Books Archives

A horrid story of intellectual corruption

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The death of a great author often causes interminable displays of corrosive envy. Heirs, acolytes, interpreters and academics resent one another’s claims on the literary estate or cultural heritage. They try to engross the dead talent for their own. They claim privileges, and make spiteful stabs at people with whom they have the closest affinities. It was inevitable that this would be the fate of someone of the momentous stature, but sometimes arcane significance, of Henry James.

Melanie McDonagh

A real-life whodunnit

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The Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday is ten volumes or 5,000 pages long and was five years in the writing. The inquiry lasted 12 years, including those five years, and cost the taxpayer £200 million. Some 2,500 people gave evidence, nearly 1,000 of whom gave oral witness. It was set up under one prime minister, Tony Blair, in 1998, and its conclusions were delivered in June 2010 under a different prime minister, David Cameron. It was the lengthiest and costliest inquiry in legal history. The events it was concerned with — the shooting by members of the 1st Parachute Regiment of 13 civilians attending a civil rights march — took place on 30 January 1972, or 38 years before the report was delivered. Was it worth it?

Lewis Jones

Journal of a disappointed man

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Simon Goldhill introduces his new book by recalling a lunch with his editor, who suggested he make a pilgrimage and write about it. Pilgrimages, he reflected, tend to be made alone, but he is gregarious, so decided that he needed to make up, with his wife and another couple, ‘a party of four Jews’, to keep him company and supply comic material. He is a classics don at Cambridge, where he also directs something called the Victorian Studies Group, so his editor suggested he do ‘something Victorian’, and the result is Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave. The title does no one any favours, but the book offers a brief and generally amiable exploration of the British literary pilgrimage.

Alan Judd

Bookends: The year of living dangerously

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Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some will also remember that the celebrity culture throve then as now and that none was more celebrated than James Hunt, Formula One world champion. He was even more celebrated than that most famous soap opera, the marriages of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; Hunt, who had a natural gift for celebrity, contrived to yoke theirs to his by handing his wife to Burton, who divorced Taylor to marry her. The two men remained good friends. A few others will remember 1976 for the nature of Hunt’s triumph that year, his dual with the reigning world champion, Niki Lauda, and his last second victory by one point.

13 January 2012

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Salman Rushdie

Sir Salman Rushdie has been in the news this week, after his proposed appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival elicited criticism from what the Guardian described as an ‘influential conservative Indian Muslim cleric’, called Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani. A little over a year ago, Rushdie appeared on American TV (above) and said that the world had moved on from furores and fatwahs caused by The Satanic Verses. Now people can read it as a novel, he said, as it was intended. Rushdie is apparently putting the finishing touches to his memoirs, which will be published later this year. It will be interesting to see how much space Rushdie devotes to the controversy, and how he regards it within the context of his life and writing as a whole.

David Blackburn

Simon Armitage interview: Ancient enmities

When it comes to national stereotypes, the modern mind remains thoroughly medieval. The Death of King Arthur, which Simon Armitage has translated from Middle English, contains two insults that sound down the centuries. An enraged Frenchman says, ‘These Britons were always blusterers and braggarts. Lo, how he swaggers in his shining suit/ As if to brutalise us all with the bright sword he brandishes. But his bark is all boast, that boy who stands there.’ To which King Arthur later retorts: ‘Our Frenchmen are enfeebled, I should have guessed this would follow,/ For these folk are foreigners in these far-flung fields and long for the food and fare of their liking.’ Football hooligans against cheese-eating surrender monkeys: it’s an ancient enmity.

12 January 2012

David Blackburn

The bookshop formerly known as Waterstone’s

There has been much furore this afternoon about the bookshop formerly known as Waterstone’s. The company has decided to drop the apostrophe from its name to make it more ‘versatile and practical’ according to its managing director, James Daunt. The company is also restoring its old branding. The suspicion is that apostrophes are not digital friendly. Waterstones, as we must now call it, is turning its attention to the digital world and this latest change is part of a concerted online push.

