Books Archives

Bookends: Circling the Square Mile

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You want the two-word review of this new book about the City? ‘London porn.’ For those of you with more time, The City of London by Nicholas Kenyon (Thames & Hudson, £40) is as comprehensive a photographic record of London’s financial centre as you could wish for. If a building is impressive or important, or has been either of those things in the last 2,000 years, it’s here, together with details of its design, construction and role in the capital’s history. There are also maps and illustrations, working together to tell the story of how this small plot of land became a magnet for the world’s bean-counters. It’s not just Mammon that gets a look-in, either; churches and livery halls and pubs are covered too.

John Preston

What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis

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The start of What Am I Still Doing Here? finds Roger Lewis in a state of deep gloom. But then so does the middle of the book — and indeed the end. This, of course, is just as it should be. The last thing one wants from a professional curmudgeon is brimming red-cheeked jollity, and I’m delighted to be able to report there’s nothing like that here. There are, however, all kinds of other pleasures. In some respects, this comes as a surprise. If happiness writes white — as every creative writing student is told — you might think that churning discontent should come in a similarly unvarying shade of black. But one of Lewis’s great virtues as a chronicler of his own dissatisfaction is the breadth of his range.

21 October 2011

Melanie McDonagh

The quotable Flann O’Brien

It's hard to stop quoting Flann O'Brien, once you start. The Irish man of letters was born a hundred years ago and to celebrate the centenary there are at least three conferences in his honour, the latest of which takes place this weekend at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, with another in the Irish club in Birmingham. For those of us who are obsessed by Flann O’Brien — otherwise known as Myles na Gcopaleen, or by his own name of Brian O’Nolan or assorted other pseudonyms — this is not an entirely welcome phenomenon. You know what happens when the lit-crit community get hold of an author, don't you?

David Blackburn

Designing the art of writing

Here is A.D. Miller, whose book Snowdrops was shortlisted for this year's Booker prize, talking about the art of writing fiction. Snowdrops, if you haven't read it, is very definitely worth reading and not just because it's "readable". Charlotte Hobson wrote in her Spectator review that Miller's book was "a heady noseful of Moscow, an intoxicating perfume that will whirl you off your feet and set your moral compass spinning." On a related point, it's notable that the book has one of the most arresting covers I can remember. It suggests a foreign and perhaps superficially beguiling atmosphere and place; themes with which the book is deeply concerned. The snazzy website for the book also draws on the alluring cover.

Fleur Macdonald

Mad world

A certain literary prize announced earlier this week received a lot of flak because the shortlist was deemed too readable. I want to know what books they were reading. The Barnes was as cold as a washed up kipper; the Kelman featured a pigeon as a narrator and most of the praise heaped on deWitt said it would make a good Coen brothers film. I'd rather just wait for the film. Speaking of which, the film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin is belatedly out today; its original release date delayed after events in Norway. The 2005 Orange Prize winner is perfect example of a page-turner by a mediocre writer which thoroughly deserved said gong. And that's not intended as a back-handed compliment.

20 October 2011

David Blackburn

Your Gaddafi reader

The news from Libya is bound to spark a flood of literature about Gaddafi, Libya and the Arab Spring in general. Here is a selection of published books and forthcoming releases on the subject: Gaddafi’s most famous work is The Green Book, which details his political philosophy. Its subjects range from breastfeeding to racial supremacy, and it has been variously described as “insane” and “surreal gibberish”. It may appear to be a psychotic symphony, but, as Andrew Roberts has noted in the Daily Beast, irrationality was Gaddafi’s leitmotif and it became an agency of his power. Christopher Hitchens touches on this theme when discussing the unstable nature of tyranny in his autobiography Hitch-22.

