Books Archives

How can Ireland survive the seismic changes of the past three decades?

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Historians in Ireland occupy a public role – unlike in Britain, where those with an inclination towards the commentariat usually migrate to America. This is perhaps not surprising in a country where public intellectuals are exemplified by Stephen Fry and philosophers by Alain de Botton. Ireland presents a more demanding prospect, where, ever since the days of Conor Cruise O’Brien, historians have colonised the public sphere with influential newspaper columns and regular debates on television. Indeed, when the national TV station began broadcasting in the early 1960s, it featured a discussion programme called The Professors, all of them historians (and one or two usually a bit the worse for wear).

Simon Ings

What rats can teach us about the dangers of overcrowding

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The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags. He studied how rodents adapted to different environments and specifically how the density of a population affects an individual’s behaviour. He collected reams of data but published little, and rarely in the mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw from his studies of rats and mice apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity.

Michael Gove

Politics as Ripping Yarns: the breathless brio of Boris Johnson’s memoir

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It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads. Our intrepid hero travels round the world, wooing Gulf potentates, sticking it to Vladimir Putin, snatching submarine contracts from under Emmanuel Macron’s snooty Gallic nose and then makes it home in time for some uniting and levelling up before settling down to a well-deserved glass of Tignanello. He also, like Aeneas, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city (while also making some truly dreadful puns: ‘Was it H.J. Eysenck who gave me that idea? Eysenck it was...’).

1 October 2024

Owen Matthews

Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong

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Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious study of Augustus’s life and times reveals these harsh headline words to be exaggerated. Indeed the man comes across as quite a good egg, as much sinned against as sinning.

Isabel Hardman

The heart-rending story of a child’s heart transplant

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Max Johnson’s life while he waited for a heart transplant had become so miserable and traumatic that he didn’t care whether he carried on or not. Indeed, the colourless, almost lifeless nine-year-old recorded a video saying he wanted to die. His parents felt as though they were on ‘death row’ as they waited for a donor. They knew, too, that the call announcing there was a heart for their son would mean that somewhere else in Britain a family was mourning. They would benefit from the sudden death of someone they were initially only told was an ‘age-appropriate donor’. Max’s mother read between the lines: her son was getting the heart of another nine-year-old.

Tessa Dunlop

How ballet lessons transformed Princess Diana

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There is something undeniably sweet about this book. On one level, in line with the cover’s pretty pink text, it is a simple, unpretentious story about a girl who loved to dance. But on another level, the unfolding tragedy is Shakespearian – an effect amplified by the unfussy prose of Anne Allan, a long-time professional dancer and choreographer. Years after everyone else cashed in their Diana chips, the Scottish-born author has finally decided to tell her story. The book opens in 1981. Allan is a dancer and ballet mistress with the London City Ballet, and the performance is Swan Lake; but the drama happens offstage when she receives a call from Anne Beckwith-Smith, lady-in-waiting to Diana, Princess of Wales.

Francesca Peacock

Life’s little graces: Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed

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Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’. But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like ‘someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked’.

Helen Carr

Whispers of ‘usurper’ at the Lancastrian court

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When Shakespeare wrote Richard II, he billed his play as a tragedy: the downfall of a king riddled with fear, contempt and an obscure sense of majesty. Shakespeare’s portrait was a reasonably accurate one. Some historians have suggested Richard was a narcissist; others that he had borderline personality disorder. Helen Castor offers a candid and considered view. Though the king ‘always knew he was special... his presence in the world shaped by his God-given destiny’, he simply lacked the conventional qualities of kingship. Richard’s tragedy was that he was doomed to rule under the spectre of his father and grandfather’s martial legacy – the Black Prince, hero of Crécy and the military giant Edward III. His cousin, however, possessed all the skills that a ruler required.

Salley Vickers

The misery of growing up in a utopian community

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In Home Is Where We Start, Susanna Crossman quotes one of Nadine Gordimer’s characters on the subject of utopias: When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on Earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it. At the unpalatable sounding communal meals, it was taboo for families to sit together The book is a brave attempt to come to terms with the 15 years the author spent from 1978 onwards with her mother, her sister Claire and her unnamed brother in an ‘intentional community’ – as it was known by its fancifully named members.

