Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray, Tanya Gold, Rose George, Toby Young and Rory Sutherland

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Freddy Gray reads his letter from Washington D.C., and reveals what Liz Truss, Eric Zemmour and Steve Bannon made of Trump’s inauguration (1:22); Tanya Gold writes about the sad truth behind the gypsies facing eviction in Cornwall (7:15); Rose George reviews The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell, by Jonas Olofsson, and explains the surprising link between odour disgust and political attitudes (13:07); Toby Young provides his favourite anecdotes about President Trump, having crossed paths with him in New York City in the 1990s (18:39); and, Rory Sutherland proposes a unique way to solve Britain’s building crisis: ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness’ (23:40).  Produced

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

For all its fame, the Great Siege of Malta made no difference to the course of history

Strategically located in the narrows of the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tripoli, with a fine natural harbour, Malta has attracted the attention of successive conquerors for two millennia: Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Aragonese, French and finally British. In 1565, the island was occupied by a power that was already beginning to look anachronistic: the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem. The Hospitallers were an aristocratic order of monk-knights, founded at the end of the 11th century to shelter Christian pilgrims and defend the Holy Land during the brief period when it was part of the crusader kingdoms of the Levant. Since then, they had progressively

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

The secret of Gary Lineker’s success

In his closing pages, Chris Evans delivers his verdict on his subject: That’s what Gary Lineker is: human. As his story shows, it’s possible to accomplish seemingly impossible things while staying grounded and true to your roots. I hate to be cruel about a diligently researched book by a freelance journalist. But unthinking writing cannot capture a man who managed to think himself into two great careers, first as a footballer and then as a TV presenter. Lineker was born in Leicester in 1960. His parents were market traders who worked brutal hours, then relaxed over card games that could run all weekend, with participants (including the local crooner Engelbert

Michela Wrong

Never underestimate the complexities of African history

What does it take to bury an outdated argument? The thought occurred while reading Motherland, one of a series of recent books seemingly haunted by the ghost of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Back in 1964, Trevor-Roper, an expert on the English Civil War and the Third Reich, made the mistake of opining on African history. There was nothing much to teach, he said, other than the history of Europeans in Africa. ‘The rest is largely darkness… And darkness is not a subject for history.’ He then added insult to injury with a snitty reference to the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’. These were silly remarks; but Trevor-Roper was the man who later

Peter Stothard

The crude tirades of Cicero the demagogue

It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes, argues Josiah Osgood, an American historian, whose book persuasively analyses a range of Cicero’s murder, fraud and extortion cases. Other men of the time were often no better, he writes, but, echoing Michelle Obama on Donald Trump: ‘Fortunately for Cicero, if his opponents went low, he knew how to go even lower.’ The defender of

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

What we get wrong about The Great Gatsby

43 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re contemplating the astounding achievement of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in its 100th year. My guest is Professor Sarah Churchwell, author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Making of The Great Gatsby, as well as the introduction to Cambridge University Press’s new edition of the novel. Sarah tells me what we get wrong about this Jazz Age classic, why Fitzgerald’s antisemitism shouldn’t necessarily get him cancelled, and how Fitzgerald’s great novel traces the arc that leads from 1925 to Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Tuesday

Chloë Ashby

The splatter of green and yellow that caused uproar in the Victorian art world

London, June 1877. Beneath a cloudy sky, the celebrated art critic John Ruskin strode along Bond Street towards the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery. Inside, he viewed a smash-hit show of beautiful and progressive art. At least that was the popular opinion. With a few exceptions, Ruskin dismissed the works on display as eccentric, impertinent and indulgent. Worst of all? James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket’, a deliciously wispy painting that captures sparks fizzing and flaring in a dark night sky. Ruskin fired the first shot; then Whistler sued him for libel, firing straight back At least that’s how I would describe it. Ruskin’s

Alexander Larman

The self-serving delusions of the ‘Swastika Kaiser’

Whenever a new study of the Nazi regime appears, it is taken as a given that after Adolf Hitler seized power and became dictator of Germany in 1933 an egalitarian society emerged, very different to previous decadent, backward-looking generations. In this modern era, it is assumed, the concerns of the Kaiser and the German elite were at best ignored and at worst made another target of the Führer’s purges. In 1933, Wilhelm called Hitler a ‘torchbearer with unparalleled force of conviction and self-sacrifice’ It’s a tempting summation, but an over-simplistic one. As a biographer of the Duke of Windsor, I drew on documents that suggested that Hitler was in fact

Rose George

Why do we assume smell is our weakest sense?