David Blackburn

Interview: A lesson with Michael Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo became a story-teller when teaching London primary school children in his late twenties. “There were 35 children in the class. I found that using a book [to teach] came between them and me.” He felt he needed to speak to them directly, with tales that grew from the “common ground” of experience between teacher and pupils. This, Morpurgo says, is why he writes as he does. We meet at the National Army Museum for the launch of an exhibition timed to coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Morpurgo’s War Horse in the New Year. The exhibition is titled ‘War Horse: Fact & Fiction’ and the tension between fact and fiction interests Morpurgo as a novelist.

19 October 2011

David Blackburn

Cheeky Julian

Fleet Street's reaction to Julian Barnes' Booker win appears to be one of relief and no small amount of applause: The Times' literary editor Erica Wagner and the Guardian's Mark Brown both sound an enormous "phew" in their columns this morning. The dissent about the Booker Prize in general and "readability" seem to have subsided for the moment as Barnes soaks up the praise, which you can see in the video clip above. Mischievously, he said that The Sense of an Ending is the best book he's written in the last five years. He even declared it to be "readable". Barnes deserves to have won just for that irresistible cheek.

George Binning

Guildford diary: Trade secrets

If you've always loved audio books but never stopped to wonder how they are made, then give yourself a slap and continue reading. Maggie Ollerenshaw described her world to a modest audience at the Guildford book festival, revealing the production process with some of the anecdotal colouring-in that makes listening to veterans talking about their particular fields so enlightening. With over 50 audiobooks to her name, she cheerily played down quite what hard work this voice-acting really is. Recording at a rate of a 150 pages a day, each page-turn is meticulously planned to fall into an editable pause. Clunky jewellery is to be avoided and the highly sensitive microphones require the actor to sit incredibly still.

18 October 2011

David Blackburn

And the 2011 Booker goes to: Julian Barnes

It wasn't a turn up for the books in the end: Julian Barnes, the odds-on favourite, has won this year’s Booker prize for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. The award has been marred by controversy this time round, with a rival prize now expected to be established, one that recognises outstanding literary achievement. The Booker's self-defence has been supremely confident: Ion Trewin derided his critics as “lovies” and told them to quit bleating until judgment was passed, sure that the result would quell dissent. Apparently, it won't be enough to call off the dogs because Barnes, in that great Booker fashion, is an overdue winner.

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs

Who’s Jeffrey Sachs? Leading American development economist and United Nations adviser, Sachs is broadly on the left of the political spectrum. His most famous book is The End of Poverty. What’s the book about? Another analysis of the current financial crisis, the book is a mixture of diagnosis and prescription, focusing on America. What are his big ideas? Sachs is no Keynesian, calling the idea to solve the crisis with more government borrowing “a magical argument without any empirical support”. He thinks the US urgently needs to stabilise its national debt, for reasons both economic and moral.

Nik Darlington

Readers’ review: Darling’s ripping memoir

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, the Labour party was split into three camps: those who genuinely adored Brown, those who believed he could change (elected as New Gordon, govern as New Gordon?) and a deflated Blairite rump that had given up the ghost. It is not immediately clear which of these camps is most reprehensible. But the most culpable were those who knew that a Brown premiership would be a disaster and still allowed it to happen, including Tony Blair, who, as Alistair Darling reveals in this brilliant autobiography, said at the beginning of his premiership that working with Gordon Brown was “like facing the dentist’s drill without an anaesthetic”.

Daisy Dunn

Guildford diary: When spies become authors

'They were afraid. Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it's the willingness to face fear. They faced their fears.' The words are familiar. Euripides rehearsed them, Seneca upheld them, Mark Twain perpetuated them. But never have they seemed as relevant as when former SOE [Special Operations Executive] agent Noreen Riols spoke them of her former fellow agents in an auditorium of stunned Guildford Book Festival goers last Sunday afternoon. That's the thing about spies, they're practical, resourceful people, not idle dreamers. Compare Franklin D.

