not to read it at all, or just to give up trying. Orlando Reade argues that it may also be the most ‘revolutionary’ text commonly available in modern classrooms – written by a man who, in his time, took extreme positions on everything from divorce (he was all for it) and whether kings have a divine right to keep their heads (they don’t). John Milton read widely and lived during the most conflict-driven period of British history.

Thomas P. Lambert

A father’s love: Childish Literature, by Alejandro Zambra, reviewed

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Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance. In doing so, he aims to correct the failings of prior male generations, who may have ‘tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men’, but never quite ‘taught us to be fathers’. Before he became one of Latin America’s most inventive prose writers, Zambra was an acclaimed poet and, like many poet-novelists, he treats narrative unities with healthy suspicion.

Will Tosh

Fortitude, emotional intelligence and wit – the defining qualities of Simon Russell Beale

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The path to National Treasureland is no paved highway. Simon Russell Beale, the finest classical actor of his generation, was nearly lost to academia (he swerved a PhD in Victorian literature), and faced down pigeon-holing from an agent who wanted to change his name to Simon Beagle, the better to capitalise on a knack for dopily jolly comedy roles. Now – and not before time – he’s written an elegant study of Shakespeare that does double duty as a juicy actor’s autobiography. The pleasure here is in the mix of green room gossip and literary insight. There’s plenty of the former: dining next to Lauren Bacall at the chat show queen Barbara Walters’s place? Good. Watching Top Gun with Imelda Staunton and Penny Downie? Even better.

Nick Spencer

The report of Christianity’s death has been an exaggeration

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George Orwell began his beautiful, nostalgic pre-war novel Coming up for Air with an epigraph from a popular song. ‘He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.’ It’s tempting to borrow the line when writing about Christianity in the West today. The chronicle of its death has been long foretold, its obituary repeatedly rewritten. Numbers, particularly in older denominations, have been heading south for decades, and churches (in Britain at least) have been shutting ever since over-enthusiastic Victorians opened far too many of them. Yet at the same time immigration is revivifying congregations everywhere. Many people show signs of spiritual openness, few speaking well of the kind of bare-knuckle rationalism that characterised New Atheism.

Daniel Marc Janes

The curse of distraction: Lesser Ruins, by Mark Haber, reviewed

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Earlier this year, I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. This cherished museum appears at first to be a collection of bizarre arcana: botanical specimens, miniature dioramas, tributes to forgotten polymaths. Closer inspection reveals it to be something altogether stranger, at the junction of fact and fiction. Witty and highly individual, it invites us to sit with the wonder, to contemplate what we have seen. Phones are strictly banned. Lesser Ruins, the consummate third novel by the Minneapolis-based Mark Haber, feels like a literary analogue – taking us as it does down rabbit holes, a twisting tour of an overloaded mind. Its unnamed narrator is a former community college professor (retired or fired – there are different versions).

Olivia Cole

Seeking forgiveness for gluttony, sloth and other deadly sins

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Professor Guy Leschziner writes that he was raised in a secular household that was ‘entirely irreligious’ yet with ‘a strong sense of morality, of right and wrong’. As an eminent neurologist and a rational atheist, it’s striking that his study of the extremes of human behaviour should reach for such Biblical terms. Is there an element of ghoulishness here? Seven Deadly Sins has a structure of which David Fincher, director of the gruesome film Seven, might approve. To zero in on the sins is undoubtedly a darkly entertaining approach, if not for the squeamish. Having been a consultant at Guy’s hospital for more than 25 years, Leschziner has seen ‘the full spectrum of human morality’: inexplicable altruism, generosity, kindness, love.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Not for the faint-hearted: She’s Always Hungry, by Eliza Clark, reviewed

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Eliza Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, centred on a self-destructive woman taking explicit photographs of men. Her second, Penance, was about a journalist constructing a ‘definitive account’ of a seaside murder. Last year she was named one of Granta’s best young novelists; but she has now produced a sadly uneven short story collection. These 11 tales do not hang together thematically, aside from a broad emphasis on the corporeal. The good ones are full of brio: ‘The Shadow Over Little Chitaly’ is composed entirely of hilarious reviews of a takeway that offers Chinese food alongside pizza. The feedback is bizarre from the start: the first mentions that the restaurant is 125 miles away and the customer complains that they rang 117 times for a refund.

