Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

One of the last men-only jobs left — offshore in the North Sea

As a child, I loved the Ladybird ‘People at Work’ series. I had the ones on the fireman, the policeman, the fisherman and the postman; and just one on a woman, The Nurse. Now, of course, they seem absurd. Women are doing all those ‘man’s’ jobs, and many more. So where do you go to find a men-only workplace? A monastery, maybe. Or an oil rig. It’s not clear how Tabitha Lasley first fell in with riggers, but she was quickly enthralled. They are among the best paid blue-collar workers in the country — at the height of the North Sea oil boom even rig cleaners earned £300 a day

Jay Elwes

A bored business administrator in Leicester puts the intelligence services to shame

In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a group of turquoise canisters with what appeared to be tail fins attached. He picked up one of the objects and filmed it. Later he uploaded his video to YouTube. What were those strange turquoise cans? The answer was provided not by a UN investigator, war correspondent or military expert, but by a bored business administrator at his desk in Leicester. He had never been to Syria, spoke no Arabic and by his own admission knew nothing about weaponry. But Eliot Higgins had become fascinated by the war in Syria, and

Elisa Segrave

A beastly cold country: Britain in 1962

Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing Day 1962 and ended in early March the following year. I was in Sussex, she at Sissinghurst in Kent. Juliet Nicolson, then eight, describes the morning of 27 December: ‘The snow was still there, turning the landmarks of the garden — the walls, lawns, statues, urns — into something unrecognisable but unified. The sight was beautiful.’ Her grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, had died in June, leaving the house to Nigel Nicolson, Juliet’s father. It was his family’s first Christmas there. In The Perfect Summer: England 1911 Nicolson wrote of an earlier

Lucasta Miller

Lives unlived: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, reviewed

Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in 2016. Set in 18th-century America, it was a tour de force of historical imagining, its prose skilfully suffused with the writerly tics of that era yet not overly so, leaving it pedantry-free and compulsively readable. His new book, Light Perpetual, is also a historical novel, but with a difference. It follows the arc of the 20th century through the stories of five working-class Londoners, but its central conceit is a clever counterfactual. The opening scene sees all five, then young children, being killed in an air raid during the second

David Crane

Holding the Empire responsible for the state of modern Britain is becoming commonplace

It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have their ‘reserved areas’. Sathnam Sanghera’s sprawling and intimidating bibliography — more than 50 pages of it — underlines just how wide and eclectic his own reading has been, but there is one sentence, more than half way into Empireland, that might make readers think. He is talking about a passage from Jan Morris’s Heaven’s Command, dealing with British racial atrocities, that seems, to Sanghera, indecently trivialising in its tone: The comment briefly makes me wonder whether you need to be a descendant of the colonised or a person of colour

Leyla Sanai

Memory – and the stuff of dreams

Can you remember when you heard about 9/11? Chances are you’ll be flooded instantly with memories — not only where you were, but what you were doing, who you were with, what you could smell and see at the time as well as how you felt. How does that happen? In the first half of this fascinating book, Dr Veronica O’Keane explains the neurological pathways and processes involved in memory. We are constantly receiving stimuli from our environment via the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. These sensations travel via cells called neurons which are electrically activated and release various transmitters into the spaces between them and

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’ — a line which recognises how easy it is to misread a writer once they’ve passed into a hazy afterlife of fame, neglect or simple misunderstanding. Yet few of Browning’s contemporaries are as hard to see plain as his own wife: the poet who was known to her family as Ba, signed herself EBB, and published a number of popular works under her married name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During her lifetime she was one of the most admired poets of the age; a framed portrait of her hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Simon Winchester: Land

43 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Winchester, whose new book takes on one of the biggest subjects on earth: earth. Land: How The Hunger For Ownership Made The Modern World starts from the author’s own little corner of New England – what he proudly calculates at a bit more than three billionths of the earth’s surface that he can call his own – and roams worldwide and through time and from the first prehistoric boundary lines to the modern age. He asks whether capitalism is possible without land rights, whether climate change will alter our relationship to property, why the pioneering map makers of

Thursday

John Maier

The programme of art plunder initiated by Hermann Göring continued long after the war’s end

Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to the right the better. In 1941, Bruno Lohse, a lowly SS officer and art history PhD, was languishing on the Baltic coast recovering from a gunshot wound when he was seconded by Hermann Göring to work as his ‘personal art agent in Paris’, where he became one of history’s ‘greatest all-time art looters’. Abroad in the lawless city — able to produce, for any purpose, authorisation papers bearing the Reichsmarschall’s signature, with their talismanic power to instruct ‘all offices of the state, party and armed forces to support his work’

Tomiwa Owolade

There’s nothing a white person can do about racism, says Dr Kehinde Andrews

After the death of George Floyd last year, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the world, racism is one of the hot-button issues of our time. And, according to Kehinde Andrews’s new book, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, it is embedded deeply in the West: A central thesis of this book is that White supremacy, and therefore anti-Blackness, is the fundamental basis of the political and economic system and therefore infects all interactions, institutions and ideas. Andrews maintains this uncompromising tone throughout. The book is partly a historical account of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism; it is also

James Hawes

Will the next generation wonder what the fuss over Brexit was about?

