Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Books Podcast: Cass Sunstein – Beyond the Nudge

In this week’s Books Podcast I’m joined by Professor Cass Sunstein – best known here as co-author of the hugely influential 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which spawned a whole transatlantic movement in using behavioural psychology to influence public policy (not least in the Cabinet Office’s celebrated ‘Nudge Unit’). Cass’s new book is called How Change Happens – and extends the arguments of his previous books to talk about the mechanisms that determine quite big, and quite abrupt shifts in politics and social attitudes. I ask him how his ideas about nudging have changed over the last decade; about the limits and contradictions of ‘libertarian paternalism’;

Allan Massie

Was there no end to his talents?

John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher; one of Lord Milner’s ‘young men’, charged with the reconstruction of South Africa after the second Boer war; director of propaganda 1917–18, a Member of Parliament; lord high commissioner (i.e. the king’s representative) to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland; governor-general of Canada. Yet the title of this excellent biography by his granddaughter is to the point. He is best known today as the author of a thriller he wrote in a few weeks in 1914 which, more than 20 years later, was made into a film by

Sue Prideaux

A struggle not to scream

Norway doesn’t have a world-class philosopher (Kierkegaard was Danish). Karl Ove Knausgaard declared at the end of his previous book that he is no longer a writer, and it looks as though he’s moving in to fill that space. A very modern space: a selfie space. Nietzsche observed that all philosophy is autobiography, and Knausgaard certainly qualifies, having written 4,000 pages of a multi-volume autobiography called My Struggle. Now he has given us a book on Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist best known for painting ‘The Scream’. Munch wrote an almost Knausgaardian number of autobiographical pages in his private journals while recording the outer reality of his life in hundreds

Andrew Taylor

The nanny’s tale

Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the 1922 Bywaters and Thompson murder case. More recently, The Crime Writer cunningly blended an English episode from the life of Patricia Highsmith with elements of one of Highsmith’s own crime novels. Now Dawson has turned to the Lucan case, which has rarely been far from the tabloid headlines since 1974. One November evening, an intruder bludgeoned to death the Lucan children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in the basement kitchen of their Belgravia home and viciously attacked Lady Lucan herself. Lord Lucan disappeared in murky circumstances and has never been found. At

Christopher Bray

Hollywood’s invisible man

What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Josef von Sternberg, George Stevens, Charles Vidor, King Vidor, Orson Welles and William Wyler? I know, it’s a toughie — and it isn’t much less tough if you consult IMDb. But the answer is that all of them made pictures from scripts that had been worked on by the same man. His name was Ben Hecht and, even today, 125 years after his birth, he’s regarded as the greatest screenwriter the movies ever had. If you want some idea of how great that is, consider that

Steven Poole

Muzak, not Mozart

What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert definition in his introduction: ‘Creativity is the drive to come up with something that is new and surprising and that has value.’ This, he argues, is possible in mathematics (he himself invented a new kind of symmetrical object) as well as the arts in general, or what he describes as ‘the outpourings of what I call the human code’. The question he sets himself in this book is: can Artificial Intelligence do as well, or even better? Du Sautoy’s use of the phrase ‘the human code’ for the software that

Robert Chandler

Witness for the prosecution | 17 April 2019

Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has been translated into most European languages and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Vietnamese. There have been stage productions, TV series and an eight-hour BBC radio dramatisation. And Grossman himself — like Leo Tolstoy, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and several other Russian poets and novelists — is now venerated not only as a writer but also as a moral exemplar. His life story is indeed remarkable. He bore witness, with clarity and balance, to many of the most terrible events of the last century: the terror famine in Ukraine,

Hugh Thomson

Stormy sees

There are more than 100 cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales of many different denominations (although I for one had been previously unaware of the Belarus Autocephalous Orthodox Church). But, wisely, Christopher Somerville focuses on those great galleons with which we are most familiar: the cathedrals that first rose up above the plains of England after 1066. The metaphor which Somerville uses, of these cathedrals as ‘ships of heaven’, runs before the wind throughout this book. If the early cathedrals were blunt old battleships, built as foursquare as castles to show that the conquering Normans were here to stay, later Gothic ones were as elegant as grand and beautiful yachts.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 17 April 2019

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON And so, as we continue through the Summer Season of history plays at Shakespeare’s Globe — supported by principal partner Merian Global Investors — to Henry IV: Part Two, which opens this week. This is, for my money, the most complex and moving of this sequence of plays – where the just-about-comic and just-about-heroic elements of Part One show their seamy side. It’s a play full of melancholy, sickness and regret: the death of the old king looming in the background. It’s where, to cite Morrissey, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’. The scenery-chewing monster of Part One, Sir

Thursday

Simon Garfield

Pirates of the printing presses

Say what you like about the efficiency of the Kindle, one day we’re going to wake up and miss the lizards. Among the many lost methods of making an illuminated book in the pioneering days of Renaissance printing, the way we once obtained powdered gold may be the most lamented: ‘In a pot place nine lizards in the milk, put on the cover, and bury it in damp earth. Make sure the lizards have air so they do not die.’ By the seventh day, ‘the lizards will have eaten the brass… and their strong poison will have compelled the brass to turn to gold.’ The design consultant John Boardley quotes

