Books Archives

Singeing the King of Spain’s beard was one provocation too many

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In the 1964 Hammer film The Devil-Ship Pirates, a privateer of the defeated Spanish Armada escapes the English fleet and puts in for repairs at an isolated coastal village whose inhabitants have not received news of the battle’s outcome. There the Spanish convince the villagers that Spain was victorious, and so impose submission on them. Historical verisimilitude was not exactly a priority. However, two weeks after the Armada was defeated in August 1588, a printer in Seville published glad rejoicings at Spain’s victory. The problems of extended lines of communications and poor intelligence bedevilled the Spanish throughout the whole enterprise, contributing notably to their defeat. The tale of the Spanish Armada is well known.

Kavita Puri

Nehru’s plans for a new India were sadly short-lived

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In Jawaharlal Nehru’s final will and testament he asked for most of his ashes be taken in an aeroplane and scattered ‘over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’. Taylor C. Sherman says this ‘request was a humble acknowledgement of his own relative insignificance’, but that it also makes India indistinguishable from Nehru. The iconography of the man was already indistinguishable from India. He was there at the moment the country gained its hard- fought independence. In a well known image, he stands at the Red Fort in New Delhi before crowds of thousands in August 1947.

Francesca Peacock

Hiding out in wartime Italy: A Silence Shared, by Lalla Romano

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The name Lalla Romano is not familiar to English readers. Despite being much acclaimed during her lifetime (and the recipient of Italy’s Strega Prize), works by the novelist, poet and painter have rarely made it out of her native language. Prior to A Silence Shared, masterfully translated by Brian Robert Moore, only one of Romano’s novels had been published in English: the quiet, eerie tale of a childhood revisited, The Penumbra. In A Silence Shared Romano demonstrates with understated economy why her work deserves to be read alongside other titans of 20th-century Italian literature such as Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino (all of whom knew and revered her). Her books are often heavily autobiographical and almost exclusively narrated in the first person.

Frances Cahill

Not just wet, but ‘dripping wet’ – how the tabloids viewed Lord Woolf

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Senior judges are often seen as being cloistered and aloof, carrying the heavy responsibility of incarcerating hundreds of people every year without having heard the clang of prison doors themselves. Lord Woolf is an exception. The former Lord Chief Justice (2000-5) was not only banged up as a student – after protesting over the banning of rag day – but volunteered as a senior judge to spend a night in jail. He and his wife surrendered their personal belongings and were shown into a cell in Brixton prison: ‘We then had the difficult decision to make as to who would occupy the top bunk and who the lower.’ It was, he recalls, ‘a memorable experience’, adding: ‘When the door closes behind you, you obtain a real sense of what imprisonment means. You do learn a lesson.

Philip Marsden

The Hope Diamond brought nothing but despair

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Nothing is less animate than a stone. There is little of significance in the random compounds that make up the Earth’s surface. They are useful, yes – for building, for metals and chemical yields – but they’re just stones. Yet throughout human history, the pebbles at our feet have exerted a fascination that goes far beyond the utilitarian. In Lapidarium, Hettie Judah delivers 60 far-reaching essays that explore the bizarre and revealing relationship between people and rocks. It begins with ochre, a ferrous pigment derived from clay and used in the earliest known example of expressive painting – a few lines on the wall of Blombos cave in South Africa, made 70,000 years ago.

Simon Heffer

The Britain Elizabeth II acceded to was barely recognisable within a decade

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The writer of contemporary history has a number of advantages over his colleagues who deal with the more distant past. It is not only that the profusion of media in recent decades supplies abundant first drafts of that history. There are also the twin forces of living witnesses and the author’s own memory. In this entertainingly written and generally even-handed account of roughly the first third of the reign of the late Queen – from her accession in 1952 to the arrival in Downing Street of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 – Matthew Engel deploys all of those forces.

Caspar Henderson

Britain’s lost rainforests

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One of the most beautiful spots I know in Britain is a steep-sided gorge in Devon where the River Dart carves through the Dartmoor rock on its way to the sea. The trees on either side are small, twisted and covered in ferns, mosses and lichens, so that even on a dull day the colours, shapes and textures are vibrant and dynamic. It was here that I took my wife shortly before she gave birth to our daughter. Nowhere I have been is more utterly beautiful and alive. This extraordinary place is a fragment of temperate rainforest: a rich assemblage of life made possible by ample rainfall, mild winters and damp summers.

