Books Archives

More curious canine incidents: Dogs and Monsters, by Mark Haddon, reviewed

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Mark Haddon’s latest collection of short stories, Dogs and Monsters, uses myth and history as springboards into mesmerising accounts of isolation, tragedy and, of course, dogs, which are a motif throughout, from the hounds who mistakenly tear apart their owner Actaeon, to one who befriends St Antony at his lowest point. Haddon monitors the borderlines between man and beast, divine and mortal, and what’s real and what isn’t. In ‘The Mother’s Story’, a reimagining of the Minotaur myth, the action is transported to quasi-medieval England. The first-person narrator is Pasiphae (though unnamed), whose ruthless husband has locked up her son Paul, born ‘a moon calf’.

Andrew Rosenheim

A choice of thrillers for end of summer escapism

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Publishing has never much distinguished between fame and notoriety, and it’s hardly Charlotte Philby’s fault that her grand-father was the double agent Kim. Still, it seems an odd credential to extol. Philby is a good enough writer to be lauded for her work alone, and her latest book, The End of Summer (Borough Press, £16.99), is spy-free and her best so far. It’s 1985 and Judy McVee is an attractive teenage hustler who leaves her unsympathetic mother in London and moves to New York. There she supports herself by pilfering wallets from men in bars who mistake her friendliness for availability.

Marcus Nevitt

How weird was Oliver Cromwell?

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One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned. We know that this is true because, in addition to the corroborating evidence, Cromwell wrote a 1,500-word letter about the events back to the House of Commons on 17 September 1649, exulting that he had even heard one of the trapped men screaming: ‘God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn.’ That telling sadistic detail reveals much about both the writer and the addressee of the letter.

Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

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Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and it’s seldom explicitly referenced in the verse. But in Jenkins’s version he’s a war poet.

Nicholas Lezard

Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed

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Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer Franz Kafka woke up to find his mouth full of blood.’ (The echo of the opening line of Metamorphosis is surely deliberate.) Here, in isolation, he recuperated, or tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: ‘I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself... by digging holes, I would dig holes.’ Josipovici quotes this, and adds that there is a photograph of Samuel Beckett ‘doing just that’ in the second volume of his Collected Letters.

Anne de Courcy

Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze

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This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed illustrations, patterns of fabric and family photographs, interspersed with chunks of prose or aphorisms. In short, it is an expression of its author’s philosophy, threaded through rather disjointedly with the story of her life. Iris Apfel is the only woman I can think of – with the possible exceptions of Diana Vreeland and Helena Rubinstein – who turned extreme plainness into an aspect of personal style.

Harry Ritchie

Celebrating Sequoyah and his Cherokee alphabet

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There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken on this planet. By the end of this century, all but 600 will have disappeared – the inevitable result of an unstoppable process as the last speakers of the world’s little languages die out, usually leaving no trace, for the vast majority are spoken only, with no written record. But even languages which have had the good fortune to be written down face their own extinction as their individual writing systems struggle to survive. Hundreds and hundreds of unique alphabets, as much as 90 per cent, face oblivion.

Paul Kildea

Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp

Lead book review

Some years ago, following a Christmas performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, I sat in one of the dives near the theatre with a member of the corps de ballet, the gay son of close friends. The audience had been populated largely by children and teenagers, most of whom were either smitten by the intrepid, empathetic Clara or wanted to be her. Yet the mood perceptibly shifted when, at the end of Act I, the life-sized nutcracker doll transformed into a most handsome prince, all grace and gluts. ‘Do you think in that moment,’ I asked my dancer friend, ‘that a smattering of adolescent boys, out on a family treat, notice their affections shifting from Clara to the Prince and receive there and then the gentlest yet unmistakable insight into their future selves?

13 August 2024

Alexandra Coghlan

Saved from certain death at Auschwitz – by playing the cello

Lead book review

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to go on the journey. Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes?

Pen Vogler

The juicy history of the apple

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In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).

Patrick Graney

The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president

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A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in his detail of the underground union gatherings, abject poverty and family tragedy which formed Lula. He brings São Paulo’s working-class culture to life throughout, with popular car brands, pop songs and sessions of cachaça and gin rummy ever present. Lula’s upbringing was marred by hardship.