Nicholas Lezard

The contagions of the modern world

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Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point in which he explained how little things could suddenly add up to cause huge change, in phenomena as diverse as the popularity of Hush Puppies and the reduction of crime in New York City. The book achieved its own tipping point and became a bestseller. It was followed by Outliers, which proposed among other things that in order to be really good at something you had to have practised at it for 10,000 hours. This is my first shot at reviewing a book by Gladwell, so I am several thousand hours short of practice. The phrase ‘tipping point’ was first coined to describe the proportion of black families it took to drive white families from a neighbourhood, so its roots are somewhat ugly.

Damian Thompson

Man of mystery and friend of the Cambridge spies

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In April 1967 Tony Scotland, a cub reporter for Australia’s ABC television news, drove with a cameraman from Hobart to a sheep station in Fingal to interview Lord Talbot de Malahide, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had edited a book about Tasmanian flora. This was a delicate assignment. Lord Talbot was a retired British ambassador to Laos who divided his time between his family’s Tasmanian property and one of Ireland’s grandest castles. He was fearsomely well-connected, peppery and ‘not good with people’. ABC had been trying for years to interview him, and he only grudgingly allowed in the cameras to publicise the book. Scotland, a 22-year-old English public schoolboy, wondered why he’d been given the job. His cameraman smiled knowingly.

Anthony Sattin

Voices from Gaza, historic city in ruins

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I have been reviewing for decades and this is by far the most difficult book I have taken on: difficult to read because it relates to what Israel has done in Gaza over the last year, and difficult to write about because the subject is so divisive. But whether you think Palestinians deserve what is happening to them or that Israel is a rogue state, please read to the end. First there is the title. Not Catastrophe, or Genocide, or Reckoning in Gaza, but Daybreak. This is a book that carries the promise of a new day, or a dawning – a book that looks forward, but does so also by looking back over 4,000 years of history.

24 September 2024

Claire Lowdon

A wish-fulfilment romance: Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney, reviewed

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An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-take featured on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. After every few skits the show would cut to an audio clip of the two undergraduates going hard at it. The joke was in the repetition – an exaggeration of the extraordinary density of earnest sex scenes in Rooney’s writing. It was crude, cruel and very funny.

David Profumo

The hare-raising experience that changed my life

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One wintry day during lockdown, the parliamentary political adviser Chloe Dalton discovered a new-born leveret on the track by her converted barn. It was only as long as her palm’s width, with a white star shape on its forehead. Ambivalent about interfering, she nonetheless gave it houseroom, despite being warned that brown hares can never really be domesticated. This book, her first, is the chronicle of how the animal changed her life.

Rodric Braithwaite

The Crimean War spelt the end of hymns to heroism and glory

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Leo Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer in the defence of the great Russian naval base of Sevastopol against British and French invaders in the middle of the 19th century. The first of his three short stories, collected as Sevastopol Sketches, came out as the siege was still in progress. In it he spelled out as no writer had done before the way people died in shattered trenches, their bodies shredded by shell fire and left to rot in the mud; or in filthy, overcrowded hospitals, where overwhelmed doctors hacked off limbs without anaesthetic. He wrote not about the generals but about the ordinary soldiers, the men and women caught up in the fighting, the Russian people themselves.

Mark Bostridge

How the Rillington Place murders turned Britain into a nation of ghouls

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‘You never seem to get a good murder nowadays.’ With this ‘fretful complaint’ George Orwell imagined newspaper readers bemoaning the decline of the classic English murder. Gone were the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ – a solicitor or dentist killing his wife in a quiet suburban home – which made the perfect News of the World spread to curl up with after Sunday lunch. In their place was an altogether more brutish type of murder committed by ruthless serial killers. Everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of 10 Rillington Place Orwell was writing in 1946. Seven years later, one of the most notorious serial killers in British criminal history was hanged at Pentonville.

