Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

James Hawes on why the break-up of the Union is inevitable

43 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is James Hawes. The bestselling author of The Shortest History of Germany turns his attention in his latest book to our own Island Story: The Shortest History of England. He tells me why he thinks there’s real value in so brief an overview of our history, how Jurassic rock formations doomed our politics, why we never got over the Conquest, how the break-up of the Union is now an inevitability, and why the Cross of St George is a funny emblem for English nationalists to rally behind.

Thursday

Simon Ings

Things mankind was not supposed to know — the dark side of science

One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all, are we supposed to make of all these wikinovels? I mean novels that leap from subject to subject, anecdote to anecdote, so that the reader feels as though they are toppling like Alice down a particularly erudite Wikipedia rabbit-hole. The trouble with writing such a book, in an age of ready internet access, and particularly Wikipedia, is that, however effortless your erudition, no one is any longer going to be particularly impressed by it. We can all be our own Don DeLillo now; our own W.G. Sebald. The model for

Kate Womersley

Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed

Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies this crisis and personally confirms it. ‘I came naturally — haha — to observing my posse and me, guys late twenties to forty, and our attitudes to women, ourselves as “men,” etc’ he says, by way of introduction to his anthropological thesis about growing up under feminism. Prepare for mansplaining littered with tedious verbal tics, which is oddly compelling to read. Zeke is between things. Born on the cusp of Gen X, a middle child to middle-class parents, he’s loitering on the tenure track of East Coast ‘Acadoomia’. There’s his

Ursula Buchan

Gardening books for Christmas — reviewed by Ursula Buchan

Dan Pearson is one of the finest of all British garden designers, blessed with sensitivity, a wonderful eye, deep plant knowledge and a willingness to experiment. In Tokachi Millennium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature (Filbert, £40) he describes how a 400-hectare parcel of agricultural land and forest in the shadow of the Hidaka Mountains on Hokkaido has been returned to an augmented natural landscape, thanks to a newspaper magnate, Mitsushige Hayashi, with deep pockets and vaulting ambition, who bought it 30 years ago. He wished to make a public ‘ecological’ park, both to cancel out his business’s carbon footprint and to reconnect his countrymen to nature;

Jay Elwes

The autistic mind could hold the key to the future

An old, cynical adage holds that ‘if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. I remembered that aphorism while reading the new book by Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world’s leading authorities on autism, in which he unpicks the instincts and processes that have driven human progress. His conclusion? The great engine of our advancement as a species has been autistic behaviour. It’s a bold, rather startling claim. In this intriguing volume, the author explains that it is the habitual pattern-seekers who are responsible for human invention. These are people who display what he calls ‘the Systemising Mechanism’, which developed in humans around 70,000-100,000 years ago.

Nigel Warburton

Universities are supposed to encourage debate, not strangle it

Liberal values are under attack on two flanks. Those of us who think extensive freedom of expression, universal human rights and respect for science and evidence-based policies are vital for a healthy society are getting worried. We foresaw the rise of a dogmatic right-wing populism that is as sceptical about truth as Pontius Pilate, but were caught napping by a new illiberalism that emerged from the left, one that has found fertile ground in universities and beyond. The new illiberals are eager to police others’ language and thought. They attack Terfs, and tell us which words we can and can’t use. If you enter a debate about any of a

Mary Kenny

Humiliating the IRA was a fatal mistake

It was said that Reginald Maudling, as home secretary, once boarded a plane in Belfast and immediately requested a stiff drink, muttering: ‘Get me out of this awful bloody country!’ This does not appear in Ian Cobain’s compelling, interwoven narrative about a killing in Lisburn, near Belfast, in April 1978, but it emblemised some of London’s attitudes to what was sometimes called ‘Ulster’. Even during the height of the Troubles, with daily shootings, bombings and killings, the Province was frequently ignored at cabinet level: the spirit of Maudling prevailed in both Conservative and Labour administrations. By Cobain’s measure, Labour’s Roy Mason was as bad as any Tory. His hardline swaggering