Elisa Segrave

Is it wrong to try to ‘cure’ autism?

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Is autism the worst thing that can happen to a person? Is ABA – Applied Behaviour Analysis – the right treatment for an autistic child? Should an autistic person get away with being rude? Do autistic individuals not feel empathy? If, as exists for unborn Downs Syndrome babies, a precise test is found to diagnose foetal autism, should the mother abort? Is it wrong, as some high-functioning autistic people claim, to try to ‘cure’ autism? Surely it is important to offer intervention to less able autistic children and adults, to help make their lives more bearable? These are some of the questions discussed in this passionate and informative memoir. Virginia Bovell’s son Danny, now 31, was diagnosed with autism in 1996, aged three.

Honor Clerk

Tales with a twist: Safe Enough and Other Stories, by Lee Child, reviewed

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Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. ‘Fabergé eggs they ain’t,’ he says, in the introduction to this collection of 20 stories, but they are real gems nonetheless. With no global readership to worry about and no commercial interests involved, Child was free to have fun. And fun he has with the short story form, shooting from the hip – ‘no need’, as he says, ‘to save anything for Chapter 17’. The trademark economy of style is faultless, each cop, hitman, fixer or judge fully fleshed out in just a few words; the scaffolding for each narrative constructed with the absolute minimum of material.

Nigel Jones

How could Hitler have had so many willing henchmen?

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Eight decades after the second world war ended, for how much longer will we produce massive books about Hitler and the Nazis? Richard J. Evans, the former regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the senior gardeners in this noxious orchard, having devoted a lifetime’s study to the subject. As a minor under-gardener in the same field, I believe that we now know all we need to about the Führer and the crimes of his vile regime, and, barring the unlikely discovery of something new, it is time that historians moved on. The damning facts can be briefly stated, and are cogently summed up by Evans in his conclusion: Hitler was a fanatic, brought to power by a German middle class traumatised by defeat in the first world war and the economic woes that followed.

Helen Barrett

Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

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On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and ‘rock’s most committed iconoclast’, as his New York Times obituary described him, for 27 years, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, aged 52. A year after that first, snot-filled seduction, the Zappas were married, a week before Gail gave birth to Moon Unit, the first of four children. Moon’s name is not a compound noun: Unit is her middle name, given to reflect how her arrival turned two people into a single family – Frank’s idea.

Philip Marsden

Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

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Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it. In her previous book, Timefulness, she wrote for the general reader and with persuasive lyricism about readjusting our focus to thinking in geological time.

Maggie Fergusson

Imperfections in wood can make for the loveliest carvings

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I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight. Callum Robinson would understand why this matters.

Brian Martin

A death foretold: The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker, reviewed

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Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid, her intimate ‘catch-fart’. (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.) Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim.

Christopher Bray

Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting

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You must remember this... Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. ‘Give her my love,’ says Slim. ‘I’d give her my own,’ says Harry, ‘if she were wearing that.’ And in real life, as the tabloids would say, he did. We are talking of To Have and Have Not (1944), in which Harry is Humphrey Bogart and Slim is Lauren Bacall. The director, Howard Hawks, said the movie was just an excuse to do some scenes.

Lucasta Miller

How ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ plays tricks with the mind

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I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how we navigate the story of colonial expansion.

6 August 2024

Stuart Kelly

An unlikely comeback: Rare Singles, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed

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Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I knew very little about the music; and listening to it did not appreciably deepen my enjoyment of this novel. Sentimentality is not a bad thing per se, but it is a difficult genre to do well, and Myers doesn’t do it half badly. The central figure is Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, an elderly American widower wracked by pain, whose musical career comprised two singles, one barely released and both largely forgotten.

Ian Sansom

David Baddiel’s father and mother must be the most talked about parents in Britain

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According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as he admits, craves attention – or who has never watched television or listened to the radio over the past 30 or 40 years, Baddiel is famous as a stand-up comedian specialising in a ‘sweary and often not-very-nice-Jewish-boy style of comedy’, as a TV chat show host with fellow comedian Frank Skinner, presenting Fantasy Football League and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. He also writes films, sitcoms, novels and non-fiction, including the recent Jews Don’t Count.

