Ian Sansom

Whether you’re left, right or just somewhere vaguely in between, wherever you’re coming from you may well have a sense that things are somehow not quite right, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, that our various problems and crises seem to be multiplying. You may well have concluded that this is because our institutions have been taken over by an out-of-touch elite who run the government, the judiciary, the media and goodness knows what else, and that the only way to discover the real truth is to do your own research, which involves scrolling through the internet because you no longer trust the ‘mainstream media’.

It is very possible that Peter Kemp is the best-read man in Britain. Certainly, as the Sunday Times’s chief literary critic for goodness knows how many years, he has read and opined upon more works of new fiction than most. His is either a dream job or an absolute nightmare, depending on how you feel about the state of the novel. A Sisphyean task? A Herculean labour? Or just a colossal waste of time? All those keen debuts, all that second-rate dross, all those egos demanding attention: Kemp has bravely buckled up, knuckled down and dutifully banged out 800-plus words, week in, week out, for longer than most of us have been able to tell the difference between a roman-fleuve and a roman-à-clef.

Hello, summer! This is it. If you have been waiting for your big holiday read, finally here it is: an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing. It is never a good idea to begin a review (or indeed to end one) with a round of applause unless you want to sound like a complete pushover or a total patsy, but full credit where it’s due: Paul Murray, the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy, has done it again. He did it first with An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), which read as if a young, Irish P.G. Wodehouse were frantically rewriting A Confederacy of Dunces.

People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage.

Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun, Ciaran Carson; It Goes With the Territory, Elaine Feinstein; A Fly in the Soup, Charles Simic; The U.S.A.

Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out that Mark Knopfler once worked as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when Basil Bunting was working there as a sub-editor. Knopfler being Knopfler, he eventually wrote a sad sweet song about it, ‘Basil’, in which he describes England’s most important modernist poet sitting stranded in the newspaper offices, surrounded by up-and-coming Bri-Nylon-clad jack-the-lads, wearing his ancient blue sweater, puffing on his untipped Players, clearly ‘too old for the job’ and ‘bored out of his mind’.

Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel, a ‘best of’ articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker. The magazine has always had its stars, among them James Thurber, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Anthony Lane and Malcolm Gladwell. Let’s be honest, Patrick Radden Keefe is not one of them – or wasn’t, until the publication last year of Empire of Pain, his book about the Sackler family and America’s opioid epidemic, based on an old New Yorker article. An overnight sensation, it was years in the making.

This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human condition. It’s also a book based on a podcast, which brings difficulties of its own. To cut a very long story short, The Missing Cryptoqueen tells the true story of a Bulgarian crook named Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled cryptoqueen of the book’s title. In 2014, she set up a pyramid scheme-cum-multi-level-marketing scam based on a fake cryptocurrency called OneCoin. In 2017, having swindled people out of billions of pounds, dollars, euros and just about every other currency on the planet, and with the authorities closing in, Ignatova suddenly went missing. Her whereabouts remain unknown. It’s a great story and a spectacular con.

For almost as long as there have been books, there have been books about books — writers just love to go meta. As well as all that midrash, those Biblical commentaries, the SparkNotes, the interpretations, retellings and the endless online fan fic, there are also of course plenty of guides, manuals and handbooks designed to instruct the gentleman or gentlewoman in the gentle arts of book buying, book collecting and other vaguely book-related activities. (Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf — a book about bookshelves — being one of the all-time metabook greats.) I happen to have, by chance, a small library of books about books, including a collection of guides to book collecting.

Clive James (1939-2019), in the much-quoted words of a New Yorker profile, was a brilliant bunch of guys. One of those guys was a poet. Alongside the celebrated columns in the Observer, and Saturday Night Clive, and the Postcard From… documentaries, and Clive James on Television, and so on and so forth, there was a lifetime’s outpouring of verse. Ian Shircore’s So Brightly at the Last is the first book-length study of James’s poetry. One sincerely hopes that it is not the last. Shircore has written books about JFK, on conspiracy theories, and a book about The Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy.

God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews in the New York Review of Books, the occasional incendiary non-fiction bestseller (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), even the famous lawsuit. (She was sued for libel by the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.) If Janet Malcolm is the thinking woman’s Joan Didion, then Nobody’s Looking at You is her Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a lot less slouching. Nobody’s Looking at You collects just over a dozen of Malcolm’s articles from the past decade or so, ranging from some pretty stringent profile pieces to a few rambling book reviews and feature articles.

I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall: He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence. ‘They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!

If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will. But if you know who Messi is and you’ve got at least a 2:1 in English, comp. lit. or similar, you are going to absolutely love it. This is definitely one for the football aficionado as well as for fans of fine writing. Messi is an Argentinian footballer who’s played for Barcelona for his entire professional career. He’s short. He’s modest. And he never takes a dive. Apart from his appalling tattoos, he’s the very opposite of what you might expect of the modern footballer — an Argentinian Roy of the Rovers.

You will doubtless recall the model villages of your childhood holidays: the cold rain beating down upon you as you wander, confused, from the 1:15 scale Stonehenge to the 1:18 Houses of Parliament to the 1:32 scale model railway, before sneaking your foil-wrapped sandwiches into the tea shop to share a pot of tea. Or maybe that was just me and the Queen, who famously visited Bekonscot model village in Beaconsfield as a child back in the 1930s, clearly the perfect day out for any monarch-to-be, to be able to survey a ticky-tacky kingdom made entirely of resin, foamboard and nostalgia for a past that even then had never really existed.

First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year even Buckingham Palace is getting in on the act with a new exhibition, Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs (‘Through war, alliance and dynastic marriage the relationships between Britain and Russia and their royal families are explored from Peter the Great’s visit to London in 1698 through to Nicholas II’).This is the year we were all reminded of our close relationship with the Russians. Some of us, of course, are more closely related than others.

When Boris Johnson resigned recently he automatically gave up his right to use Chevening House in Kent, bequeathed by the Earl Stanhope for the use of a person nominated by the prime minister, traditionally the foreign secretary. I think I’m right in saying that when she first came to office, Theresa May attempted to get Boris to share the place with David Davis and Liam Fox, but to no avail, which was surely a sign of things to come. Among its many attractions and allurements — 115 rooms, a boating lake, all the other usual country-house trimmings — Chevening has a magnificent maze, planted by the 4th Earl Stanhope, to a design by his great-grandfather, Philip Stanhope.