Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

John Maier

Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?

It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached his four-film contract, preferring to settle out of court. Actors have lodged their public regret at working with him. He is one of Hollywood’s notable sinking stars. In March, following a demonstration by staff, Hachette pulped this book. ‘Everybody should take responsibility for their actions,’ one protesting employee told the Guardian — anonymously, and apparently without irony. The New York Times called him ‘a monster’. And if you think that’s social rock bottom, in 2016 the Clinton campaign refused his donation. Imagine that: money so tainted that not even the

Rose Prince

When Idi Amin threatened to shoot the cook

Private chefs keep many secrets and are expected to go to their graves without sharing a morsel of gossip about their employers. Whether cooking for a pop star, tycoon or member of a royal family, chefs must guarantee confidentiality. Chatter can be career-ending or lead to lawsuits. For a few such cooks, revelations could even end in execution. When the Polish journalist Witold Szablowski came up with the winning idea of writing a book about what some of the world’s most notorious dictators ate, it proved a difficult task. Finding just a few living examples of their chefs took more than two years; persuading these individuals to tell their secrets

Amy Liptrot

How not to get away from it all in the Hebrides

Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not to’ guide. Within a few pages it’s clear that Tamsin Calidas’s decision to decamp with her husband to a tiny Hebridean island is highly ill-advised. They take on too much: buying a derelict croft, hoping to renovate the place and live self-sufficiently, with no farming experience. It’s not much of a surprise, especially to anyone with experience of life in the Scottish islands, when the relationship founders and her husband leaves. It’s a gripping start. Surely she won’t remain on the croft alone? Surely things can’t get worse? Astoundingly, both

Brian Martin

A Wiltshire mystery: A Saint in Swindon, by Alice Jolly, reviewed

This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled, it reflects the way we are now living. Inspired by the collective imagination of a Swindon book group, Alice Jolly has written a prophetic story. The narrator is Janey, married to the older Phil and running Hunter’s Grove, a B&B in the Swindon suburbs. Phil is an impediment: ‘Retirement — twice as much husband and half as much money.’ Tuesday afternoons mean tea and sex with Len the builder — ‘Tea with Len, Cider with Rosie, what’s the difference?’ Other than that, Janey is visited by her girl friends, among

Matthew Adams

Sadness and scandal: Hinton, by Mark Blacklock, reviewed

In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to confess to bigamy. A theorist of the fourth dimension, he had looked destined to forge a career that would align him with the most renowned academic figures of the age. Now, with a conviction, a brief imprisonment, and ‘illegitimate’ twin sons attached to his name, his reputation was ruined. Unable to find employment, he fled with his first family to Japan. Mark Blacklock’s novel tells us what happened next. We initially encounter Hinton at Yokohama harbour where, with his four sons and his first wife, Mary, he is about to

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why America loves Shakespeare

35 min listen

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined from across the Atlantic by the eminent Shakespearean James Shapiro to talk about his new book Shakespeare in a Divided America, which discusses the myriad ways in which America has taken Britain’s national playwright up as its own; and then used him as a lightning-rod for the deepest issues about its own national identity – issues of masculinity, race relations, immigration and assassination. Jim talks about why a country founded by theatre-hating, Brit-hating Puritans fell in love with a British playwright; how Lincoln was the greatest reader of Shakespeare in American history; about whether America is the purest repository of Shakespeare’s language; about

Thursday

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Pity the poor stepmother — the most reviled character in folk literature

Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but as humans do not change in certain essentials it seems likely that reactions centuries ago were similar to reactions now — when it is adults who often find many of them gruesome and unsuitable for those of single-figure age. Wicked stepmothers plot torment and murder; small children are banished alone to forests; wolves dress up in grandmotherly bonnets and shawls to deceive — and eventually to kill and eat — rosy-cheeked little girls; beautiful princesses are locked in high towers or tricked into taking poison to fall asleep for 100

Owen Matthews

Moscow rules in London: how Putin’s agents corrupted the British elite

In the past year alone, Russia-watchers have been treated to books entitled The Code of Putinism; Putin’s World; Putin vs the People; The Putin System and We Need to Talk About Putin — just to mention the ones with Putin’s name in the title. In addition, Robert Service’s Kremlin Winter, Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of the Russian Leviathan and Andrew Monaghan’s Dealing with the Russians have also offered their own insights into the history, politics and future of Putin’s Russia. In this crowded field, is there a place for Putin’s People? Happily, there is. Catherine Belton is a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times — and before that worked

Ian Garrick-Mason

For Jack Tar, going to sea was the ultimate adventure

Seafaring and the rule of the waves — as the song would have it — was an integral part of Britain’s sense of identity for centuries, a fire in the national imagination arguably first sparked by the exploits of Sir Francis Drake and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rising to full flame with the Battle of Trafalgar and the expansion and consolidation of the Empire, and finally dwindling to embers as imperial ambitions failed and ownership of the seas passed to the United States. It’s a story often told, and known almost too well. But this is not the story that the journalist-historian Stephen Taylor tells. Rather than taking

