Books Archives

Have we all become slaves to algorithms?

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Here I am, a human, recommending Kyle Chayka’s book about the negative impact of algorithms on our culture. Hopefully that will calm him down a bit, because he worries a lot, possibly far too much, at least as it seems to someone who is less online. Chayka is a staff writer at the New Yorker and he is concerned about the effect of the Filterworld, his word for the ‘network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed’. He is referring to the songs Spotify cues up, the films Netflix suggests, the stories Facebook feeds its users, the broken flush of TikTok videos.

Nigel Jones

Conrad Black adheres firmly to the ‘great man’ view of history

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George Orwell has a story that when Sir Walter Raleigh published the first volume of his projected history of the world while in prison, he witnessed a brawl outside his rooms in the Bloody Tower which resulted in the death of a workman. Despite diligent enquiries, Raleigh was unable to discover the cause of the quarrel. Reasoning that if he could not even ascertain the facts behind what he had observed he could hardly accurately report what had happened in distant lands centuries earlier, he burned his notes for the second volume and abandoned the entire project. No such doubts assail the 79-year-old Conrad Black, sometime proprietor of The Spectator, who, like Raleigh, has written the first of a projected three-volume global history.

Susie Mesure

Mystery in everyday objects

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‘The surest and quickest way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare unafraid at a single object.’ Cesare Pavese wrote those words in Dialogues with Leucò, one of two quotations that preface Lara Pawson’s deceptively slim third book, Spent Light. When her dog starts killing squirrels, Pawson cooks them, acquiringa Whitby Wild Cat skinning knife Pawson takes the Italian writer at his word, turning to a toaster for inspiration. The electrical appliance, which appears two pages in, is a gift from a neighbour, Reg, after his wife dies. Pawson uses it to launch a deeply empathetic piece of writing exploring the brutality of the world in which we live. ‘What would have had to happen to me to make me be so cruel?

Tanya Gold

The strangeness of Charles III

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There are two narratives in Robert Hardman’s Charles III. The first is an account of the King’s first year on the throne. This is superbly researched and fascinating. We learn, for instance, that when Queen Elizabeth II died, the state trumpeters were on a plane to Canada and the bearer party was in Iraq. (Their first order on their return was to get a haircut. Their second to carry a comb.) The second is about magic, but since Hardman doesn’t admit this explicitly, the book has the flavour of an intellectual trying to cast a spell. I don’t understand why royalists can’t just say that a monarch occupies a space to prevent something worse occupying it. Monarchism is practical, is the royalist line, considering what people are. It is republicans who are dreamers.

Ian Buruma

The problem with westerners seeking oriental enlightenment

Lead book review

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He – for it was mostly a he – usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition. He identifies two ancient western perceptions of the ‘East’, by which he really means India, China and Japan.

18 January 2024

Ian Sansom

Have we all become more paranoid since the pandemic?

Lead book review

As anyone who has ever been lucky enough to spend time in a psychiatric hospital knows, you don’t have to be completely mad to be there. A lot of us end up in the care of mental health professionals and jacked up on all sorts of crazy-person meds because something’s just not right: you know it, I know it, the dog in the street knows it. Those people are looking at us funny; those voices just won’t quieten down; it really isn’t safe out on the streets, so it must be better to draw the curtains, triple-lock the door and sit quietly in the dark eating only tinned fruit and bottled water.

Travis Elborough

How Liverpool soon outgrew the Beatles

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‘If any journalist asks you about the Beatles because you’re from Liverpool, say you hate them and you don’t listen to that old crap.’ Such was the advice that the DJ Roger Eagle, promoter and founder of the legendary (and there really is no other word for it) Merseyside punk club Eric’s, dispensed to a young Ian Broudie in the late 1970s. Little could either have imagined that almost simultaneously John Lennon, over in New York in the Dakota Building, was busy demo-ing ‘Now and Then’. It was a song which would resurface as the final Beatles single and top the charts some 40-odd years later, aided by a form of AI technology that possibly only members of Dalek I, the Wirral’s wackier answer to Kraftwerk, could have dreamt of back then.