17 October 2011

Alex Massie

This Year’s Booker Rumpus: Just As Ridiculous As Every Other Year’s Booker Rumpus

The annual tiff about the Man Booker Prize is a reassuringly perennial feature of the British autumn. It is also almost always ridiculous. This year, apparently, the prize has been "dumbed down" as the judges (including the Spectator's Susan Hill) neglected a number of fashionable names in favour of a shortlist that, Julian Barnes excepted, features relatively little-known authors. Worst of all, it seems, the judges are said to have treated "readability" as an important factor when considering their favourites. Crivvens! This, it is further alleged, is part of longer-term trend favouring "accessible" novels above those of so-called genuine literary merit.

Anna Baddeley

Libraries: Stop patronising, start patronising

Be honest, how many times have you used your local library in the past year? If you live in Kensal Rise, the answer is “not enough”. Before it was locked up last week, after the High Court overturned a last-ditch appeal by campaigners, its pretty Victorian library had been getting only 850 visits a week. With each of these visits costing £4, Brent Council decided this wasn’t sustainable. Kensal, along with five other “under-performing” libraries, would be closed, with some of the £1 million saved going towards the borough’s six remaining libraries. There are also plans underfoot to build a new “super library” near Wembley stadium.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Prizes for all

Andrew Motion has joined the chorus of disapproval against this year’s Booker shortlist, saying that it has created a “false divide” between highbrow literature and accessible books. He went on to describe the split as a “pernicious and dangerous thing”, adding that it was “extraordinary” that authors like Graham Swift, Alan Hollingshurst, Edward St. Aubyn and Philip Hensher had not been shortlisted. Stern stuff from the former Poet Laureate, who was chief Booker judge last year. His words will further inspire those who think that a new prize should be created, one that recognises an “uncompromising standard of excellence”.

Daisy Dunn

Guildford Diary: Famous friends

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the generations for its enigmatic symbolic value.

15 October 2011

Sam Leith

Masques of beauty and blackness

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Sam Leith on the paradoxical nature of Britain’s first literary celebrity What a piece of work was Ben Jonson! If you lived in Elizabethan England and had just narrowly escaped the gallows after stabbing a man to death in an illegal duel, wouldn’t you want to keep your head down for a bit? Not Jonson. He converted to Catholicism. A few months after the bishops of Canterbury and London, in 1599, declared the writing of satire illegal, what did Jonson produce? Every Man out of his Humour, a self-declared ‘comical satire’. The writing of history was also proscribed — Tacitean history being a particular sore point. So in 1603 Jonson produced Sejanus, a history play based on Tacitus. Epigrams were banned too. By 1612, Jonson got round to publishing some.

Bevis Hillier

Stranger than fiction

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Asked to review this book, which I was told was about encounters between unlikely pairs of people, I assumed it would be on the lines of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Craig Brown is our premier parodist, the best since the incomparable Max. Might his chatting twosomes include Cleopatra and Janet Street-Porter? The Marquis de Sade and Mary Whitehouse? No one could do that better, I thought; and by the end of it I’d be writhing on the Axminster, to borrow a phrase from the late Alan Coren. I couldn’t wait to split my sides. I was quite wrong. To my surprise, the book describes real encounters. Truth being stranger than fiction, many of them are every bit as bizarre as anything Brown could have invented, and some are as funny.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The best and bravest

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‘The candle is burning out and I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can — that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this — with the best news, which will also be the quickest. It is 50-to-1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud. Great love to you. Ever your loving, George. ‘ Thus wrote the magnificent (and in many ways muddle-headed) mountaineer George Mallory on 27 May 1924. It was his last ever letter to his wife Ruth before he disappeared into the blizzard that swirled around the summit of Mt Everest, never to return. Did he reach the top? That is a question that cannot conclusively be answered and Wade Davis doesn’t try to. Instead, in his quite brilliant new book, he applies himself to the question of why.

Vernon Bogdanor

Not lions, but ostriches

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Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the colonisers. But that, surely, is a fallacy. For the British empire was, for most of its history, an elite project. There is little evidence that it ever enthused the British people, except perhaps in the decade following Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when Beatrice Webb found ‘all classes’ to be ‘drunk with the sightseeing and hysterical loyalty’.