Adam Begley

Man on the run: Sugar Street, by Jonathan Dee, reviewed

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A man is driving alone across America, under the passenger seat is an envelope containing a large chunk of cash. For reasons unclear, he’s desperate to erase himself; he avoids surveillance with the inspired agility of the truly paranoid. His urge to disappear, ‘to leave as illegible a mark as possible on the Earth’, leads him to a city, ‘big enough to be anonymous in’. The clever premise hooks the reader. Will our unnamed narrator contrive to live an untraced life? And why does he want to make this new life ‘a kind of spacewalk: to step outside the capsule, to cut the tether’? What, as he would say, is his ‘deal’?

Nick Spencer

The true meaning of Jesus’s radical message

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Biblical scholars, one of the greatest of them once remarked, go looking for Jesus only to find themselves staring at their own reflection down the bottom of a very deep well. As with scholars, so with cultures. The Victorian Jesus was meek and mild and proper and principled. There’s a rather good sketch of ‘GOP Jesus’ doing the rounds on Twitter in which Our Lord tells his followers: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat... And behold, now I’m all lazy and entitled.’ In our own politically troubled times, however, it is Jesus the zealous revolutionary who has risen. There is much to recommend this intense, radical figure.

10 January 2023

Philip Hensher

Spare reviewed: Harry is completely disingenuous – or an idiot

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A surprising number of royal personages have published books under their own names, and sometimes they have even been written by the purported authors. The first, I think, was the Eikon Basilike, published shortly after Charles I’s execution and presented as his account of himself and of events. The authorship of this highly effective piece of propaganda has been questioned, but its simple, direct, haughty tone is very similar to the king’s recorded speech at his trial. After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria published two journals of her life in the Highlands. We know that she was an enchantingly vivid writer from her diaries and letters, with a novelist’s ear for dialogue.

5 January 2023

Orlando Bird

There are no ‘correct’ recipes when it comes to pasta

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A few years ago I was feeling peckish at Catania airport. I wandered over to the main café and spotted – beyond the stacks of panini stuffed with wilting prosciutto – a sign promising pasta. I assumed they’d be doling it out ready-made from a hulking pot, school-canteen style. But no: they were carefully blanching each portion of rigatoni, then finishing it in the sauce (a humble pomodoro). Who cares about foot-tapping customers on the verge of missing their flights? There were more noble priorities. The celebrity chef Carlo Cracco caused an uproar when he included garlic in his amatriciana sauce This national pedantry – more interesting than the British and their tea – has often been mined for comedy.

3 January 2023

Nicholas Lezard

The art of exclamation marks!

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This is a short book, but it carries a punch, as does its subject, the exclamation mark – or shriek, or bang, as it is occasionally and graphically called. I use the word ‘graphically’ advisedly, for the punctuation mark falls into an ambiguous territory overlapping orthography and illustration. I say to myself that I don’t like it, but I do on occasion. I recently used it to describe the noise of my horrible doorbell (‘BZZZT!’) to convey the sensation of panic that occurs when I hear it. I also love it when the speech bubble above a cartoon character’s head contains nothing but an exclamation mark: pure surprise. My favourite example is in Snoopy’s case, for often his ears also stand up like exclamation marks themselves.

Lynn Barber

The life of Elizabeth Taylor was non-stop drama

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What is so startling about Elizabeth Taylor’s life story is how quickly everything happened. She was an MGM star at 12, a wife at l8, a widow at 26 and a grandmother at 38. Aged 16, she was playing Robert Taylor’s wife in Conspirator while still doing school lessons every day. ‘How can I concentrate,’ she wailed, ‘when Robert Taylor keeps sticking his tongue down my throat?’ MGM paid her mother Sara to be her chaperone, and Elizabeth felt that the only way she could escape their control was to get married – which she did, to Nicky Hilton. He had managed to stop drinking while courting her, but two weeks into the honeymoon he started again, and beat her up so badly she had a miscarriage – ‘I saw the baby in the toilet,’ she said.