Mark Cocker

Life is a far richer, more complicated affair than we imagined

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In 1982, the philosopher Karl Popper suggested that ‘science may be described as the art of systematic simplification’. In this mind-stretching book, Philip Ball seems to wish to prove Popper’s statement both wrong and correct. On the one hand, Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past 70 years. The author is a former editor of Nature and has been privy to the flow of cutting-edge results coming from the world’s leading research programmes over the past decades. How Life Works has a sense of up-to-the-minute authority. Yet Ball is also deeply alive to the human story within his project, leavening technical matters with wit and humour.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Flirting in 15th-century Florence

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Noel Malcolm, a former political columnist of The Spectator, the historian of English nonsense verse and editor of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, has written a book on an arresting subject. Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe gives close and relentless scrutiny to male-male sexual relations in Europe, the Ottoman empire, north Africa and in such dispersed colonies and outposts as New England, Peru, Cape Town and the Dutch East Indies. Malcolm’s interest in the subject began with his find of a cache of documents dating from 1588. These recorded the official investigation of a male couple – a trainee interpreter for Venice’s envoy in Constantinople and the envoy’s barber – who fell in love.

Lee Langley

Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed

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In everyday life – on a garden path, flowerpot or lettuce – I back rapidly away from slugs. I didn’t expect to confront them in literature, but in Michele Mari’s Verdigris they are present in abundance, from the first line: Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more... slimy shame transformed into splendid silvery iridescence. So, not a novel for one who shrinks from gastropod molluscs, you would think. Yet I quickly found myself drawn into a remote corner of rural north Italy in 1969 where a lonely, bookish boy, Michelino, spends long summers with his emotionally unreachable grandparents.

Christopher Bray

How The Sopranos changed TV for ever

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‘Too many characters, too many plot lines, characters who weren’t very good at their jobs, and their personal lives were a mess.’ Thus the memo to the creatives behind Hill Street Blues. ‘It was like a blueprint for what made every show successful since The Sopranos,’ Kevin Spacey giggles to Peter Biskind. ‘If the NBC executives had had their way, the road from then to now would never have been paved.’ As the quondamlead of one of that road’s biggest stones, House of Cards, Spacey can perhaps be excused his post hoc moment. Still, his big point stands. There was TV before The Sopranos and TV after The Sopranos, and they are not the same.

Francesca Peacock

Refugee lives: The Singularity, by Balsam Karam, reviewed

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One Friday evening in a half-ruined, half-rebuilt city, where smart tourists dine out in restaurants next to refugees in makeshift shelters, a woman walks the streets. In torn clothes and slippers ‘worn ragged’, she hands out leaflets. On every piece of paper the same words are written: ‘Has anyone seen my daughter?’ On the same evening, in the same coastal city, which is ‘half obscured by skyscrapers’, another woman walks the streets with a different purpose, seeking to spend time away from her co-workers on a business trip. As she cradles her pregnant stomach, she watches as a female figure climbs over a clifftop railing and jumps, leaving behind a bag of leaflets. Later, the second woman has a miscarriage.

Michael Arditti

A redemptive fable: Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips, reviewed

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The Appalachians have become fashionable fictional territory. Following Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Demon Copperhead comes Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch. Like Cold Mountain, it is set largely in the aftermath of the American civil war, but, for all its wealth of detail, it is less a historical account than a redemptive fable. As befits a portrait of a society riven by war, the novel unfolds in a series of discrete episodes. Its dominant consciousness and first-person narrator is 12-year-old ConaLee, who lives in a remote hillside cabin with her mother Eliza, infant brothers and sister and violently abusive ‘Papa’.

Annie Walton Doyle

Musings in lockdown: The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

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The Vulnerables represents Sigrid Nunez’s foray into pandemic literature, a genre we can only expect to see grow in the coming years. The topic is handled with a level of absurdity, making elements of the story eerily (and sometimes traumatically) recognisable. Nunez’s musings on how writing can represent the strangeness of life are never more poignant than when she reflects on the ‘uncertain spring’ of 2020. You’d think she was inventing it if you hadn’t been there yourself. The question of how to write when life is stranger than fiction is at the centre of the book. ‘More and more, fictional story-telling is coming across as beside the point,’ she declares. ‘More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up?

Juliet Nicolson

The summer I dwelt in marble halls

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The discovery of a cache of long-lost love letters might be an over-familiar inspiration for a memoir, risking a bit of a dusty lane indulgence – a charming, nostalgic featherbed flop into a past romance. But although the events described by this delightful nonagenarian first-time author took place three-quarters of a century ago, there is nothing sepia-flattened about Gill Johnson’s writing. This is a book which shimmers with remarkable recall as the author returns us to the post-war vibrancy of Venice and the dazzling inhabitants who transformed her young life. The youngest of four children, Gill reached adulthood in Blitz-scarred, rationed 1950s London.