My cat can smell depression. Another family cat could smell my stepfather’s dementia. They both became more affectionate and tactile: the dementia-smelling cat would gently paw my stepfather, when he hadn’t even liked her when he had been well. My cat comes in close when my mood is darker. Perhaps both cats were using other cues, but I’m convinced it was smell. Up until the 18th century, doctors relied for diagnoses on smell as much as anything else For something that Jonas Olofsson calls ‘the easiest and most natural thing in the world’, smell is satisfyingly complicated. When it comes to humans’ ability to smell, as Olofsson persuades us in

Andrew Roberts

The ghost of his father haunts Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’  Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.  There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life Because My

Diana Hendry

A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became. Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir. The Visitor, her only novella, written in her late twenties when she was working as a journalist in Manhattan, remained unpublished

Franklin Nelson

This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed

When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might have been taking his cue from the man he considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. While serving as a diplomat in Britain, Cuba and France, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) savaged clerical hypocrisy and national backwardness in what are now considered canonical realist doorstoppers. And a century before Saramago, he caused a similar ruckus with Adam

Friday

Michael Gove

Michael Gove, Mary Wakefield, Mitchell Reiss, Max Jeffery and Nicholas Farrell

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove offers up some advice to Keir Starmer (1:33); Mary Wakefield examines the rise of the ‘divorce party’ (7:28); Mitchell Reiss looks at the promise and peril of AI as he reviews Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, a collaboration between the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Craig Mundie, and the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (13:52); Max Jeffery listens to The Armie HammerTime Podcast as the actor attempts to reverse his spectacular downfall (20:45); and, Nicholas Farrell reveals the time he got drunk with the ghost of Mussolini (25:24).  Produced and presented by

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Red-letter days for Gilbert & George

James Birch is a somewhat mysterious art dealer and curator, whose first great triumph was mounting a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow in 1988. He wrote a gripping book about that adventure, Bacon in Moscow, and has now written an even more gripping follow-up, about taking Gilbert and George to Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai. Mounting the Moscow exhibition meant getting drunk every night, but Birch carried it off with aplomb Birch was born ‘circa 1956’, according to Wikipedia, and grew up in Primrose Hill, London. Both his parents were artists and also communists, which he claims was not unusual in the 1960s (though I’d say it was, quite). At the

Rupert Shortt

We are all people of faith, whether we realise it or not

A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers. Yet Ayer’s ideas survive today in mutated form and influence other subjects besides philosophy. Though partly infected by relativism, the humanities have witnessed a growing impulse to redescribe everything in material and supposedly objective terms. The move is reductive. It involves restricting us to a world of causes rather than reasons, sounds rather than music.

Philip Hensher

The beauty and tedium of the works of Adalbert Stifter

A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, Sebald had a career in the academic proponency of German literature. Silent Catastrophes is the first English translation of two essay collections from 1985 and 1991, The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland. (‘Uncanny’ would be a better translation than ‘strange’, but neither title goes easily into English.) It

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Orlando Reade: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

36 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Orlando Reade, whose book What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost describes the life and afterlife of one of the greatest poems in the language. Orlando tells me how Milton’s epic has been read with – and against – the grain over the centuries; how it went from being a totem of English exceptionalism to being an encouragement to postcolonial revolutionaries and political thinkers from Malcolm X to C. L. R. James; how the modernists wrestled with Milton… and how Jordan Peterson gets it wrong.

Tuesday

Mathew Lyons

The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover

At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died of a heart attack in his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. Prokofiev’s death wasn’t so much forgotten as ignored. The leading music magazine Sovetskaya muzyka devoted the first 115 pages of its new issue to Stalin; only then did it mention Prokofiev. A million people thronged the streets to see Stalin lie in state;

Nicholas Lezard

The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York

I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’ A self-described radical feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, Vivian Gornick says that that flame has died down a bit now (she was 79 when this book was first published ten years ago). Her perspective in this meandering, delightful memoir-cum-essay is still, obviously, feminine – yet there is a kind of detachment; and from what she

Mitchell Reiss

Time is running out to tackle the dangers posed by AI

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would