Books Archives

A sea of troubles: The Coast Road, by Alan Murrin, reviewed

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Contemporary Irish writers have a knack of making their recent past feel very foreign. Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These is set in 1985, but the horrors she reveals about one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries seem more like ancient history. Alan Murrin pulls off something similar in The Coast Road, where in late 1994 divorce is still illegal in Ireland, unlike the rest of Europe. Izzy Keaveney, a housewife with two teenage children, ‘has the depression’ and has dragged herself to Sunday morning mass despite a hangover. She spent the previous evening at a dinner-dance, listening to her politician husband James give a talk about the importance of business in the local community. ‘Are you going to spoil another night?

Alexandra Coghlan

Pure Puccini: an opera lover’s melodramatic family history

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‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ By the time the Duke of Wellington’s famous question (‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’) made its way down to the young Michael Volpe, growing up in a fractured Italian family on the ‘streets and railway tracks... estates and football terraces’ of 1970s west London, it was mangled almost beyond recognition, bent and twisted into a surreal new shape. But the spirit of Wellington’s question remained, burrowing into a boy with one foot in the stable and one beyond, his very name a contradiction of identity: the blandly Anglicised, Sunday-best ‘Michael’ at odds with the sly, sinuously Italian ‘Volpe’ – fox.

Hannah Walton

Afrikaner angst: Cato Pedder goes in search of her ancestors

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‘Let me tell you about Jan Smuts,’ my grandfather, a doctor born not far from Johannesburg, would begin. And we, as children, would mutter and glance sideways and sink into our chairs. The story would go something like this: ‘Smuts was a Boer War leader, later feted by the English political establishment and central to international moves towards a liberal world order, a segregationist back home and reviled by the Afrikaner nationalists, who instituted formal apartheid from 1948. He was many things to many people, and his influence in South Africa and internationally was unparalleled in his time.’ My grandfather’s eyes would mist over and we would grunt responses about problematic legacies and racism.

Lee Langley

Runaway lovers: The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

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Watching Kevin Barry’s progress over the years has been a pleasure. His first novel, City of Bohane, flamboyant with tribal vernacular and savagery, was followed by Beatlebone, a beguiling surreal odyssey, and then Night Boat to Tangier, where two tired old crims wait and talk their way through the dark hours. Escaping Beckett’s long shadow, the vigil had a hint of redemption. Never has the lawless life been depicted with such wry sweetness. What Barry celebrates above all is language, swooping from desolation to deadpan mirth in a phrase. Pain that lies too deep for tears can be assuaged by laughter. The award-winning novels were interspersed with collections of short stories, prize-winners resonant with the hidden music of the old country.

Clive Aslet

The atmosphere of a historic country house cannot be bought

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The Historic Houses Association can congratulate itself. This pressure group for country houses, founded in 1973, has proved to be one of the most effective lobbying organisations of our time. When it came into being, the future, according to the architectural historian John Cornforth, was ‘full of gloom’ for the country house. The Destruction of the Country House exhibition of 1974 revealed the extent of the crisis, which had set in a century earlier with the agricultural depression of the 1870s. That was when aristocrats who had previously relied on the income from their estates built their hopes on landing a transatlantic beauty with ‘plenty of tin’. The supply of heiresses dried up in about 1912, just before the first world war.

Christopher Shrimpton

No Sir Lancelot: A Good Deliverance, by Toby Clements, reviewed

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Sir Thomas Malory is not much of a knight. He lies; he is lecherous; he is bested in tourneys; he misses battles due to a dicky stomach; he inadvertently causes the deaths of his friends. He is no Sir Lancelot. But he has his talents, chief among them being his ability to spin a yarn, and he has won much renown for his retelling of the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table, later to be published as Le Morte d’Arthur. Now he has the chance to set his own story straight. Well, straight-ish. A Good Deliverance is a sly and salty fictional account of the life and deeds of Malory, whose real-life record is shrouded in mystery. The story begins in 1468 with the elderly man’s arrest and imprisonment in Newgate Prison. No charges are forthcoming.

Chris Mullin

One damned thing after another: Britain’s crisis-ridden century so far

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Asked about the greatest challenges he faced as prime minister, Harold Macmillan is said to have replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ The first quarter of this century has seen no shortage of events that have blown prime ministers off course. There was Tony Blair by 9/11 and the resulting war in Iraq; Gordon Brown by the financial crisis of 2007-8; David Cameron and Theresa May by Brexit; and Boris Johnson by Covid. With the exception of May, none of these people had any inkling, on taking office, of the bolts from the blue that would ultimately define their premierships.