Jonathan Boff

What did Britain really gain from the daring 1942 Bruneval raid?

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These days we use radar to help us park our cars, but during the early years of the second world war it was white hot technology and a closely guarded military secret. First used to detect aircraft in 1935, within a few years it had helped win the Battle of Britain and sink the Bismarck. It was so secret that work on it was forbidden even to physicists of genius who had fled the Nazis. (In the event, this freed up two such émigrés, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, to prove the viability of the atom bomb and thus kick-start what became the Manhattan Project.) Intelligence about what the enemy was up to with radar had a price above rubies.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Women beware women: Wife, by Charlotte Mendelson, reviewed

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Charlotte Mendelson has been described in the Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if anything even worse. This is the story of a lesbian relationship that sours. The book begins at the marriage’s end, but in its slightly confusing structure it leaps back to the beginning and then forward again. In fairness, these time- jumps are clearly signalled and I think the sense of bewilderment they nonetheless create is intentional.

Tibor Fischer

Does bitcoin fit the definition of good money?

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Three philosophers walk into a crypto-currency. Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, I’d argue, is a slightly inaccurate title. Messrs Bailey, Rettler and Warmke have composed a book that is a meticulous and unphilosophically lucid examination of the origins and properties of bitcoin. No Hegel, no Husserl, no fuss. ‘We don’t prophesy,’ they state. ‘We don’t preach.’ They plead a Socratic humility. ‘We’d forgive you for thinking that three philosophers aren’t up to the task.’ They describe themselves as ‘epistemic trespassers’ in matters of economics and cryptography. Access to bitcoin has changed from a muddy country path to a six-lane highway The editorial sessions for Resistance Money must have been hell.

Amanda Foreman

Towards Zero: the gruesome countdown to the American Civil War

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Some 100,000 books have been written about the American Civil War since it ended in 1865. That’s hardly surprising, given the four-year conflict’s impact on society, and not just because of the immense death toll, which new estimates put as high as 750,000 – more than the losses from all other wars combined. The effusion of blood created a new nation and a new mythology, anchored on the principles of freedom, equality and democracy. There is not much room in this crowded field for Civil War neophytes. Erik Larson knows what he is about, however, in The Demon of Unrest – but do his critics? The mixed reception this book has received suggests not.

Charlotte Hobson

Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia

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Goodbye to Russia is an elegy for a lost country – the warm, chaotic Russia of unlimited possibility that welcomed the 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford in 1992. She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow as a Russian correspondent from 2014. Her memoir’s 30-year period covers an entire cycle in Russian politics – as Anna Akhmatova might have put it, from vegetarian to carnivore. In August 2021, Rainsford was stopped at the Russian border and refused entry as a ‘threat to national security’. A few weeks later, she was expelled with no right of return, one in a rollcall of foreign journalists banned from Russia.

Isabel Hardman

Does ‘artistic swimming’ truly describe the world’s hardest sport?

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Synchronised swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? It’s ‘artistic swimming’ now, of course, though many athletes don’t like that term precisely because it makes the Olympic event sound less like a real sport. But by the end of Swimming Pretty, Vicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronised swimming, it’s difficult to think of it as anything other than one of the toughest sports we’ve been watching in Paris – and wonder why anyone would disagree. That question is one that Valosik addresses in her book, along with making the case for the sheer discipline and power of a synchronised swimmer. Her skill is in doing both without ever sounding plaintive or chippy. Besides, the story she tells is so remarkable that it doesn’t need any forced drama.

Scott Bradfield

A marriage of radical minds: the creative partnership of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

Lead book review

It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood illnesses that limited his activity to reading books, writing stories and staging ‘pasteboard theatre’ productions with his nanny, or else travelling to health spas in Marseille, Genoa and Naples. He strongly resisted his father’s efforts to enlist him in his own career as a lighthouse designer, and at Edinburgh University the only thing he excelled at was truancy.