David Blackburn

History that’s crying out to be written

It was an abiding moment of the Arab Spring. As Colonel Gaddafi’s mauled corpse was paraded through the streets of Sirte, al-Jazeera cut to what it described as ‘wild street celebrations in Tripoli’. The screen showed a dusty compound, with three blokes lolling around a burned-out car, diffidently firing pistols into the air; a stray dog entered stage right, sloped-off towards the car and then disappeared from view. Chris Morris could not have surpassed the sequence; it was beyond parody. The memory of this scene re-entered my mind yesterday evening, when I visited Sky News’ ‘A Year on the Frontline’ exhibition at Somerset House.

Fleur Macdonald

A mutual minefield

Opening presents is tough: hiding greed, masking disappointment and feigning gratitude. You're also probably being filmed for the family time capsule and you'll be on YouTube within hours. That's what happened to a poor American woman called Emily this Christmas. She's starting 2012 as the latest social media sensation. The video has been removed, but I can report that on receiving and flicking through Republican candidate Ron Paul's Liberty Defined, she burst into tears, saying: 'He just called Israel an apartheid state. I’m not reading this.' It's hard to know who comes out worse this time of year; each gift's a mutual minefield. On coming home from the holidays this year, I was greeted by a neat little parcel from my flatmate.

Mark Mason

“Page 99” and quiz

‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ So said Ford Madox Ford. Whether that applies to any of his own books I don’t know (my shelves seem to be a Ford-free zone — anyone?). But at least one blog applies the test to various tomes, so I thought I’d scan some of my past reading and see whether the rule holds true. Page 99 of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy is a conversation between the two main characters (adult Will and schoolboy Marcus), which features a brilliant example of Hornby getting you straight inside Marcus’s head: ‘Do people give you a hard time?’ Marcus looked at him. How did he know that?

11 January 2012

David Blackburn

Pigeons, pros and amateurs

A flurry of new reviews of Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English has landed in recent days, coinciding with a new edition of the book. Kelman’s debut divides opinion. Lewis Jones thinks it ‘miraculous’. Catherine Nixey thinks (£) that it’s ‘exuberant’ but ‘miss-steps’ occasionally. And I found that a pigeon is a less than engaging narrator, even if its appearances are sparse. Reading the book made me recall the story of Kingsley Amis throwing a copy of his son Martin’s book, Money, across the room in frustration, and I wondered how the old devil might have dispatched of Kelman’s opus. All of which brings me to this piece by Alex Gallix about the death of literature.

Nick Cohen

A left-wing writer conservatives should enjoy

I have a review of Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank, one of the few left-wing writers I believe conservatives can read with pleasure. He is old fashioned, so old-fashioned indeed that most American leftists would not call him left-wing. He has no time for the culture wars, which still stir the passions of so many on the right and left (and not only in the US). Instead he has concentrated on why ordinary working and middle class Americans do so badly when Wall Street is thriving and have to bail it out when it fails. Since 2008 events have justified him with a vengeance. He is also a dazzling writer: honest, sardonic, scornful and literate – worth one thousand Michael Moores.

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Joan Collins

This week's Shelf Lifer is the indefatigable Joan Collins. She tells us which literary character she'd pick to share a bed with and exactly how many self-help books she's written. What are you reading at the moment? Frank Sinatra: The Boudoir Singer by Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter As a child, what did you read under the covers? Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? Yes, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist when Bill Sikes murders Nancy because it's the most harrowing description of a murder that I’ve ever read You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?

Matthew Richardson

Interview: Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid’s A Scattering — a collection of poems written in honour of his dead wife, the actress Lucinda Gane — won the 2009 Costa Award. Reid will be reading selected poems from that collection at the South Bank Centre later this month, as part of the forthcoming exhibition examining attitudes to death and grief. Here, Reid talks to Matthew Richardson about his poetry in general. Looking back over the collections excerpted in your new Selected Poems, has your career panned out as you hoped? I don’t think the younger me had any clear expectations. A few vague hopes, possibly, but nothing so definite as to leave the older me feeling either satisfied or disappointed. How do you think your work has changed? Some gains, some losses.