Ian Birrell

The courage of a madman: Maurice Wilson’s doomed assault on Everest

Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 metres, is probably the finest high-altitude mountaineer in history. His list of astonishing achievements on dangerous ice-clad crags includes the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without use of oxygen. Yet as he sat exhausted at 26,000 feet with two days still to go on that pioneering ascent, he thought of an eccentric Englishman ‘tougher than I am’ who had set out before him with one crippled arm and no crampons, let alone knowledge of some basic climbing techniques. ‘Do I understand this madman so well because I am mad myself?’ he wondered. Now

Honor Clerk

From light into darkness: the genius of Goya

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was doomed by the new fashion for marble. The young Goya first studied in his home town before graduating to Madrid, rising through academy and court circles and navigating his way through the reigns of three Bourbon kings and the intervening rule of Joseph Bonaparte before retiring to Bordeaux in his late seventies. From early commissions for religious frescoes, altarpieces and tapestry cartoons for royal palaces, he went on to paint celebrations of everyday Spain en fête and to establish a portrait practice encompassing all the leading figures of the wildly

Robert Crawford

Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in front of me. It wasn’t easy. I’d never met him before. After some preliminary chat, though, I realised this affable man knew exactly where our conversation was heading and had pondered the question a good deal himself. The barrister Jeremy Hutchinson — Baron Hutchinson of Lullington — was the son of Mary Hutchinson, Eliot’s close friend. Infatuated with the poet for a time, she had met ‘Tom’ and his wife Vivien before Vivien’s adultery with Bertrand Russell, and some years before the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. When

The Spectator

Books of the Year II — chosen by our regular reviewers

David Crane If nothing else, this has been a good time for catch-up. Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (translated by Walter Wallich, Persephone Books, £13) was a treat. But the real discovery of the year was an author I had never heard of, Wallace Breem. He seems to have spent his life as a librarian in the Inner Temple but found time to write three historical novels, one of which, The Leopard and the Cliff (Faber Finds, £13), set during the Third Afghan War of 1919, is up there with the very best novels of military life: vivid, tense and deeply moving, with a central character who has a touch of

Thursday

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Comforting brown food from the Domestic Goddess

Nigella Lawson is many things to many people: the perfect hostess, the TV star, the thinking man’s crumpet. To me she’s always embodied the joy of sharing food with friends and family. Her books and television shows burst with conviviality, with parties and suppers. Now we are in the middle of a pandemic that has all but taken that pleasure away, but luckily the Domestic Goddess has always had an uncanny knack for moving with the times. Cook, Eat, Repeat, Lawson’s 12th book, is a celebration of home cooking — a defence of repetition in the kitchen and on the dining table which couldn’t feel more apposite. The book is

Andrew Gowers

Lionel Barber leaves the pink ’un in the pink

As Lionel Barber recounts unrolling his pitch to replace me as editor of the Financial Times to the newspaper’s proprietor Marjorie Scardino, he retrospectively makes fun of his presentation: ‘You have to change the editor,’ he recalls telling the Pearson CEO in the summer of 2005. ‘Otherwise this sucker’s going down.’ Then an aside for readers: ‘Maybe she thought I had been watching too many Hollywood movies.’ Well, yes. There are some cinematic touches to Barber’s memoir of his long reign as FT editor from October 2005 to January 2020. This is true of his own self-portrait (gun-slinging journalistic enforcer in the Evans and Bradlee tradition, friend to the powerful,

The Spectator

Books of the year, chosen by our regular reviewers

Clare Mulley In the past I have sometimes wondered how many books I would read if only someone had the kindness to lock me up. It turns out, this Covid year, not to be so many — but the quality has been high. Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant and devastating The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (Guardian Faber, £10.99) fuelled me with an outrage in no way diminished by David Olusoga’s masterful and hugely compelling Black and British: A Forgotten History(Pan, £12.99). I know I was late to the party for that book but, as statues tumbled, I enjoyed Keith Lowe’s very timely and thought-provoking Prisoners of History: What Monuments Tell

