Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

The wonder of the human body

Gabriel Weston is an extraordinary writer. An ENT surgeon who now prefers to carry out excisions of skin cancers, she has found a niche in exploring moral dilemmas in medicine. Her first book, Direct Red (2009), examined such clashes as a patient’s need for empathy and a surgeon’s requirement to be steely. A serious problem at the time was how the punishing schedules of junior doctors made it virtually impossible for them to give patients the attention and compassion they so often needed. Weston’s second book, Dirty Work (2013), was a novel – and no less ethically probing. Nancy, its female gynaecologist protagonist, takes on her department’s unpopular abortion lists,

A satire on the modern art market: The Violet Hour, by James Cahill, reviewed

In James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, Don Lamb, a Cambridge art historian, expressed outrage when ‘Sick Bed’, a Tracey Emin-like installation, is erected in the college quad. It is tempting to imagine what Lamb would now make of the many artworks on display in The Violet Hour. Here, Cahill steps away from the rarefied world of academia and public galleries to expose the excesses of the international art market. At the centre of the book’s many strands is Thomas Haller, whose violet-coloured panels partially inspire the title. He is a world-renowned artist who, in the words of his erstwhile best friend and dealer, Lorna Bedford, has become ‘the moneyed

Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed

There are, broadly speaking, two types of artist: the explorer and the miner. The explorer keeps moving on, staking out new aesthetic or thematic terrain, while the miner keeps returning, digging deeper into the same earth each time. Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel prizewinner for literature in 2014, is an artist firmly of the second camp. Ballerina may be Modiano’s 32nd novel, but it feels more like the latest haunting chapter of the one long book that makes up his career. Blending noir, elegy, Paris and an obsession with memory, Modiano writes like Proust conducting a police line-up. And so we step again into a world of half-remembered faces, veiled

Sam Leith

Michael Wolff: How Trump Recaptured America

33 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Donald Trump’s outstanding Boswell, the magazine writer Michael Wolff. Michael’s new book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, takes Donald Trump and his colourful cast of hangers-on from the aftermath of the 6 January riots to his triumphal return to the White House. Michael tells me why he thinks people in Trumpworld are still talking to him, how the Donald has changed over the decade he has been reporting on him, why he’s confident American democracy will survive a second Trump presidency – and how world leaders, such as Keir Starmer, are best advised to handle this volatile and unpredictable character.

Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed

Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing

What Ovid in exile was missing

A notable recent trend in popular history is the revival of interest in the ancient world. Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Bettany Hughes and Peter Stothard are just some of the historians whose books and television series have cashed in on our thirst for knowledge of distant forebears and their civilisations. Now Owen Rees joins the merry band with a strikingly original take on the subject. He argues that our interest in classical history focuses almost entirely on the Graeco-Roman world, specifically on the capital centres of those cultures. We therefore miss much of what was going on at the periphery of empires, with their vibrant cities and peoples. Rees attributes

Liberty is a loaded word

Just about everyone is for liberty, but we mean different things by it. Far-right libertarians want almost all constraints on their actions removed. They desire free markets, no unions, low taxes, free speech and the freedom to be very rich. The oppressed want freedom from tyranny: in extremis, they want to be free from jail and free to live without the threat of arbitrary arrest and torture. The moderately oppressed want more freedom than they have now, but within the context of a functioning democracy that is more equal, and more supportive, than the kind of society imagined by the right. They make a distinction between liberty and licence (complete

How Cold War Czechoslovakia became a haven for terrorists

Cold War Prague hid its historic charms under a veil of grime and dilapidation. But, as we learn from this deeply researched and scholarly study, it was still a favoured destination for international terrorists, mostly Palestinians, after the 1968 Soviet invasion. They liked its hotels, its proximity to the West, its medical facilities, the tolerance and support of its security authorities and the quality of its light-arms manufacturing. Communist Czechoslovakia (CSSR) boasted relatively efficient security and intelligence services (generically referred to as the Stb). They were scrupulous record- keepers, and Stb archives, released after the Velvet Revolution with minimal expurgation, remain among the most complete of any former Warsaw Pact

Things Fall Apart: Flesh, by David Szalay, reviewed

London and the South East, The Innocent, Spring, All That Man Is, Turbulence – the titles of David Szalay’s first five novels, which won a flurry of prizes, are all captured, in a sense, by Flesh, his sixth. Much of the latest book is set in Britain’s capital, and the innocent frequently lose that tag as its protagonist battles to advance his position. When we first meet him, Istvan is 15, living with his mother in Budapest in the dying days of communism and being introduced to sex by a neighbour. Having served a jail sentence for killing the woman’s husband, this ‘solitary individual’ joins the army and, after tours

