Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Chris Ware: The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three

39 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Chris Ware — author of Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories and Rusty Brown, and a man widely regarded as one of the greatest living cartoonists. Chris’s new book, The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, opens his sketchbooks for public consumption: a potentially painful move for an artist as self-conscious and perfectionist as Ware. He tells me a bit about the relationship between cartooning and architecture, what he’s trying to do with his graphic novels, the importance of R Crumb and Art Spiegelman to his work, and what gave him the confidence to turn his back on fine art.  

Saturday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Christmas I: Katy Balls, Craig Brown, Kate Weinberg, Craig Raine, Lisa Haseldine and Melissa Kite

37 min listen

On this week’s Christmas Out Loud – part one: Katy Balls runs through the Westminster wishlists for 2025 (1:26); Craig Brown reads his satirist’s notebook (7:06); Kate Weinberg explains the healing power of a father’s bedtime reading (13:47); Craig Raine reviews a new four volume edition of the prose of T.S. Eliot (19:10); Lisa Haseldine provides her notes on hymnals (28:15); and Melissa Kite explains why she shouldn’t be allowed to go to church (31:19).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

When will Ronald Reagan get the recognition he deserves?

The talented military historian Max Boot has published a well-researched life of Ronald Reagan that is fundamentally wrong. First the good parts: he has combed through lots of archives finding new information and has interviewed countless people who worked with or knew Reagan. His style also bears the reader effortlessly along. Yet his claim that Reagan was merely a lightweight pragmatist who had little effect on reviving the American economy, resuscitating the country’s self-esteem or winning the Cold War is absurdly revisionist. It says more about the author’s own rejection of the Republican party than it does about Reagan’s world-historical achievements. Quite unnecessarily in a biography of someone who left

Emma Smith

Thomas Kyd wasn’t a patch on Shakespeare

The biggest blockbuster hit of the Elizabethan theatre was not by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson. In fact it wasn’t by anyone. The Spanish Tragedy, a sturdy play of rhetoric, blood and revenge, was published in multiple editions without any attribution at all. Its central figure, Hieronimo, was a cultural phenomenon, but the drama was widely quoted, imitated and parodied without mention of its author. Its impact was huge. We wouldn’t have Hamlet without it. BBC Radio 4’s invitation to celebrities to try experiences they have unaccountably missed is called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. Without a doubt, the Elizabethan equivalent would have been I’ve Never Seen

Lionel Barber

The rotten core of Credit Suisse

The tale of Credit Suisse ought to be Buddenbrooks on steroids. A staid Swiss lender enters marriage with a racy Wall Street investment bank and gives birth to a monster. Scandal follows scandal. CEOs come and go. In March 2023, the bank ends up being flogged to its arch rival UBS for a miserly $3 billion. Inside Credit Suisse, the backstabbing and treachery were more suited to a medieval court Duncan Mavin is well placed to tell this corporate horror story, having written a book about one of Credit Suisse’s most notorious clients, Lex Greensill, an Australian melon farmer turned fintech champion. Greensill Capital, which employed David Cameron as a

James Campbell

Why does James Baldwin matter so much now?

James Baldwin matters. To veteran Baldwin admirers, his renewed prominence comes as a surprise after decades of indifference. This year, in the centenary of his birth in Harlem, Baldwin has seemed to matter more than at any time since his heyday, when he combined the roles of writer and civil rights spokesman. Between 1961 and 1964 he produced three bestselling books – two collections of essays and the novel Another Country – as well as a stylish collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon and a Broadway play. In May 1963, Time put him on its cover (Martin Luther King had to wait until the following January). Life called him ‘the

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Modern-day ghosts: Haunted Tales, by Adam Macqueen, reviewed

I don’t approve of ghosts, from the sublime (I generally just mouth the words ‘Holy Ghost’ in church, as I don’t want to pledge allegiance to something I can’t help but envision looking like the traditional sheet-based model) to the ridiculous (I would charge all ‘mediums’ with fraud). If ghosts were invariably like poltergeists (the Mrs Thatchers of the spirit world), I might have more time for them. But as it is, I just want to shake them and tell them to sort themselves out. Having said that, Adam Macqueen’s Haunted Tales is a cracking little book. As befits a writer who went to Private Eye for work experience and

Harry Wallop

Nostalgia for the bustling high street is misplaced

Every Christmas the proportion of money we spend online escalates. This year probably more than a third of all our festive gifts and food will be sourced via the internet. With this will go the usual hand-wringing about consumerism causing neighbourhoods to become clogged up with delivery vans and the death of our high street. If you think calls to boycott Amazon and entreaties to shop local are a new phenomenon, think again. In 1888, a Tunbridge Wells vicar implored his flock to support the town’s shopkeepers, for ‘the weight of goods arriving at our local stations for private people far exceeds that for the tradesmen’. He was bemoaning the