9 January 2024

Annie Walton Doyle

Ménage à trois: Day, by Michael Cunningham, reviewed

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Set over the course of the same April day, with morning, afternoon and night ascribed to consecutive years, Michael Cunningham’s Day is built around time’s march towards an inevitable ending. This feeling of being caught up in time and trapped by its onward force is shared by the novel’s small cast of characters. A married couple, Isabel and Dan Byrne, along with Isabel’s brother Robbie, are struggling with their floundering careers, ageing bodies and their place in the world. They are also balancing a painful platonic love triangle, with both Dan and Isabel more in love with Robbie than with each other. The claustrophobic domesticity of the novel is amplified by its timespan: 2019-21.

Helen Barrett

The proposed cities of the future look anything but modern

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California Forever is an American 21st-century utopian vision, a new city to be built on 60,000 acres of dusty farmland 50 miles outside San Francisco. This latest plan for ‘safe, walkable neighbourhoods’, unveiled late last year and yet to be approved, is financed by Flannery Associates, a consortium of tech venture capitalists led by a former Goldman Sachs trader. Despite its ultra-modern backers, California Forever looks nothing like a modern city. Its promotional material is pure English nostalgia, something close to Metroland, with dreamlike vistas, charming streets, rowing boats, bicycles, sunrises and endless trees. If renderings are to be believed, the future is Blytonesque.

Jude Cook

Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man

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If any novelist, playwright or screenwriter of the past 40 years could be called ‘a writer of consequence’, to use the literary agent Andrew Wylie’s term, it would be Hanif Kureishi. While not shifting units on the scale of his near contemporaries Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, Kureishi’s cultural influence – through his explorations of race, class and sexuality in novels such as The Buddha of Suburbia and films like My Beautiful Laundrette – is inestimable. In this first major biography, Ruvani Ranasinha tracks Kureishi’s progress from his birth in Bromley in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother, through his glittering, always provocative career, to the recent accident which rendered him unable to walk or use his hands.

Mathew Lyons

Downhill all the way: the decline of the British Empire after 1923

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The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a ‘wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations’. It offered ‘the only solution to the great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails, then all else fails.’ Stirring words – and not those of some sentimental Colonel Blimp back in London. They were written by the newspaper’s editor, Manilal A. Desai, a young Nairobi-based lawyer and a prominent figure in the large Indian community in Kenya. But, as Matthew Parker observes in One Fine Day, an ambitious account of the empire at the moment of its territorial zenith on 29 September 1923, Desai’s encomium came with a caveat: Either the British Empire must admit the equality of its different people...

Allan Mallinson

Why was the British army so ill-prepared to fight the second world war?

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Conflict comes highly recommended. Two former chiefs of the defence staff, Generals David Richards and Nicholas Carter, praise it for identifying key lessons from the past appropriate to the future. A former MoD strategic adviser, Sir Hew Strachan, says it will ‘challenge the professional and enlighten the generalist’. The US marine corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, ‘the warrior monk’, says it is ‘a clear-sighted assessment of war’s future’. And the late Henry Kissinger called it ‘an exceptional book, written by two absolute masters of their profession’.

Chloë Ashby

She’s leaving home: Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, reviewed

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The narrator of Cathy Sweeney’s first novel has finally cracked. I say ‘finally’ because there have been signs: drinking alone; disliking her daughter, or at least her type; having an affair with her friend’s son; opening a separate bank account in her maiden name when her mother died. But in the beginning we don’t know any of this. We don’t know what she’s doing, and neither does she. It’s an ordinary Tuesday in November when she leaves her comfortable home in the suburbs of Dublin, which she shares with her husband and their two almost-adult children: ‘I grab my handbag and keys, let the front door shut behind me. I have no idea that I will never come back.’ What follows is a taut tale of the protagonist’s journey by car, train, bus and ferry.

Robert Skidelsky

Milton Friedman – economic visionary or scourge of the world?

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The Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor called Milton Friedman one of the two most evil men of the 20th century. (Friedman was in distinguished company.) The ‘scourge’ he inflicted on the world was monetarism, a product of what Kaldor called Friedman’s Big Lie – of which more later. Moral judgments aside, how does Friedman rank in the world of 20th-century economists? By common consent, he stands with Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes at the apex of his profession. All wrestled with the defining problem of their age: the radical economic and political instability of the 1920s and 1930s. Their responses reflected their national situations.