Stuart Jeffries

AI is both liberating and enslaving us

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Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping across a busy road in Tempe, Arizona in 2018 when she was struck by a hybrid electric Volvo SUV at 40mph. At the time of the accident, the woman in the driver’s seat was watching a talent show on her phone. The SUV had been fitted with an autonomous driving system consisting of neural networks that integrated image recognisers. The reason Herzberg died was because what she was doing did not compute. The autonomous driving system recalibrated the car’s trajectory to avoid the bicycle, which it took to be travelling along the road, only to collide with Herzberg, who was walking across it. She became the first casualty of artificial intelligence.

Toby Harnden

Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era

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The CIA, this fascinating new history notes, is ‘possibly the most infamous organisation on the planet’. Its hidden hand is often presumed to be everywhere, pulling the strings. That’s pretty impressive, given that it only has, by most estimates, around 20,000 employees. (The exact number is, naturally, classified.) At the same time, it’s routinely portrayed as comically inept – a bunch of ‘clowns’ and ‘a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals’, as Richard Nixon put it. This has led to a dichotomy in CIA histories. On the one hand it is depicted as an all-powerful evil force, responsible for many of the world’s ills since its foundation in 1947.

Nicholas Lezard

Shalom Auslander vents his disgust – on his ‘grotesque, vile, foul, ignominious self’

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The word is Yiddish, and is an expression of disgust. A decent translation of it into vernacular English would be ‘yuck’. Shalom Auslander has been feeling feh about himself for pretty much as long as he has been conscious. Born into a strictly religious family, with a mother given to quoting Jeremaiah and a father whose violence and cruelty were almost literally biblical, or at least strongly evocative of the Old Testament, Auslander grew up to be the kind of Jew who, when visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, writes ‘fuck you’ on a piece of paper and shoves it in a crack. It is more traditional for the pious to write a prayer. But that is Auslander’s prayer.

18 June 2024

Agnès Poirier

If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad

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A London-based foreign correspondent is probably not the target audience of Michael Peel’s latest book. Indeed, what Peel (himself a former Financial Times correspondent in Lagos, Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Brussels) discusses in eight lively, well-researched chapters won’t come as a surprise to any of his UK-based foreign colleagues: how Britain is perceived abroad; and how little it seems to permeate the national consciousness. This blindness – or the British inability to realise how they appear to others, as opposed to the image they have of themselves – often has foreign correspondents pulling their hair in disbelief. If only Britain knew how it was seen! One senses that Peel’s return to London from Tokyo after 13 years of foreign postings must have felt like a crash landing.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

An insight into the American Dream: Table for Two, by Amor Towles, reviewed

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Amor Towles was a Wall Street banker before he published his first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011, at the age of 46. Since then, his books have sold six million copies, and the second, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), has been made into a Paramount + series starring Ewan McGregor. Towles’s success in banking and publishing has perhaps given him a particular insight into the American Dream. The six stories and one novella that make up his stylish and confident new collection, Table for Two, all feature characters in pursuit of an ambition that puts them in varying degrees of peril – protagonists tasked with missions of differing seriousness.

Olivia Potts

The pleasure of reliving foreign travel through food

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The idea of the kitchen as a space for transformation and transportation is not a new one. Many writers have explored the room’s ability to offer both domesticity and alchemy at the same time – how it allows cooks to travel vicariously through the food they make. This is the subject of Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden’s memoir of her time spent in her kitchen in Scotland and of her travels to Eastern European and Central Asian cities – and somehow she makes it fresh and compelling. She is an author and critic who has written extensively about the food and culture of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Black Sea, in which she explored Odessa, Istanbul and Trabzon, received a clutch of prizes, and Red Sands, about Central Asia, won the prestigious André Simon food book award.

Tibor Fischer

What will we do when all our jobs are done for us?

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Laughs are in short supply in the academic world unless that world is serving as the victim of satire. So full marks to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom for loading Deep Utopia – his reflections on life in a ‘solved world’, perfected by technology and science – with self-mockery and slapstick. Bostrom isn’t the first to fret about the travails of extreme leisure. John Maynard Keynes feared that economic abundance would produce more disgusting aristo-like behaviour. It’s nice to see how mighty minds can be so wrong. Bostrom cites John Stuart Mill being seriously depressed by the prospect, as humanity solved its problems, of there not being enough music to keep everyone happy all day.

