Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Philippe Sands on the trail of Nazis

38 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the writer and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands. His new book The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive describes his painstaking quest to track down the real story of a Nazi genocidaire who fled justice into the murky underground society of postwar Italy. Philippe tells me about the strange world of shifting allegiances he uncovered, and his own no less shifting relationship with his subject’s son – who continued against all the evidence to believe his father was a good man.

Thursday

Adrian Woolfson

A ‘loneliness pandemic’ could prove as dangerous as coronavirus

The subjugation of nature has formed a cornerstone of the human agenda. How surprising and humbling, then, to find our way of life so rapidly and unexpectedly undermined by a biological force that transcends identity and culture. Still worse, when we discover that the source of this chaos is a sub-microscopic viral particle whose genetic code — simpler than a bacterium — is barely compatible with a living entity. Yet it has brought global civilisation to a standstill. The stark and poetic prose of Paolo Giordano’s essay How Contagion Works conveys the existential angst of an Italian intellectual as he comes to terms with quarantine: the vulnerabilities, missed opportunities, loneliness,

Sue Prideaux

Roger Scruton’s swan song: salvation through Parsifal

This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last Words: testaments of belief at the end of a long spiritual journey. In the introduction, Scruton identifies the enduring problem in his life, and ours, as: ‘How to live in right relation with others, even if there is no God.’ He gives us his answer: Whether or not there is a God, there is this hallowed path towards a kind of salvation, the path that Wagner described as ‘godliness’, the path taken by Parsifal, and it is a path open to us all. Scruton sees Parsifal as a tale of

Fiona Sampson

Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life

To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is exactly that. It’s not just that Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page. Poetry has a tendency to come into its own at exceptional times such as our own. William Wordsworth’s 250th anniversary has provoked media reflections on his consolatory power; a recently established Poetry Pharmacy is receiving attention; and social media brims with poems and poets attempting to make sense of what’s happening to us. Arguably there couldn’t be a more apt context for Doty’s book about his lifelong

Jay Elwes

Much-hyped technological innovation isn’t necessarily progress

Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like magic. It’s easy to get excited about it all — but what happens if we get too excited? What happens if we lean too heavily on technology, convinced that it can solve all our problems? What happens if we begin to see technology in an unrealistic, hyped-up way? These are the questions at the heart of Gemma Milne’s book. The answer — somewhat unsurprisingly — is that over-excitement is a bad thing. Hype can damage scientific progress and in some cases send it into reverse. Whether it’s in the development

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The symbolism of Orion, the hunter of the heavens

What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our pre-literate past is a history without a clear story: excavated stones and waste pits, fragments of myth and philological association. The early literate past is little clearer. The later Bronze Age of the Myceneans, the Minoans and Moses is a speculative assembly. Later, the surfaces of the Athens of Plato and Pericles are solid in marble and rational in thought, but the myths remain strange and violent memories, subject to an alien, evasive logic we cannot quite follow. ‘These Greeks,’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal mused as he climbed up to the

Simon Heffer

Political biographies to enjoy in lockdown

Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present house arrest. The danger with such lists is that what has recently entered the memory becomes most prominent; so this one consists entirely of works published in the 20th century. Charles Moore’sThatcher, Leo McKinstry’s Rosebery and Andrew Roberts’s Churchill, all superb works, therefore do not figure; and I have arranged those that do in chronological order of their subjects. John Ehrman started his magnificent three-volume life of William Pitt the Younger in the late 1950s and published the final part in 1996. He was a gentleman-scholar of the old school

John Self

Another alien in our midst: Pew, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed

It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain. Step up Catherine Lacey, and welcome. Her previous novels specialised in confounding the reader, taking the frames of road trip and science fiction and giving them a good yank. Now she’s gone full religious allegory on us: or has she? ‘Pew’ is the name the villagers in her novel give to a stranger they find sleeping on a pew in the local church. Lacey’s character offers no name, no story, no age or gender (so let’s use the pronoun they; though I admit I kept thinking of Pew as male,

Annie Gray

William Sitwell’s history of eating out reminds us painfully of what we’re missing

In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the collapse of Jamie Oliver’s empire last year: ‘His endeavour, passion and hard work wasn’t enough… it was part of a bursting bubble.’ Since then more mid-range chains have announced their imminent demise. Teetering before lockdown, it’s not just the prospect of months of closure and general uncertainty that’s pushing them over the brink but decades of oversupply and a reliance on a cynical model of successful restaurants selling on and out. This book feels timely: a reminder of what we currently can’t have, and how the sector came to be.