10 January 2012

David Blackburn

Hatchet Job of the Year

You may remember that 2012 will see the launch of a new literary award. On Tuesday 7th February, the Coach and Horses in Soho will host our friends The Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year. The aim is to reinvigorate literary criticism by rewarding the 'angriest, funniest, most trenchant' book review of 2011. The aim is not to celebrate malice, but to challenge the deference that pollutes so much of Britain's cultural debate.

David Blackburn

Exemplary popular history

Few non-fiction writers’ books fly off the shelves as fast as Tom Holland’s. He’s a renaissance man — an overused phrase, but merited in his case. He began professional life translating ancient classics for Radio 4 and is best known for his histories of the ancient world: Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium. This back catalogue has created the impression that Holland is a classicist; in fact, he studied English as an undergraduate and was studying for a PhD on Byron before leaving for London in his mid twenties. The breadth of his learning and its grounding in literature make his books so accessible — and his after dinner speeches so memorable.

Paul Torday

The Expenses Scandal: a Morality Play for our time

Morality plays began in the Middle Ages. They were intended to explain Christian precepts and encourage a mostly illiterate audience to lead a Godly life. Typically, they describe the progress of an Everyman who falls into temptation and then is redeemed. In modern times it’s our newspapers who stage our morality plays. The press coverage of the expenses scandal in 2009 and 2010 was certainly strong on MPs falling into temptation. There wasn’t much about redemption, though. I recently wrote a novella about the subject of guilt, and its corrosive effects on memory and personality, and I decided to use the expenses scandal as the locus for these ideas.

9 January 2012

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Milton’s blindness

When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light denied, I fondly ask; But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies; God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait. This sonnet begins as a private confession.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: literary parlour games

Last Thursday saw a major publishing event in Britain: the release of The Art of Fielding, the debut novel by American Chad Harbach. The book has been received with rapture in the States: the phrase 'Great American Novel' is being whispered and Harbach is routinely compared to Jonathan Franzen, the literati’s present infatuation. The comparison has migrated across the Atlantic. Mike Atherton, former England cricket captain and award winning sports columnist, wrote last week (£): '[Harbach] wears his learning more lightly than Franzen (although learned types will recognise all kinds of literary references) has a sharper feel for the rhythm of language on the page and is more content to let the narrative take its course.

8 January 2012

Jerry Hayes

A splendid life of crime

Let me nail my colours clearly to the mast: I would prefer to eat my own spleen, or listen to a Gordon Brown speech, than read the memoirs of a barrister/politician. The remaindered lists are groaning under these unsellable, unreadable, dusty monuments to over-inflated egos. They should be pulped and moulded into bed pans. However, Ivan Lawrence’s splendid book, My Life of Crime — out in paperback later this month — is very much the exception. Ivan, a distinguished QC and formerly a high-profile MP, lives life to the full and this book is brimful of classy anecdotes and well worth the read. Ivan and I have been friends for nearly 30 years, and this book tells me things about him I never knew.

7 January 2012

Sam Leith

The heart of Hemingway

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A new biography of ‘Papa’ has deeply impressed Sam Leith, although its thoroughness — like its subject — ‘teeters on nuts’ Hemingway’s Boat is just what it sounds like. It takes as its conceit — and it’s a good one — that writing about Hemingway’s boat Pilar (now up on blocks in Cuba) is a way of getting at deep things about the man. Pilar was there all the second half of his life and may have been the only friend he never fell out with. Fishing was more than a recreation for Hemingway: it was at the centre, this book plausibly suggests, of his being in the world. Paul Hendrickson duly set about getting to the core of Hemingway’s relationship with Pilar. And how! His research is flat-out phenomenal.

Dan Jones

When treason was the last resort

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One hundred and fifty years after Anglo-Saxon England was invaded by the Normans, Anglo-Norman England was invaded by the French. On 21 May 1216 King Philip Augustus’ eldest son, Louis the Lion, landed at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet, kissed a crucifix, planted it in the ground and began an 18-month war for the English crown. He had been invited to England by a group of barons who wished to replace King John as punishment for repudiating the terms of Magna Carta. The war Louis waged, although ultimately unsuccessful, was a damned near thing. Sean McGlynn’s new book calls this England’s ‘forgotten invasion’, although in recent years Hollywood has been trying to remind people about it.