Rowan Pelling

The mystery of female desire deepens

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Sexual fantasies, that dream you had last night, and ideas for novels have one thing in common: generally the best place for them is inside your head, never to be divulged. Until now, the major exception to the rule was Nancy Friday’s 1973 compilation of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, which sold more than two million copies worldwide. Friday aimed to emancipate women from guilt and inhibition, and informed an enthralled world that women of all stripes were prone to vivid erotic reverie. Many of the more heavily thumbed passages involved taboo elements, such as rape, incest and the occasional dog or octopus. Of course this was some decades before the internet, and it’s possible that not every reader engaged with the book out of entirely feminist principles.

Jonathan Boff

When Britannia ceased to rule the waves

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When the Royal Navy celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, 173 ships and 50,000 sailors filled the Solent. The Spectator (3 July 1897) described the ‘endless succession of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, gunboats and torpedo boats’ as offering ‘the most magnificent naval spectacle ever beheld’. More importantly, the fleet at Spithead ‘would have been able to beat any navy or combination of navies that might be brought against it’. It constituted, the magazine proclaimed, a purely defensive weapon, designed only to safeguard the shores of the British Isles, protect the colonies and police the seas ‘for the benefit, not of Englishmen alone, but of the whole world’. Not everyone was entirely convinced.

Leyla Sanai

A dark satanic cult: The Third Realm, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

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I finished reading the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest series – no longer a trilogy, perhaps a sextet – in three days. The Third Realm is as unsettling, disturbing and riveting as the previous instalments, and I was even disappointed that it came in at a mere 500 pages – considerably shorter than the others. But all three books are less dense than those in his celebrated My Struggle series. There is a lot of dialogue, and Knausgaard’s skill in capturing conversation makes his characters spring vividly from the page. Ordinary failings, such as insecurity, jealousy, duplicity, lust and irritation, are subtly conveyed through a surly comment, a fleeting mutinous thought, a blurted accusation, a smooth lie.

Ian Thomson

Starving street urchins sell their sisters in the chaos of Naples, 1944

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Naples is ‘certainly the most disgusting place in Europe’, judged John Ruskin. The boisterous yelling in the corridor-like streets and beetling humanity filled the Victorian sage with loathing. (‘See Naples and die’ became for Ruskin ‘See Naples and run away’.) In the city’s obscure exuberance of life he could see only a great sleaze. Naples still has a bad name. Tourists tend to hurry on through to visit the dead cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or jet-set Capri, renowned for the debauched excesses of Tiberius. Naples may lack the monumental grandeur of Rome, but visiting it constituted the gracious end to the Grand Tour during the 17th and 18th centuries. Naples, one-time Arcady of Bourbon kings and queens, has seen better days.

Marcus Nevitt

The flowering of enlightenment under Oliver Cromwell

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In 1651, the poet Andrew Marvell was working for the parliamentarian military hero Sir Thomas Fairfax, tutoring his daughter Mary on Fairfax’s Nun Appleton estate near York. When he wasn’t delivering language lessons to his young charge, Marvell was busy composing one of the most astonishingly experimental poems of the 17th century. Opera in the 1650s first seeded the idea that women might be able to act and entertain for money in public ‘Upon Appleton House’, dedicated to Thomas Fairfax, is, on the one hand, just another variety of early modern patronage poem in which a writer praises a member of the aristocracy and their values in return for favour or reward. From another perspective, the poem is profoundly avant-garde.

James Ball

Is now the most exciting point in human history?

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Yuval Noah Harari has sold more than 45 million books in 65 languages. He is a professor with a PhD from the University of Oxford, has spoken at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and his latest book, Nexus, is considered ‘erudite, provocative and entertaining’ by Rory Stewart and ‘thought-provoking and so very well reasoned’ by Stephen Fry. This is the story the book’s cover tells us about its contents, and Nexus itself argues that it is stories which are fundamental to shaping the world. It posits that the strength of humanity comes from building large networks in which we work together co-operatively, but that our weakness is that once we have amassed power this way, we use it unwisely.