Dorian Lynskey

When it comes to krautrock, it’s impossible not to mention the war

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In recent years, sensitive music critics have attempted to replace krautrock with kosmiche as the consensus term for the wild and wonderful music that exploded out of West Germany during the 1970s: Can, Neu!, Cluster, Faust. A word that literally translates as herb-rock, cooked up by glib Brits who had read too many war comics, lacks a certain gravitas, and nobody would describe Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk as rock anyway. The Hamburg journalist Christoph Dallach opens his invigorating oral history with a spirited argument about the label, but sticks with it anyway. So krautrock it remains. In this story, it is impossible not to mention the war because no country in the world has been less at ease with its recent past than Germany.

Christopher Akers

The roots of anti-Semitism in Europe

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The medieval trope that Jews are inherently bloodthirsty has echoed down the ages. Forms of the blood libel have been disseminated ever since the myth emerged in England in the 12th century with claims that Christian children were being ritually murdered by Jews in re-enactments of the crucifixion of Jesus. In the aftermath of 7 October, Labour’s Rochdale by-election candidate Azhar Ali accused Israel of lowering its defences so that it could justify the shedding of innocent Palestinian blood. Gigi Hadid, the American model, shared a video which alleged that Israel is harvesting the organs of Palestinians.

Owen Matthews

Distrust and resentment have plagued Anglo-Russian relations for centuries

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Has a book ever been more bizarrely mis-titled than this one? The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century has nothing whatever to do with the actual Cold War, nor is it for the most part concerned with the 19th century. Rather, Barbara Emerson has written a thorough and often diverting diplomatic history of Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th to the early 20th century. This period encompasses at least 14 wars in which British and Russian troops found themselves embroiled, sometimes on the same side, sometimes on opposite sides. None of these wars was remotely ‘cold’. Nor does Emerson attempt to make any argument that the shifting great power politics of the 19th century resembled those of the post-second-world-war nuclear age.

Anna Aslanyan

Citizens of nowhere: This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud, reviewed

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Any personal history is hard to fictionalise, not least because the story needs to be both universal and unique. Claire Messud manages to find the right balance in her latest novel, reconstructing her family’s past in vivid episodes that open a multitude of windows on to the world. Continents and decades chase one another as the narrative traces the movements of the Cassar family. Hailing from Algeria, for much of the book they are citizens of nowhere. Their tribulations begin in 1940, when Lucienne and her children, François and Denise, flee Greece (where their father, Gaston, has been posted as the French naval attaché) to wait out the war in the relative safety of an Algerian hinterland.

James Campbell

Paris is perhaps the greatest character in Balzac’s Human Comedy

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Open one of the major novels by Honoré de Balzac and you are likely to encounter a sentence such as this, from Cousin Bette: ‘Towards the middle of July, in the year 1838, one of those vehicles called milords, then appearing in the Paris squares for the first time, was driving along the rue de l’Université.’ Or this (from César Birroteau): ‘On winter nights there is no more than a momentary lull in the noise of the rue Saint-Honoré.’ It is the same story in Père Goriot (rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève), Cousin Pons (Boulevard des Italiens) and others. From the first words of the tale, the reader is cast into the drama of the street. One of the first things to beware of is the mud.

11 June 2024

Caspar Henderson

The good old ways: nature’s best chance of recovery

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Britain is one of the most nature-depleted places on Earth. The consequences for human wellbeing and resilience, as well as for non-human life, are grave. Conservationists and others say it doesn’t have to be this way. But when it comes to recovery, what should we aim for? How much can we know about what was once present? How much is it practicable or sensible to restore? What does recovery, let alone ‘rewilding’, really mean in a rapidly heating world? Sophie Yeo does not have the answers to all of these questions. Nobody does. What she does offer in Nature’s Ghosts are insights that could help shape a better informed and more constructive debate.

Marcus Nevitt

Disgusted of academia: a university lecturer bewails his lot

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There’s a beautiful moment in I Am the Secret Footballer (2012), a Guardian column turned whistle-blower memoir, when the anonymous author is momentarily freed from an enveloping depression caused by his career as a professional sportsman. He’s at Anfield to play against Liverpool in one of the biggest games of the season when he picks up a pristine, unused football before a warm-up drill and, inexplicably, sniffs it. With that inhalation he’s transported from the corruption, pressure, scandalous abuse and monstrous egos of elite sport and for a few seconds becomes a kid uncontainably excited at the prospect of kicking a new ball around his council estate.