Chris Mullin

The travails of Britain’s first Labour government

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Once the working classes were allowed to vote it was inevitable that sooner or later they would elect a government which reflected their interests. That moment came with the appointment, in January 1924, of the first Labour government. The circumstances could hardly have been less auspicious. There had been three general elections in as many years. No party had an overall majority. Labour, with 191 seats, was not even the largest, with the result that, throughout its short life, the government was entirely dependent on the goodwill of the Liberals, which soon ran out. With a couple of junior exceptions during the wartime coalition, no Labour MP had any experience of government.

2 January 2024

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Septuagenarians behaving badly: Stockholm, by Noa Yedlin, reviewed

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My grandmother wore a bikini long after she’d turned 60. As a teenager, I couldn’t think of anything more embarrassing than to be seen with her on the beach. When the day came, on an inescapable family holiday, I begged her to reconsider. ‘I’ve never understood why they say the body betrays you,’ she replied. ‘The body is simply doing what it’s supposed to. It’s the soul that refuses to do its part in the deal.’ I remembered this reading Stockholm, a delightful dark comedy by the Israeli author Noa Yedlin about four elderly people conspiring to conceal the sudden death of their friend, the renowned economist Avishai Har-Nof, so as to secure his award of a Nobel prize.

Stuart Jeffries

Has Germany finally shaken off its dark past?

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In 1982, a board game appeared in West Germany. If you landed on square B9 you were sent to a refugee camp in Hesse where you became ill from loneliness, unfamiliar food and not being allowed to work. Worse still, you had to miss a go and spend the free time thinking about ‘how you would feel in such a situation’. Even if, like me, your childhood was spent crying over lost games of Monopoly, nothing could quite prepare you for the cheerless experience of playing ‘Flight and Expulsion Across the World’. It’s unlikely an updated version has been commissioned for our home secretary, with players assigned counters representing the Bibby Stockholm, inflatable life rafts and Rwanda-bound jets, but you never know.

Justin Marozzi

How dangerous is the Sunni-Shia schism?

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In 2014, with the Middle East convulsed by the murderous, self-styled Islamic State, a Daily Mail reader wrote a letter to the editor which began: ‘Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain...’ Aubrey Bailey went on to describe the dizzying complexity of diplomatic relationships thrown into turmoil: So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting our other enemies, whom we don’t want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win... And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out – do you understand now?

Mathew Lyons

What Shakespeare meant to the Bloomsbury Group

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In November 1935, Virginia Woolf saw a production of Romeo and Juliet. She was not overly impressed. ‘Acting it,’ she wrote, ‘they spoil the poetry.’ Harsh words, you might think, for a cast that included John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans and Alec Guinness. But Shakespeare on the stage was something of a bête noire for the Bloomsbury group. ‘We, of course, only read Shakespeare,’ Clive Bell later said. The Shakespeare that mattered was the one on the page. Shakespeare on stage was a bête noire for the Bloomsberries. ‘We, of course, only read Shakespeare,’ said Clive Bell Who was that ‘we’, though?

Nicholas Lezard

Dark days in Wales: Of Talons and Teeth, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed

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This book has taken me far too long to read, and not for the usual reasons (that it’s too long, it’s rubbish, idleness, I lost it, etc.) but because I could only manage ten pages a day before getting a kind of mental nosebleed. And that is because it is so good, so different. There is a note at the back from the publishers, of whom I had not heard: ‘Repeater Books is dedicated to the creation of a new reality.’ There follows some invective about capitalist realism in historical fiction and ends: ‘We are alive and we don’t agree.’ I would say that this book fulfils their brief admirably. We are in Wales at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Suzi Feay

Why were masters of the occult respected but witches burnt?

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It has long been acknowledged that alchemy, however bizarre its premises, is the fore-runner of modern chemistry, compelling a figure as rational as Sir Isaac Newton. Other aspects of Renaissance thought are harder to assimilate. In his study of five crucial figures of the 15th and 16th centuries, Anthony Grafton aims to demonstrate that astrology, angelology and conjuration were, if not central to the era’s world view, at least hard to extricate from its more respectable concerns. His first subject, Faust, is little more than a sideshow, but significant in establishing the magus as a not entirely respectable figure, from which ignominy Grafton seeks to rescue him.