Robert Tombs’s new book is not long: 165 pages of argument, unadorned by maps or images. But brevity is good, and we pick it up expecting much insight, because its predecessor was so wonderful. In The English and Their History (2015), Tombs, a scholar of French, not English, history, boldly saw the wood where specialists saw only the trees. Surely, he said, England should have a history of its own. The election had just signalled that England-and-Wales might soon be a separate polity for the first time since 1707. Tombs delivered a timely and gripping investigation of this land, so filled with marks of continuity, yet prone to occasional, apparently

Ali Bhutto

Cruelty and chaos in Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the award-winning journalist Samira Shackle writes that the city’s penchant for extremity and eccentricity kept luring her back from London for almost a decade. During these visits, made between 2012 and 2019, she navigates the darkest corners of the metropolis’s maze and documents some of the lives that exist on the peripheries of society. In a city where violence is constantly simmering beneath the surface and lines between law enforcement and crime are blurred, locals develop their own mechanisms for coping with trauma. For instance, Safdar, an ambulance driver who survived

David Wootton

An English 17th-century double portrait holds many clues to its meaning

This is a big book about a minor painting — a double portrait of John Bankes, aged about 16 (the son of the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes), and his tutor, Dr Maurice Williams. It was done in Oxford in 1643-4 by Francis Cleyn, a court painter. At the time, Oxford was the headquarters of the royalist army, and painters were busy recording for their loved ones Cavaliers who would soon be dead. In the left corner of the painting there is a copy of Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in its Latin translation, open at the frontispiece, along with a globe and

Brian Martin

On the cowboy’s trail: Powder Smoke, by Andrew Martin, reviewed

Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway policeman investigates a supposed double murder, tracing a young fairground sharpshooter, Kid Durrant, through the Yorkshire countryside. The action takes place over five days in early December 1925, but is interspersed with flashbacks to the previous summer. At the York Gala, Stringer sees Durrant perform his fairground act, quick on the draw and deadly accurate with his pistol and rifle-shooting. His entertainment persona is a Wild West cowboy, presented with appropriate Western colloquialisms, spoken with an American accent acquired by way of Sheffield. The gala is observed by a rare

Gillian Reynolds

A burnt-out case: the many lives of Dr Anthony Clare

Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t know the half of him. Its authors are Brendan Kelly, professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry and Muiris Houston, a columnist for the Medical Independent and the Irish Times. Theirs is a meticulously sourced, clearly arranged, carefully assembled account of Clare’s packed life and multiple achievements. Yet through it thrums a sense that you can only really understand him if (a) you are a psychiatrist and (b) you are Irish. Born in Dublin, Clare was the youngest of three

Christopher Howse

God’s many mansions: a guide to the world’s greatest churches

The surroundings of the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul are ‘little better than a dump’, wrote the British embassy chaplain in 1964. ‘It takes an intimate knowledge of the place to find it.’ Today, the street running north-west from the Galata tower on the far side of the Golden Horn is quite chic. Turn right at the end and, above fig trees and trumpets of bougainvillea, you glimpse the lead-roofed spirelet of the church. It is by G.E. Street, the architect of St James the Less in Vauxhall Bridge Road, which also has stripes across nave walls and chancel vaulting. The competition to design the church in Istanbul demanded that

Suzi Feay

The Generic Asian Man: Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, reviewed

Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most crucial is that he has occasional small roles in an American TV detective series, Black and White, set in Chinatown. In a group of similarly complexioned jobbing actors, his scope is limited to Background Oriental Male, Striving Immigrant or Generic Asian Man. His dream, like everyone else’s, is to rise to the athletic heights of Kung Fu Guy. Printed in the form of a script, with a typeface that looks as though it’s come straight off a manual typewriter, Interior Chinatown comically charts Willis’s progress through the ranks of extras.

Viv Groskop

The art of the short story: what we can learn from the Russians

This is such a superb idea that it’s a wonder a book like this has not cropped up before. Here we have a critically acclaimed, best-selling novelist, who also happens to be a highly sought-after creative writing teacher, setting out the curriculum of his over-subscribed ‘How to Write’ class in a way that is accessible to anyone… and the book reproduces the texts under discussion. Wow. This has to be the best York Notes ever, flawlessly designed for the exam we all sit without realising: life. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain you get all Saunders’s commentary (which is both charming and addictive) and the original (translated)

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird: Good Grief

43 min listen

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are the writer and Women’s Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer, and her mother, the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird. They are mother and daughter — but a year ago they became ‘sister widows’, as both lost their husbands within a few weeks of one another. Their new book is called Good Grief: Embracing life at a time of death, and they join me to talk about grief in the time of Covid, how social perceptions of widowhood put pressure on the bereaved, and what they think needs to change at a societal and personal level with regards to how we treat death

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Like trying to understand some obscure but fashionable meme: WandaVision reviewed

‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve now got on Disney+: a bizarro series called WandaVision. I feel terribly out of the loop for not quite getting it. But possibly I’m not the target audience. For a start, I haven’t seen either of those Avengers movies; nor am I sufficiently familiar with the nuances of the Marvel comics universe to get all