Marcus Berkmann

Gift books for Christmas — reviewed by Marcus Berkmann

We have a fine crop of Christmas gift books this year, so good that some of them actually qualify as real books. This is a rare and beautiful thing. What Cats Want (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is by Dr Yuki Hattori, billed here as ‘Japan’s leading cat doctor’, as though anyone is going to argue with that. It’s simply a guide to understanding your cat — clear, concise, very pleasingly designed and with some lovely, quintessentially Japanese illustrations, mainly of cats. Of course, if you don’t like cats it’s really not going to help you very much; but for those of us who are at least partially obsessed by these beautiful, mysterious,

Mark Cocker

Where time stands still: a Himalayan pilgrimage

The region of Dolpo in Nepal forms part of a border zone between that country and China in the central Himalayas. It is essentially a high-altitude desert encircled by towering snow-capped peaks and has long been celebrated in the West as a real-life version of Shangri-La. Part of the image flows from the restricted access permitted to outsiders, and also from the lives of its inhabitants, who might belong politically to Nepal but culturally show allegiance to the former theocracy presided over by the Dalai Lama. Dolpo is one of the last places on Earth where a vestige of the traditional Buddhist society of Tibet still survives. Another key part

Anne de Courcy

A love story — with clothes as heroes

On the weekly ‘opinions’ afternoons, the public would arrive with carefully wrapped parcels holding items to be identified, writes Claire Wilcox. Sometimes this was a length of Brussels lace, sometimes a gown that could be dated not just to the year but to the season, because the fashion then was known: Once, someone brought a box of medieval leather shoes and everyone was sent home while a specialist in protective clothing and mask was called in, in case they had come from a plague pit. She was talking of the textile department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, where she had been senior curator of fashion since 2004. Among exhibitions

Emily Bearn

A literary scoop: the passionate correspondence between R.L. Stevenson and J.M. Barrie

This book has appeared with no fuss or fanfare and yet by any account it is something of a scoop. For here, published for the first time, is the correspondence between J.M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson, revealing one of the most intriguing literary bromances of the 19th century. The existence of the letters is well documented. In the early 1890s, gossip columns were agog with the news that two of the most popular writers of the day were corresponding, with Barrie reported to be writing ‘reams of letters’ to Stevenson. But while Stevenson’s letters to Barrie were published after the former’s death, Barrie’s letters to Stevenson never surfaced. It

Kevin Blankinship

A 13th-century guide to fraud and skulduggery

Eight centuries ago in Turkey, at a gathering of intellectuals, a Muslim sultan insisted that one of his courtiers write a book about an unlikely subject: thieves and con artists. The sultan, Rukn al-Din, had secured another such book from Spain, but he wondered: ‘What’s left out of it?’ The set-upon courtier was Jamal al-Din Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, and the commissioned Arabic work, Kashf al-asrar (Exposing Secrets), his only surviving text. But why would a powerful ruler such as Rukn al-Din, presumably safe from street-level scammers, order a guidebook about the medieval Islamic underworld? The answer is most likely nostalgie de la boue — a way, as Tom Wolfe was

Isambard Wilkinson

The ruthless politics of Pakistan — and the curse of being a Bhutto

Hours after Benazir Bhutto arrived back in Pakistan on 18 October 2007, two bombs exploded near the bullet-proof truck carrying her as it inched through hundreds of thousands of supporters in Karachi. She had returned after eight years in exile in an attempt to become prime minister for a third time. As with other major incidents in Bhutto’s life, Victoria Schofield, her friend from their time at Oxford, was there. ‘Suddenly, without warning, there was a loud explosion, the impact of which literally blew me out of my chair,’ she writes. More than 140 people died. Bhutto survived. Straight after the blasts Schofield found her at home. ‘She showed me