Eric Weinberger

Lake Michigan days

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It is probably hard to enjoy this new big novel from America without some understanding of the shortstop’s position on the baseball field. But that is easily remedied, thanks to YouTube, where searching for ‘shortstop, fielding’ arouses multiple videos that compete for attention, with stars of the game in their infield position between second and third base, taking ground balls hit at, near, or even away from them, scooping them up, throwing to first base for the out: something the shortstop does six or more times in a game.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book

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Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go at it. By my reckoning Tales from an Actor’s Life (Robson Press, £14.99) is Steven Berkoff’s third volume of autobiographical writings, although I might have missed one or two others along the way. This one, though, is a little out of the ordinary. Written in the third person — he refers throughout to ‘the young actor’ — it tells a number of stories of his formative years ‘in the business’, of auditions failed, of rep tours endured, of disastrous productions walked out of, and of lessons learned, usually far too late to make any difference.

Philip Womack

Questioning tales

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Tessa Hadley’s previous book, The London Train, was one of the best novels of last year, though overlooked by prize committees. It concerned the gently disentangling lives of a pair of middle-class couples, and found its strengths in numinous revelations of the everyday. These short stories (all previously printed in magazines such as Granta and The New Yorker) explore, with a questioning intelligence, a mostly similar territory. Here people try to shore up their lives as best they can in the face of vicissitudes. They do so by reaching out to others, often in the face of convention; and by trying to square life with the worlds that they create in their heads, and that are created around them in the forms of fiction.

Ian Thomson

Still roughing it

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We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel seepage. Takeaway detritus. Travel, in its pre-package sense, can no longer be said to exist. Airports even have ‘comfort zones’ with dental clinics, cinemas and (at New York’s JFK) funeral parlours. Some travel writers, desperate to simulate the hardship of Victorian travel, have imposed artificial difficulties on themselves. The late Eighties saw a glut of such daft titles as Hang-Gliding to Borneo and To Bognor on a Rhinoceros. In every case, however, it would have been quicker to take the train. Why windsurf across the Mojave when there’s a decent coach service?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The truest man of letters

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In 1969 an author in his early thirties published his first book. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters won the Duff Cooper prize, delighted the reading public, introduced them to the name of John Gross, and marked the beginning of what would be an illustrious and fascinating literary career. It ended with his death on 10 January 2011, a great sorrow for the many people who loved and admired John. A year ago, copious tributes were paid to this remarkable man, as writer, editor, critic, friend, which I wished I had joined in. He was the best-read man in the country, said Victoria Glendinning, or for Craig Brown, ‘the man who read everything’. His capacity for reading was indeed almost inhuman, and his memory frightening.

6 January 2012

Fleur Macdonald

A book for boys

If Time Magazine declared 2011 the year of the protester, then it seems quite fitting that, in a public vote, the Galaxy Book Awards crowned Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman their book of the year. Touted as a modern day feminist call-to-arms, it is also the memoirs of a former music journalist turned Times commentator professional tweeter (hashtag commentweeter). It's sort of a roughed up version of Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée but funnier and relocated to the messy days of the late seventies, as if S de B had dumped her drain of a boyfriend and had plonked herself next to you at a party, triple shot of gin and (full fat) tonic in hand. Less Parisian and more Wolverhampton, mind you.

Daisy Dunn

The original Nutcracker

The English National Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker was especially enchanting this year, but I left wondering what the story’s original author, E.T.A. Hoffmann would have made of it all. Hoffmann was long dead when his short story, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King) (1816) came to inspire the ballet a generation later. Even if he had lived to see it set to Tchaikovsky’s magical score, he’d have found his own credit severely diminished. For in fact it was the more established and popular author Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale that was, and still is, popularly recognised as the ballet’s main source of inspiration.