Caspar Henderson

The North American fruit tree that provides a model for economics

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Life on Earth is not a zero-sum affair. Most plants only exist thanks to partnerships with fungal filaments in the soil which mobilise essential nutrients for them and receive sugars made from sunlight in exchange. Without those partnerships, humans and most other land animals which depend on plants either directly or at one or two removes would not exist. Cooperation gives rise to a living world that is vastly more complex, productive and beautiful than the sum of its parts. An understanding of this reality is one of the key insights of an ecological worldview; and, argues Robin Wall Kimmerer in this short and charming book, it is of vital relevance when thinking about how human societies and individuals might organise, and think differently and more expansively about the future.

Melanie McDonagh

The Lion’s Mane, the Firework and terrible jellyfish jokes: the year’s best children’s books

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Philip Reeve roams across realms of his own making with effortless brio. If I say that Thunder City (Scholastic, £8.99) is based on the premise that the world’s great cities have detached themselves from their terrestrial foundations and are floating across the sky like so many urban space ships, swallowing up smaller fry, you’d probably think this is asking a bit much of the reader, but somehow you take it all on board. In this futuristic scenario the characters and their modes of thinking are in fact rather quaint – like Miss Torpenhow, a governess whose floating town of Thorbury has been captured by a diabolical former protégé. The assurance of the storytelling carries you along. Rick Riordan has invented an entire genre: Greek myth crossed with American teenage comedy.

19 November 2024

Marcus Berkmann

A shortage of Nigels and other calamities: humorous stocking-fillers

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This is the part of the run-up to Christmas I always look forward to most – the ‘silly’ books, loo books, even non-books produced by serious publishers who may resent the huge piles of money they make every year while delicate, thoughtful literary novels remain unbought and unread. As it happens, I have just finished a wholly unsatisfactory book of short stories – no names, no packdrill – so a few weeks of loo books have proved surprisingly refreshing, like a palate cleanser after a hideously over-thought restaurant meal. They are all recommended for grumpy old relatives, or even yourself. Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Scream (Abacus, £14.99) comes in the familiar category of ‘Rants About Life’, and is full of gobbets of unadorned rage about features of modern living.

Tom Payne

A post-Brexit entertainment: The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

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This is a novel that spans the Truss administration, from its heady dawn to its decline and fall 49 days later. The Proof of My Innocence starts as a satire, not so much of Truss and her world but the ideologists who thought that the prime minister’s brief, shining moment was their long-cherished future. They meet in a collapsing Cotswolds castle to hear from delegates such as Josephine Winshaw, who intones that everything now is woke: ‘Paying your TV licence was woke. Getting vaccinated was woke... buying avocados was woke, and reading novels was woke.’ Another speaker praises a reactionary novelist to a much smaller audience. Into this milieu steps Christopher Swann, a blogger. To him the radical economic libertarianism that Truss represents stems from early 1980s Cambridge.

Mary Wakefield

We need to learn to pray again

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In The Spectator’s basement kitchen a few weeks ago, I cornered a young colleague, Angus Colwell, and asked him what he made of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder. The thrust of it is that we are not in an age of enlightenment so much as ‘endarkenment’ (Dreher’s term) and that, having turned our backs on God, we have become easy pickings for demonic forces. ‘Oh Lord’, said Angus, turning wearily away, ‘I’m so sick of demons.’ This delighted me then and still delights me, both because it’s so surreal and also because it rings so true. If you’d told me ten years ago that young political types in 2024 would be talking knowingly about the ancient devil-gods of the Mesopotamian region – Moloch, Ishtar and Baal – I’d have said your vape was spiked.

Paul Deaton

Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship

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In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand. Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of the child, the poet, the scientist and the psychologist. Lewis is adept at all these stratagems.