Stephen Bayley

Clean lines and dirty habits: the Modernists of 1930s Hampstead

With its distinctive hilly site and unusually coherent architecture (significantly, most of it domestic rather than civic), Hampstead has always had a singular character. But it is as much a state of mind as an address. Although two of England’s greatest native artists, Keats and Constable, made it their home, over the past three centuries Hampstead has notably attracted waves of exotics: French, Spanish and Jewish. These immigrants, struggling with heavy baggage labelled ‘high culture’, have had a huge influence on the neighbourhood. Perhaps the geography and townscape — a miniature city on a hill defined by secret places, alleyways and architectural surprises, a defensible space both in terms of

Helen Parr

A story of skill, courage and imagination: how Britain’s Sea Harriers stole victory against the odds

‘The world,’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have said, ‘is full of ships.’ With this comment, unlike in many other things, she lacked a common touch. I do not know what she thought about planes, still less jump jets, but no doubt she would have shared the sentiment of Rowland White’s Harrier 809 about their pilots: brave, selfless individuals who showed daring and ingenuity in overcoming the numerically superior Argentine air force to steal victory against the odds. White is an aviation enthusiast, knowledgeable about the technical and logistical challenges fighter pilots face and adept at crafting a fast-paced narrative. His previous book, Vulcan 607, recounted the achievements of the

Alan Murrin

Guilty pleasures that fail to satisfy: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed

In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing it. ‘No,’ he says. ‘The life of freed instincts is composed of layers. The first layer leads to the second, the second to the third and so on. It leads ultimately to abnormal pleasures.’ A hunger sated only uncovers a darker, more rapacious need. There is no endpoint to desire, no fulfilment that can snuff it out entirely. The protagonist of Cleanness, a novel in the form of connected short stories, is an American teacher living in Bulgaria who will be familiar to readers of Garth Greenwell’s much lauded 2016

Emily Bearn

Alexandra Shulman’s unlikely career in fashion journalism should have made a Hollywood movie

Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her clothes, and given us some scintillating reading. For despite having edited British Vogue for 25 years, until she retired in 2017, Shulman’s relationship with fashion at times reads less like a love affair than a marital tiff. Take, for example, the bra, which is the subject of chapter three. ‘There’s a point in most women’s lives when shopping for bras is consigned to one of those special places in hell,’ Shulman writes, revealing that, aged 17, she gave up, and didn’t wear a bra again for 20 years. (‘It wasn’t

Ariane Bankes

Arthur Jeffress: bright young person of the post-war art scene

The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history. ‘Small but subversive’ could describe the man as well as his collection: his fabulous wealth, inherited from Virginian tobacco plantation-owning ancestry, coupled with his rampant homosexuality, shaped a life of compulsive and conspicuous extravagance, in which art and sex vied with one another for supremacy against the backdrop of Belgravia and a palazzo just off

Joseph Williams

How Brighton’s gangs became increasingly radicalised

Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes, travelled to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist militia and one of the main jihadist groups fighting the Syrian army. A dozen more young people from Brighton were also eager to go. Radicalisation had swept through the group like a ‘contagion’, catching parents and police unawares and baffling counter-extremism experts. In his disturbing No Return, Mark Townsend traces the various hidden causes of the Deghayes case, events that he claims ‘transformed the entire approach of the government’s counter-extremism programme, both in policy and ideology’. Townsend, who is home affairs

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Salman Rushdie on the Age of Anything-Can-Happen

61 min listen

‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis’, Sir Salman Rushdie said to Sam when they spoke in an interview for the Spectator’s 10,000th edition. Sam met Salman in New York a few weeks ago, before coronavirus struck down the city. This episode is a recording of that interview, where they discuss everything from his latest book Quichotte, to his relationship with his father, who we learn made up the surname ‘Rushdie’, and how he feels about The Satanic Verses now. Sam’s full interview is out in this Thursday’s issue.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

The cult of Sappho in interwar Paris

I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for the first time; the results were compelling. At the beginning of a novel by one of them, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the terror of masculine traditions is concisely stated: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’, cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I

Derek Turner

Our rivers, as much as our oceans, are in urgent need of protection

Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers and fertilisers, fishing grounds and spiritual metaphors, power-givers and flushers of poisons. They are the veins of terrains, which like our own veins carry oxygen or pathogens, and extinction when they fail. They inspired Babylonian and Roman legal codes, outlining ideas about access, drainage, fishing, irrigation, maintenance, navigation, pollution and sharing that still course through

Stuart Jeffries

We all need to be let alone —not just Greta Garbo

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains for most people a pleasure that, whatever its social significance, can be enjoyed in entire solitude, and a pleasure that remains entirely individual. At the time, 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women were regular smokers. Smoking was not just a means of inhaling death and of escaping the dead

Horatio Clare

Heated debate over Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition

How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it. Ernest Coleman’s story of his search for clues to Franklin’s fate is delightfully prejudiced and pugnacious. The purpose of No Earthly Pole is, he writes, ‘to speak out in opposition to the clustering together of some academics and experts who have closed their minds’. Middle-aged lieutenant goes to the ends of the earth to defend the reputation of Queen Victoria’s Navy