Boyd Tonkin

Luminous fables: Night Train to the Stars, by Kenji Miyazawa, reviewed

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Talking animals – as anyone who has watched a Studio Ghibli animated film will know – are big in Japan. But not always cute. The snooty hawk, for instance, looks down on the ugly but peaceable nighthawk (‘quite harmless to other birds’), who half-shares his macho name despite a deplorable lack of raptor credentials. Just to humiliate him, Hawk decides to call Nighthawk ‘Algernon’ instead. In despair, the little creature flies up to the heavens, only to be told: ‘One has to have the proper social status in order to become a star.’ The nighthawk awaits a lonely death in the frozen skies but finds his frail body ‘glowing gently with a beautiful blue light’. He has joined the constellation Cassiopeia, ‘still burning to this day’.

Chloë Ashby

A fierce defiance: Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré, reviewed

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‘I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be any different from other kinds of love. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to stop loving each other? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to break up?’ So begins Love Me Tender, the simply told but deeply felt new novel from Constance Debré, a story inspired by the French writer’s experience of leaving her husband and losing custody of her child. A story that’s quietly heartbreaking and fiercely defiant. When we meet our narrator, Constance, she has been separated from Laurent for three years, though definitions are fuzzy: ‘I call him my ex, he still calls me his wife.

Oliver Soden

Caring for the dying in a world of Zoom

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Ten years ago, recently graduated and unemployed, I sent my CV to a raft of radio producers. Just one replied. ‘Dear Oliver,’ wrote Marilyn Imrie, in an email with the subject line ‘YOU’: ‘How nice to hear from you and about you.’ Her generosity and enthusiasm were writ large in those three capitals, which headed a letter that came festooned with advice, offers of work experience and an anecdote about her adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. It takes skill to shorten one of the longest novels in the language, but then Imrie was a legendary figure in the world of radio. We briefly corresponded but did not meet. Runcie’s real subjects are not death and disease, but love, and the object of his love Motor neurone disease runs the following course.

Clinton Heylin

Bob Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort

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Between 2007-9, Bob Dylan compiled no fewer than 100 Theme Time Radio Hour broadcasts of songs he rated, prefaced by seemingly off-the-cuff verbal riffs on their meaning, history and importance. He was no natural DJ, but his love for the form shone through, as did a well-honed gruff ol’ man persona. The series was produced by Dylan’s ‘fishing buddy’ Eddie Gorodetsky, a successful sitcom scriptwriter (Mom, Big Bang Theory), with many of the selected songs more reflective of his taste than Dylan’s. Now we have Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, and the suspicion remains (confirmed by a generous dedication) that Gorodetsky is in the wings, throwing out suggestions again. For Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort.

Sarah Crompton

Lord of the dance: the genius of George Balanchine

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Sex and dance were the twin themes of George Balanchine’s life. ‘I am a cloud in trousers,’ he said, using a phrase borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Jennifer Homans quotes the sentence early in her biography of the man who co-founded New York City Ballet: What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences. The first was the trousers – the earthly man, delighted by sensual feelings and desires, who loved good food, fine wine, beautiful women... The cloud or breath was something else, and he saw it as the source of his gift.

David Patrikarakos

The depressing durability of dictatorships

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Many years ago, in Tehran, I spent a few hours in a bookshop run by an Armenian whose adult life had coincided almost exactly with the existence of the Islamic Republic. As I browsed, he fell into conversation with a German-language student who had come in looking for what appeared to be an obscure Persian grammar. The student was hopeful for change in Iran. A young population with growing social media use, together with state-wide oppression and economic mismanagement, would, he argued, see the end of the mullahs soon enough. The bookshop manager listened politely for a long time and then, clearly deciding his potential customer could be trusted, replied that none of that mattered.

Martin Vander Weyer

How the Romans set an example of good business practice

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‘The purpose of corporations,’ writes William Magnuson, ‘is, and always has been, to promote the common good.’ That’s a very bold claim in an era when the left is convinced that shareholder-owned limited liability companies (which is what Magnuson means by corporations) largely exist to exploit the customer, the worker and the planet for the enrichment of owners and executives; while plenty of entrenched boardroom opinion believes with Milton Friedman that the sole social responsibility of business is ‘to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits, so long as it... engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’.