Sarah Ditum

We don’t talk of a ‘working father’ — so why do we still refer to a ‘working mother’?

The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that: in the UK three-quarters of women with dependent children work. Yet the working mother still feels provisional, something that lockdown has made sharply apparent to many women. Will it be Mum or Dad who claims the spare room, while the loser retreats to the kitchen table? Mum or Dad who does the home-schooling? Who will preserve their professional status, and who will slide into the domestic? The answer is that, in most cases, the woman loses, and her male partner quietly gathers the spoils. Although the ability to do our

Emily Rhodes

The art of negotiation: Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, reviewed

Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace negotiations — reflects: ‘Peace talks settle into this repeating pattern after a while, a pattern like that of the floor carpets in places like this conference centre, in which a polygonal weave mesmerises the eye almost to a vanishing point.’ He is commenting on the lonely, relentless routine of the talks, walks, meals and drinks, as official negotiations inch forward, stall, reverse and proceed again over the course of months. Alongside the diplomatic conference, another type of peace talk is underway: the meandering, intimate prose of the novel’s first-person narrative

Peter Parker

Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure

When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. ‘Every blockhead does that,’ Banks replied. ‘My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.’ It was a wise decision, and his voyage on HMS Endeavour would be the making of him. He returned with an extraordinary haul of natural history specimens and would thereafter more or less fall into important roles on the strength of his experiences, whether it was as the unofficial director of Kew, which he would make into the world’s most important botanical

Daniel Rey

The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?

Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to developers, the countryside is ingrained in our collective consciousness as our unspoiled national haven. It is Albion’s Garden of Eden, with its Holy Trinity of village church, local pub and cricket ground. Englishness itself, as much as cricket, is the main theme of Michael Henderson’s genre-melding And That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket. The title alludes to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Going, Going’, and the last summer was 2019, when Henderson, sportswriter and cultural critic, took a journey around the cricket grounds of his past. The international

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Mark O’Connell on the fantasy and fear of the apocalypse

39 min listen

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Mark O’Connell, a writer whose latest book Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back sees him investigate doomsday preppers, wannabe Mars colonists, the Ayn Rand billionaires buying up New Zealand, and the tourist route through Chernobyl. Why, he asks, is the apocalypse something we seem to fantasise about as much as fear?

Thursday

Ian Thomson

From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff-armed Roman salute after the handshake was considered fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras. For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried

Peter Parker

Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’. In the Victorian language of flowers the plant denoted pride or haughtiness, but its tendency to turn its head to the sun led Byron’s abject Julia to use its image on a seal for her final letter to Don Juan with the accompanying motto Elle vous suit partout. The sunflower has been adopted as an emblem by

Duncan Fallowell

Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?

People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that may be true. But the drag of the past is still great, and I can think of only two major works between classical and recent times that celebrate same-sex love openly: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Light began to break through after the Great War, but largely for fellow insiders. Auden and Isherwood were timid in what they published in their prime. Proust did gay, but stuck to sordid. Only Gide spoke out positively in Corydon, but the journals are almost mute on his sex

Stephen Bayley

René Dreyfus: the racing driver detested by the Nazis

I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A racing car is a fearsome environment of engulfing pyroclastic heat, metaphor-testing noise, vision-blurring vibration and nauseating centrifugal forces. Ninety years ago it was even worse. The cars had tyres with little grip, feeble brakes and no crash protection whatever. Hot oil would continuously spray over drivers, who raced in linen caps; and an off, as they call excursions, would often result in mutilation or immolation. Faster is the story of René Dreyfus, who flourished in this atrocious atmosphere, in a culture where the public found the achievement of speed a

Philip Hensher

Short stories to enjoy in lockdown

In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust now, as the days stretch ahead and the horizons shrink to an hour’s walk a day, when is it going to happen? But it seems much more likely that reading is going to contract, and the most you’ll realistically manage is a short story a day. Fortunately, some of the greatest literature of the last couple of centuries has come in the shape of the short story. Here are nine long-standing favourites of mine that manage to repay repeated re-reading — the definition of a classic. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is

Colin Greenwood

Would you kill for a cup of coffee?

In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup told the story of El Salvadorean coffee, from seed to cup. America was the world’s biggest consumer, drinking nearly 60 billion cups a year. It opened with a picturesque image of local Indians in traditional costume dancing under the Santa Ana volcano. A trade commentator intoned: Far to the south, high in the mountains of Central America… studded with volcanic peaks, rich in tropical grandeur… Here at the beginning of the coffee season we find gaiety and laughter. Bankrolled by the coffee planters, it portrayed a Potemkin village of plantation