Tony Gould

Fixing malaria

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A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics. Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief of Time magazine and has ten years’ experience of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He knows what happens on the ground, how small a fraction of charitable donations ever reaches the people it is intended to help; and he is not a fan of aid agencies, characterised here as ‘Western arrogance in a white SUV’. Perry’s hero is a man from New Jersey called Ray Chambers. Never heard of him?

Cressida Connolly

Bookends: Squelch of the bladder-wrack

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What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little essays that give the reader the gist of each place: if there’s a better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I’d like to see it. Lycett Green has written about front gardens and cottages, books full of interesting facts about history and buildings, conveyed in a pleasantly informal, even chatty, style. She also writes a column on unspoiled market towns and villages, which has already spawned one book, Unwrecked England. The present volume is along the same lines.

Jonathan Davis

Investment special: Be very afraid

Features

In The Fear Index, the latest thriller by Robert Harris, now heading for the Christmas bestseller lists, a brainbox hedge fund manager with little in the way of interpersonal skills discovers that his computer-driven trading system has flown out of control and threatens to send the world’s stock markets into a tailspin. Anyone familiar with Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein will recognise the genre of the oddball genius consumed by his own creation — populist fiction at its best. But is it fiction? Not so fast, reader. As Harris makes clear in a footnote near the end of his novel, the market meltdown which Dr Alex Hoffmann’s trading system appears to have prompted in The Fear Index is one that actually happened.

14 October 2011

David Blackburn

A thoroughly English affair

Calm reigned outside Kensal Rise Library this afternoon, following the dramas of the morning. Contractors arrived at 6am to board up the building after a court decided that Labour controlled Brent Council could close six libraries as part of its austerity drive. They discovered two people standing guard at the front door, who immediately stood-to and barred the way. The same scene was repeated at 8am, when a posse of locals descended to defy council workers. They were bolstered by a phalanx of 140 or so primary school children from the nearby Princess Frederica CofE school, dragooned into action by their parents. The burly contractors slunk off with their chip-board and haven’t been seen since. The mood was quietly upbeat when I arrived just after midday.

Daisy Dunn

Guildford diary: The Bell tolls

It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen. Last night its bells tolled to the sound of Martin Bell reciting from his new book of light-tongued but ominous verse (he prefers to call it ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’), For Whom the Bell Tolls. ‘The Man in the White Suit’ is sitting in his dressing room prior to his Guildford talk dressed, predictably, in his ‘white suit’, which is actually cream. Does he have John Donne or Ernest Hemingway in mind with this title?

Fleur Macdonald

I only have ‘ize’ for you

It's easy to blame the Americans, but sometimes — as the courts ruled in Perugia last week — they're innocent. The case brought to mind another instance of injustice meted out to our transatlantic cousins, all in the name of that most exacting of mistresses: grammar. Of the many linguistic crimes we've accused them of committing, the most awful is the genocide of the suffix "ise". We tut over spell-check, remark on the aesthetic superiority of that line of beauty — the curve of an "S" — and stand aghast at the cheek of attempting to deface their mother tongue. Replace the elegant slip of an "ise" with a clunky utilitarian "ize"?! But we got it wrong.

13 October 2011

David Blackburn

A scribbling spat

The prognosis is grave for the Booker Prize, say more than a few literary commentators in response to the news that a cabal of publishers, authors and agents plan to establish a “well-funded prize” that would have a “different set of priorities” to the Booker. For different "set of priorities", read “high-brow”; the prize may also be open to American authors. Spokesman for the nascent Literature Prize, Andrew Kidd, told the Bookseller that the prize would: ‘establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence...For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize.

Anna Baddeley

Briefing Note: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California. Who is Michael Lewis? A former bond trader turned financial journalist, Michael Lewis specialises in explaining complex financial matters in an accessible and funny way. The American author’s last book was credit crunch primer The Big Short. Does he have any insights?