17 September 2024

Scott Bradfield

Nothing was off-limits for ‘the usual gang of idiots’ at Mad

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As many of us who grew up in America in the 1960s and 1970s learned, Mad magazine didn’t, as our parents warned us, warp our brains – because our brains were pretty warped to begin with. It was a time when what passed for culture was almost entirely scripted by Madison Avenue, promising that overpriced concoctions of sugar water and aspirin would eliminate all pain, social awkwardness and anxiety, or transport us to happy, sex-crazed beach parties with packs of photogenic young people.

Max Décharné

The sad story of the short-lived Small Faces

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One Sunday in October 1967, about 16 per cent of the British population settled down at 8.15 p.m. to watch the Morecambe & Wise Show on ITV. This was mainstream family entertainment aimed at all age groups, but there was also a place each week for teen-friendly acts from the pop charts. That evening it was the turn of four sharply dressed East End mods, who managed to inject some real heart and soul into their band’s performance. ‘They look very nice, don’t they?’ said Ernie, to which Eric replied: ‘They look extremely nice, except for one thing. Their faces are too small, I feel. Much too small.’ Mild leg-pulling of this kind was par for the course.

Lee Langley

Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

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Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role. A daily glass or three of schwarmerei restores good cheer, sometimes generating hallucinogenic euphoria Though the novel describes itself as ‘a horror story’, it’s more a salutation to the power of the natural world and a celebration of difference.

Lucasta Miller

The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil

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The French philosopher Simone Weil, who died of self-starvation and tuberculosis in a Kent sanitorium in 1943 at the age of 34, remains a conundrum. ‘Mais elle est folle!’ had been the spluttering response of Charles de Gaulle the previous year, during her short wartime period analysing reports for the Free French in London. Her simple brief was to précis the ideas coming in from the Resistance movement on how to reconstruct France after liberation. The result – which was posthumously published, as were most of her writings – turned out to be a major work of original philosophy, Enchainement (The Need for Roots), running to hundreds of pages, a testimony to Weil’s lifelong need to go further than anyone could ever have required into what she saw as the truth of things.

Simon Ings

Life among the world’s biggest risk-takers

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The Italian actuary Bruno de Finetti, writing in 1931, was explicit: ‘Probability does not exist.’ Probability, it’s true, is simply the measure of an observer’s uncertainty; and in The Art of Uncertainty, the British statistician David Spiegelhalter explains how this extraordinary and much-derided science has evolved to the point where it is even able to say useful things about why matters have turned out the way they have, based purely on present evidence. Spiegelhalter was a member of the Statistical Expert Group of the 2018 UK Infected Blood Inquiry, and you know his book’s a winner the moment he tells you that between 650 and 3,320 people nationwide died from tainted transfusions.

Olivia Cole

Unrecorded lives: Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed

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There was a time when Elizabeth Strout’s fans had to wait a few years for the next book; but Tell Me Everything follows fast on her two previous novels – part of what she has termed a ‘marathon’ of writing in her sixties. It has been an extraordinary creative flowering: a diverting pleasure for admirers of her psychological perceptiveness and her ability to transport us instantly to Crosby, her fictional town in contemporary Maine. Strout once described her characters as rolls of fabric, with her novels as her patterns to cut out. Much material is used in each novel, yet there is a lot of spare, too. It’s the fullness of these characters and their inner lives that give her work its depth.

David Sexton

Heartbreaking scenes: Annihilation, by Michel Houellebecq, reviewed

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Michel Houellebecq’s ninth and longest novel, anéantir, was published in France at the beginning of January 2022 with an initial print run of 300,000 copies. Translations into Italian, German and Spanish appeared a few weeks later. Only now, though, is it available in English, a belatedness all the more regrettable because, like several of Houellebecq’s novels, it is set a little in the future (Submission, for example, foreseeing the islamisation of France, was published in 2015 and set in 2022). Houellebecq has always maintained an absolute faith that love alone saves Annihilation looks forward to the presidential election of 2027, correctly assuming that Emmanuel Macron, never named but clearly referenced, would have won a second term in 2022.