The punishing life of a chief whip

For many Spectator readers, their only exposure to the workings of the Whips’ Office will be through the machinations of Francis Urquhart, Michael Dobbs’s fictional chief whip made famous in House of Cards. In the first diaries published by a former chief whip, Simon Hart aims to shine a light on the vital and often unrecognised role that the Whips’ Office plays in the functioning of parliament and government. Having been overlooked by David Cameron and Theresa May, Hart arrives at the top table under Boris Johnson in 2019, nine years after his entry to parliament. He serves as secretary of state for Wales until he joinsa slew of others

A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain

If James Bond, now in American hands, re-emerges refreshed as an agent of the CIA, then it will be a homecoming of sorts, given that his creator played a role in drawing up the blueprint for America’s first foreign intelligence service. In May 1941, Commander Ian Fleming sat down in Washington with Colonel William (‘Wild Bill’) Donovan to sketch out an agency modelled on British naval intelligence. Under Donovan’s stewardship, this became the Office of Strategic Services and, in 1947, the CIA. The two men got on well and were not afraid to try things that had not been tried before. Fleming’s experience at the admiralty, notably in the propaganda

Paul Wood, Matthew Parris, Ian Buruma, Hermione Eyre and Francis Young

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood reads his letter from the Vatican (1:17); Matthew Parris warns Conservatives from embracing causes that could lose them as much support as they would gain (7:31); reviewing Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, Ian Buruma argues that the atomic bombs were not only immoral, but ineffective (15:35); Hermione Eyre examines the life and work of the surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun (23:03); and, Francis Young provides his notes on Shrove Tuesday (29:12).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

The weirdness of the pre-Beatles pop world

Quizzed about pop by the teen music magazine Smash Hits in 1987, the year of her third consecutive electoral victory, Margaret Thatcher singled out ‘Telstar’, a chart-topper from a quarter of a century earlier, for special praise. She pronounced it ‘a lovely song… I absolutely loved that. The Tornados, yes.’ As a whizzily futuristic sounding instrumental ode to a transatlantic communications satellite, and only the second British recording to top the American Billboard charts, its charm for Thatcher was perhaps as much political as musical. That it was the work of an independent producer might also have appealed to her love of freewheeling, self-reliant private enterprise. Roger George ‘Joe’ Meek

Is Keir Starmer really Morgan McSweeney’s puppet?

Every government has its éminence grise.  The quiet, ruthless man (or occasional woman) operates in the shadows, only to be eventually outed when the boys and girls in the backroom fall out among themselves or when someone pens a memoir. Think Peter Mandelson, Nick Timothy, Fiona Hill and Dominic Cummings. The authors of Get In, both lobby journalists, have produced a detailed insider account of the rise of Keir Starmer, as seen through the eyes of those inhabitants of the political underworld whose names rarely surface in the public prints. In this case, the focus is on one alleged strategic genius, a man in his late forties with the memorable

The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive

In The Builder’s Stone, Melanie Phillips reminds us forcefully that we must never forget how 7 October 2023 changed the world. On that day Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded southern Israel and brutally raped women and butchered or burned alive 1,100 Jewish men, women and children. They also dragged 250 Israelis, including three-year-old twins, grandparents and young women whom they had already attacked, into Gaza as hostages. They filmed it all on their body cameras, and perhaps the most terrifying thing they recorded was the glee with which they carried out these atrocities. Phillips, a British writer who lives in Jerusalem and London, has spent many decades fighting Goliaths. Like

How can a biography of Woody Allen be so unbearably dull?

How do you make the life of Woody Allen unbearably dull? Mainly by retelling the plots of every one of his movies, along with lists of cast and crew, box-office receipts and critical reactions. And there are so many movies – 50 so far, but there’ll probably be another by the time you read this. Long ago, Allen got into the habit of making a film a year, and so he goes on. He once said he was ‘like an institutionalised person who basket-weaves’ – he couldn’t stop. So we have to wade through an awful lot of filmography before the juicy stuff – the scandal – begins. Mia Farrow

Sam Leith

Selena Wisnom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History

45 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the Assyriologist Selena Wisnom, author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History. Selena tells me about the vast and strange world of cuneiform culture, as evidenced by the life and reign of the scholar-king Ashurbanipal and the library – pre-dating that of Alexandria – that he left to the world. She describes the cruelty and brilliance of the Ancient Near East, the uses of lamentation, the capricious Babylonian gods, the ways in which we can recognise ourselves in our ancestors there – plus, what The Exorcist got wrong about Sumerian demons.

Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life.  The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966. Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger. He enjoys his work, but he’s 31 and restless. He finds himself casting a speculative eye at the café on

The Assyrians were really not so different from us

Among the most striking and memorable exhibits in the British Museum are the Assyrian reliefs depicting the royal hunt. These huge panels show the king, Ashurbanipal, shooting, spearing and stabbing a succession of lions, albeit ones that had been trapped beforehand and released from cages for the occasion. It is a magnificent work of art, carved in the city of Nineveh – on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq – around the middle of the 7th century BC. My favourite section shows the king on horseback, riding full pelt, with no reins in his hands but only his bow and arrow. Our eyes are drawn to the detail