Ruth Scurr

The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield

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A hundred years ago, in a former Carmelite monastery 60 kilometres south of Paris, Katherine Mansfield ran up a flight of stairs to her bedroom and died of a haemorrhage. She was 34 years old. She had known for five years that she had tuberculosis. After joining the spiritualist therapeutic community at Fontainebleau-Avon in October 1922, under the guidance of the Russian guru George Gurdjieff, she had been careful to avoid stairs, or only to take them very slowly. But on the 9 January 1923, her husband, the writer and editor John Middleton Murry, came to visit and they enjoyed an evening watching other members of the commune dancing.

12 December 2022

David Profumo

Miller’s thumb and Mother-in-law’s garotte: the marvellous lexicon of angling

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Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the subject of precious little historical scholarship, giving rise instead to anecdotalists or grim technicians. So Chris McCully’s latest animated and vigorous addition to the Bibliotheca piscatoria arrives as fresh and welcome as a run of summer salmon from the estuary. The lexicon of angling, he suggests, can encode cultural histories – and so it does. The result is a stargazy pie of a book rich in natural lore and quirks, assembled with etymological rigour and finished with crisp wit.

Ruth Scurr

Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes

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The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial – lived for the last 40 years of her life in Farnborough, between the military towns of Aldershot and Sandhurst. There she created a home, museum, mausoleum and chantry in commemoration of the first and second French empires. Farnborough Hill was the place she chose ‘après que tout fut fini’ (after it was all over). In 1870, Eugénie had accompanied her husband into exile in England, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. Together with their teenage son, they lived in Camden Place, a large country house in Chislehurst.

Mark Bolland

A courtier’s lot: writing to prime ministers one minute, acting as nanny the next

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Apart from when the government has been self-immolating, the royal family has dominated the news recently: the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the solemn accession of the King; the continuing and rather tragic psychodrama of the Sussexes; the sad tale of the Duke of York. And, of course, we now have the latest series of The Crown. Apart from the weird sensation of seeing oneself portrayed on screen (thank you, Ben Lloyd-Hughes), I found the ten episodes, with their portent of tragedy to come, quite gripping. Just the right time, then, for a book revealing the hidden wiring which powers the royal family. Courtiers is a suave history of the monarchy over the past century, seen through the prism of those who serve it. What is a courtier?

Jonathan Sumption

The collectors’ obsession with rare medieval manuscripts

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Why do people collect? Cicero said of the Roman governor of Sicily Gaius Verres that his appetite for Greek sculpture was called a passion by himself but a mental illness by his friends. Freud attributed the collector’s mania to bad toilet training. Others claim to have proved that it is due to abnormalities in the medial prefrontal cortex. Psychologists have filled thousands of pages on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. It is safe to assume that Christopher de Hamel has not read any of them. But in this fascinating book he presents 12 case studies of men and women with just one thing in common. They were all obsessed with acquiring, selling, making or in one case forging medieval manuscripts.

Julie Burchill

Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

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There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another.

Mark Amory

The bad boys of the Hypocrites Club

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Members of the Hypocrites Club were Oxford undergraduates, and those with whom David Fleming’s book is chiefly concerned were born between 1903-5. It had originally been a respectable club, founded in 1921, its two most mentioned members being L.P. Hartley, the novelist, and David Cecil, the biographer and historian. But all that changed when Harold Acton arrived, closely followed by many of his fellow Etonians. Acton himself was always fastidiously polite, and spoke in a curiously hesitant way; but his friends were not, and shouted. Soon the club became celebrated for drunkenness and homosexuality, and closed in 1924. It would be impossible to depict the whole circle, and Fleming does not try.

Lynn Barber

Meghan and Harry have never grasped the notion of ‘only connect’

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In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him they should do a cover story on Meghan Markle, the star of Suits. Carter had never heard of Markle, but then nor had most people. In her own eyes she was a huge Hollywood celebrity, but actually she was mainly unknown outside Canada, where Suits was filmed. She wasn’t even the star of the series; she was about sixth in the billing. But Sarkin knew something else about her: that she was rumoured to be marrying Prince Harry. Markle happily agreed to the interview, but said, of course, she could not talk about Harry. She wanted to be celebrated as a global ‘activist and philanthropist’.

Michael Hofmann

Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

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The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.