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The dreadful fate of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters

‘Cela me revolte,’ wrote Queen Victoria in her diary in 1894 when her adored granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse announced her engagement to the Tsarevich Nicholas, ‘to feel that she has been taken possession of and carried away by those Russians.’ The sisters all look alike in the photos: uncomfortable dress, priceless jewellery, grimace, hair in bun  The queen was proprietorial about the four surviving daughters of her late daughter Alice, who had died of diphtheria, aged 35, when little Alix was only six. To lose one of those granddaughters to the Russians had been bad enough. Alix’s elder sister, the headstrong Elizabeth, known as Ella, had refused Victoria’s suggestion that

Justin Marozzi

For God or Allah

I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather than the wider public, the grand narrative history is something which general readers will applaud and enjoy. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, to give him the full honours, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldiers and is steeped in the history of the Middle East. There is no doubting the pivotal nature of the

Stephen Bayley

The must-have novelties nobody needed

Many reviewers start work with a peek at the book’s index. Here you find Gladys Goose Lamp, Choo Choo Chain and Dynamite Candles – novelty gifts (the ‘executive toys’ of the title) that made a small fortune for their creators. You might therefore think this a very slight book – so slight that its value could be dispersed by the mildest of zephyrs. But no. With unhesitating commitment it reveals the frailty and vanity of the long-gone culture it describes. Thus, fascinating.  Can anything better illustrate the sense of doom gathering in the 1980s than an executive toy created for bored Concorde passengers? They say an era is at its

Craig Raine

4,000 pages of T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism is not enough

This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein: I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead [the mathematician]. Defiantly, flagrantly clairvoyant. Daring us to dispute the claim, the Big Lie flourishes. Size matters. Think George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Big Whoppers both, tirelessly fibbing.  Towards the end of his life, in

Sophie Hannah

Celebrating Miss Marple

There’s a big difference between being a fan and being a super-fan. Not all fans would be able to differentiate between the two, but every super-fan understands, at a bone-deep level, the difference between themselves and those of their ilk (fellow super-fans) on the one hand and regular fans on the other. The unforgettable theory that it’s the weak characters who do the most damage appears in a Marple novel For example, I am a big fan of Richard Curtis’s 2013 movie About Time. I love it, recommend it to people and think it’s one of the best stories of both romantic and familial love that I’ve ever come across,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Daniel Tammet: Nine Minds, Inner Lives on the Spectrum

38 min listen

In this week’s Books podcast, I am joined by the writer Daniel Tammet, whose new book Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum is a pen portrait of nine lives of people on the autism spectrum. On the podcast, he tells me how he happened upon these nine lives, whether ‘spectrum’ is a helpful term when understanding autism and Asperger’s syndrome, and how popular culture’s most famous depiction of autism – Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man – is based on an individual who wasn’t autistic at all.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Book Club: Jonathan Coe

33 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Jonathan Coe, talking about cosy crime, the tug of nostalgia, the joys of satire, and his brilliant new novel, The Proof of My Innocence.

Tuesday

Sue Prideaux

Wagner’s Ring is a mythic mishmash

Wagner’s Ring is an ambitious cycle of four operas relating world history from Primal Swirl to End of Days. It took 26 years to write, takes 15 hours to perform, a double-size orchestra to play and a specially built opera house to stage. Michael Downes, the director of music at St Andrews University, places the fons et origo of the epic in Wagner’s frustration as a kapellmeister, when he wrote, unsolicited, to his boss the King of Saxony, proposing a total revamp of the royal music scene. No reply was forthcoming. A second proposal was also blanked. Furious, Wagner flung himself into the Dresden uprising of 1848, financing the manufacture

Stuart Kelly

Out of this world: The Suicides, by Antonio di Benedetto, reviewed

The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of – and was imprisoned and tortured in 1976-77, during Argentina’s Dirty War. His eerie fables of paranoia, impending threat and incomprehension pre-empted his experience of them. Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I foundthe wait for The Suicides

Richard Bradford

Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved

Alex Burghart

Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?

The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’ After 27 years in the Commons, 14 of them as Chair of the 1922 Committee, the commodore has swapped his deck garb for ermine and written a kiss-and-tell about his political encounters with five Tory prime ministers. The 1922 Committee – the fabled men in grey suits who represent the parliamentary party’s backbenchers – is