Stuart Kelly

Kapows and wisecracks: Fight Me, by Austin Grossman, reviewed

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Superheroes are the trump card of genres. As a rule of thumb, if a novel has a murder, it’s ‘Crime’; if it has a murder on a space station, it’s ‘Science Fiction’; and if it has a murder on a haunted space station, it’s ‘Horror’. But a novel with crimes, robots, faeries, cavemen, magic, cyborgs and time travel can only be ‘Superhero’. It is rarely successful outside the graphic variety, possibly because such strenuous suspension of disbelief is best managed in comics. Yet it can be done. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is one, while Lavie Tidhar’s Our Violent Century and Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir are both clever and witty. Perhaps the most recognisable success was Austin Grossman’s smart 2007 Soon I Will Be Invincible.

Elizabeth Goldring

At last we see Henry VIII’s wives as individuals

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Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. Nearly 500 years after the death of Henry VIII, can there be anything new to say about his queens: Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr? Does the world need another book about this sextet? The answer to both questions, as this elegantly written and sumptuously illustrated volume makes clear, is a resounding yes. Published to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of the same name (20 June-8 September), Six Lives is a collection of concise, accessible essays written by experts with specialist knowledge of Tudor painting, music, jewellery, manuscript illumination and book binding, among other topics.

Leyla Sanai

The diary of a dying man: Graham Caveney’s poignant cancer memoir

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Reading this third memoir by Graham Caveney, a knot in my chest tightened. It wasn’t only because it’s a cancer memoir; it was because the unfolding of history so often shows that abuse begets self-destructive behaviour. To parody Auden: I and the public knowWhat all healthcare staff learnThose to whom evil is doneDestroy themselves in turn. Caveney’s two previous memoirs, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness and Agoraphobia, outlined his working-class childhood in Accrington, Lancashire, and his winning of a place at a Catholic grammar school. But where the school succeeded in helping him achieve his aim of becoming a writer, it also screwed with his head, because he was not only taken to plays but also played with by a member of staff.

Tim Newark

Jam-packed with treasures: the eccentric Sir John Soane’s Museum

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Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane viewed it as a reflection of his busy intellect, ‘studies for my own mind’, he said, and Bruce Boucher’s new book reveals how the architect, famous for designing the Bank of England, put together the remarkable collection that visitors can still see today. The author was director of the Soane Museum from 2016 to last year, and his privileged access to its archives ensures we get an insider’s view of the quirky institution and its more than 40,000 eclectic objects.

Mike Jakeman

The sheer drudgery of professional tennis

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Wimbledon’s starched whites, manicured flower beds and hushed silence enable tennis to present itself as a genteel sport. But Wimbledon only represents tennis in the way that an Olympic 100m final represents athletics. It is the best players in the best setting for a brief period. Actual tennis, the day-to-day life of a regular player on the circuit, is very different. It is relentless, stingy and unsentimental. The most surprising thing about The Racket, Conor Niland’s bruising account of his career as a good (but not great) tennis player, is that he emerges with both his sanity and his compassion intact. Tennis is not an easy game to break into.

Nick Macpherson

The costly legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s monetarism

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Post-war British economic history is littered with failed policy panaceas. Keynesian demand management would solve the unemployment problem; the Exchange Rate Mechanism would provide an anchor for stability and end sterling’s perennial weakness; the Barber and Kwarteng budgets – separated by 50 years – would throw off the shackles of Treasury orthodoxy and put the country on a path to higher growth. On the face of it, monetarism – the theory that if you control the money supply, you control inflation – fits squarely into this paradigm. As soon as government sought to control the money supply, the historic relationship between money and inflation broke down.

Lucasta Miller

A long goodbye to Berlin

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Christopher Isherwood pioneered what is now known as ‘autofiction’ long before it acquired that label. His best known work, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which later inspired the musical Cabaret, was based on the diaries he kept while living in the Weimar Republic in his twenties. He’d already used the material before in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), a brilliant black comedy thriller that deserves to be read alongside more supposedly serious works of modernism. Forty years later, he reworked the experiences yet again in Christopher and His Kind (1977), in which he finally made explicit, for the new gay liberation era, what had been suppressed in the earlier works: his homosexuality, which had previously been outlawed.

6 June 2024

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Those magnificent men and their stargazing machines

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Where is science bred? Is it where the physical circumstances are right – clear skies for astronomy, for example? Where raw materials are abundant – coal for organic chemistry? Where minds freely meet? Where the enlightened patron rules? Violet Moller’s first book, The Map of Knowledge, examined the spread through the centuries of the ideas of Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy by focusing on seven, mainly Mediterranean cities, from Alexandria to Venice, where scientific knowledge was gathered, augmented and promulgated anew, ensuring the survival of classical learning into the modern period. But why these men and these cities? Are people or places the drivers? Is geography a reliable guide, a storytelling device, or an artificial constraint? There are clearly losses in this approach.