John Jolliffe

The chilly charm of Clarissa Eden

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Clarissa Churchill – as she was known until her marriage to Sir Anthony Eden – was brought up in a now vanished privileged world of intellectual, social and political London. In the introduction to his biography, Hugo Vickers provides a valuable roll-call of names. Those still living who knew Clarissa have proved invaluable sources of information, though a note of unconscious humour sometimes slips in – as when Antonia Fraser comments: ‘I was not quite glamorous enough for her’ (‘quite’ being the operative word). Born in 1920, Clarissa began life with the ostensible advantage of being a Churchill, the niece of Winston. In fact this was not the case: her real father was Harold Baker, known as ‘Bluey’, a scholar, barrister, Liberal politician and friend of H.H.

Alexander Larman

A century of Hollywood’s spectacular flops

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Gore Vidal once sighed that ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’, and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible artistic impact, flop hideously: proof that audiences will not fork out for any arrant piece of trash. The most recent high-profile failure of this kind was Todd Phillips’s bewilderingly poor Joker sequel, Folie à Deux, which insulted its audience and thus precipitated its commercial failure.

Leyla Sanai

The boundless curiosity of Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, first came to public attention with his descriptions of fascinating neurological conditions in accessible articles and books. He was one of the first doctors to attempt to break down the barriers between the medical profession and the layman by eschewing esoteric jargon and explaining complex brain pathology simply while never losing sight of the patient as a human being. He exuded compassion and honesty. He brought attention to little-known illnesses such as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, of which there was an epidemic after the first world war.

Rupert Shortt

Is it time for Jordan Peterson to declare his spiritual allegiance?

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Alan Isler’s novel Clerical Errors (2001) features a troubled priest who mocks the faith he has largely abandoned. ‘How can any rational creature not see in the story of Christ the pattern of countless pagan myths, the universal romance of the sacrificial god, his apotheosis and his rebirth?’ Jordan Peterson’s new book stands this argument on its head. That core Old Testament and gospel narratives are echoed in other cultures, past or present, is hailed as a mark of biblical universality. What applies to the resurrection also covers themes including sibling rivalry (Cain and Abel), pride and overreach (Noah’s Flood), deliverance from slavery (the Exodus) and the Fall itself. These archetypes abide in our collective unconscious for good reason.

14 November 2024

Ursula Buchan

Blooming marvellous: the year’s best gardening books

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I am an absolute sucker for a handsome reproduction of a rare and highly illustrated natural history, preferably more than two centuries old. This may possibly be a niche interest, but Catesby’s Natural History was pronounced a wonder when it was first published and is a wonder still. Mark Catesby was ‘a procurer of plants’, sponsored by a group of rich, curious patrons, including William Sherard and Sir Hans Sloane, to explore and record the flora and fauna of the most southern of the Thirteen Colonies – the Carolinas and Florida, as well as the Bahamas Islands. He made several perilous trips in the 1720s, sketching his subjects live, and completing paintings in England. He finally published his text and 220 hand-coloured plates in 1747.

12 November 2024

Helen Barrett

What will the cities of the future look like?

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At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth hypothesis, the biologist’s 2016 proposal to remove humanity from half the planet to allow ecosystems to recover. It is an entertaining, clever and provocative exhibition, but it is fiction: it does not offer a set of instructions.

Scott Bradfield

The fresh hell of Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood

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Hollywood didn’t kill Dorothy Parker, but booze probably did. In fact, if Hollywood hadn’t paid her so well to spend so much time at home, she couldn’t have afforded the booze – as well as maintain a lifelong ability to insult almost everyone she loved while still earning their (sometimes reluctant) affection.

Terence Blacker

Who would be a goalkeeper?

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‘We are all goalkeepers now,’ declares Robert McCrum, and who could seriously argue with that? Every day we try to defend our own goal against the hurtling ball of fate, but too often end up fishing it out of the back of the net. Then again, we are also all strikers, hopefully hoofing, occasionally taking a bit of a dive in the box. Or central defenders, muddied but valiant. Or nippy little wingers, making mazy but pointless runs down life’s touchline, whingeing at the referee. Come to think of it, we are all, in a very real sense, referees too. There is no end to the football-as-metaphor game. For the football metaphorist, every pass and kick, tackle or foul represents some grand, universal truth about life and the wider world.