Colin Greenwood

‘God has abandoned us’

At a dinner recently I was told the story of a Canadian billionaire (now defined in banking circles as someone withmore than $500 million in liquid assets) who is building an escape destination from the oncoming climate apocalypse: an ersatz Versailles, with two runways, deep in the thawing Canadian tundra. Four hundred years earlier, the world faced a different meteorological crisis. Temperatures plummeted by around 2° C, and summers zig-zagged between floods and droughts, possibly due to variations in solar and geothermal activity. Harvests were cut short, rivers and seas froze over as the climate changed with a biblical ferocity. Birds, frozen on the wing, were said to have plummeted

Lara Feigel

Cuckoo in the nest | 11 April 2019

What kind of loyalty do we owe a robot we’ve paid for — one who exhibits a convincingly human kind of consciousness? Less loyalty than we owe to our own children? But what about to someone else’s child? And do we commit murder if we destroy him? These are the questions facing Charlie when he spends his inheritance on a robot called Adam. Charlie is a trained anthropologist with an enthusiasm for computers who hopes to give his life meaning by experimenting in ‘electronics and anthropology — distant cousins whom late modernity has drawn together and bound in marriage’. He and his girlfriend Miranda join forces in programming Adam with

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Twitting the twits

Titania McGrath is the alter ego of the schoolteacher Andrew Doyle. A perpetually enraged ‘activist, healer and radical intersectional poet’, her job was to lampoon the imbecilities of the achingly ‘woke’ middle class left, and expose the manifest contradictions in what they were spouting. Her forum for this was, of course, that vast lagoon of hastily jabbered nonsense, Twitter — and it was very effective. So effective that for a while Twitter users could not be sure that it was a joke at all — an understandable confusion, given the real-life existence of people such as the journalists Laurie Penny and Suzanne Moore, for example, or the French academic Myriam

Paul Levy

Bagels, borscht and brisket

In matters of culture and ethnicity, I take my lead from my old friend and guide Sir Jonathan Miller. Like him, I count myself as Jew-ish, and, as every Jew-ish person knows, you are what you eat; these traits are expressed most poignantly in our food. Not in the ancient (and incoherent) Hebrew dietary laws, which make it impractical, impossible even  —  for the few observant Jews who remain on this planet — to eat an everyday British or American diet; but in the foods that we relish, cherish and feel nostalgia for. These almost never include the ritual foods or meals associated with Jewish religious festivals, such as the

Hermione Eyre

Medieval girl power

Women who can — however tenuously — be described as ‘rebel girls’ are big in publishing now. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls sold 3.5 million copies in hardback, reflecting a huge cultural push to discover and venerate women in history who kicked over the traces. To publishers, real-life rebel princesses have cool hard-cash value. In this context we come to this book, a scholarly work effortfully seeking out the ‘you-go-girl’ moments of the notoriously woke 13th century. Kelcey Wilson-Lee, who has a doctorate in medieval history from Royal Holloway and works in the development office at Cambridge University overseeing regional philanthropy, has an underlying agenda. But she also has the

Nigel Jones

A dead letter

When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of this book usually feature, holding the top and bottom positions. Attempts are periodically made to revise these verdicts, most recently in John McDonnell’s description of Churchill as a villain; and by Robert Harris’s sympathetic portrayal of Chamberlain in his thriller  Munich. By and large, however, the general view of the two PMs remains fixed: Churchill was a hero who saved his country and arguably freedom and democracy worldwide, while Chamberlain was a purblind and arrogant fool who let Hitler stomp his jackboots all over him. The revisionists who want to

Stuart Ritchie

Vital statistics

Scientists, it turns out, are really bad at statistics. Numerous studies show that a startling proportion of academics consistently misunderstand the statistics they’re using, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. A computer algorithm that highlights basic statistical errors was recently set loose on a huge sample of published research papers in psychology  and found that almost half contained a mathematical mistake; 13 per cent had a serious screw-up that meant their reported results might have been completely wrong. If scientists — who use statistics all day to analyse their experiments — are so innumerate, what hope is there for everyone else? Enter Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor

Philip Hensher

A born rebel

Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English composer who worked within established forms —symphonies, oratorios, string quartets, piano sonatas — to startlingly new effect. But his innovation was not just as a composer. He was also a political and social radical, embedded in Trotskyite, pacifist and gay rights ideas. The newness made itself known in a long attempt to find novel ways of living. Oliver Soden’s biography feels like an attempt to answer a series of questions. How, in the 20th century, should a creative artist live? Or be a pacifist? Or a homosexual? The answers were

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Books Podcast: who was Søren Kierkegaard?

My guest for this week’s books podcast is Clare Carlisle, author of a new life of Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart. Kierkegaard has a reputation for being forbidding, pious and difficult to pronounce – but Clare’s here to tell us why the work of this transformational thinker and writer speaks to every age about the difficulties and the vital importance of finding a way of living in the world. Plus, we learn about his very strange love-life, his mental health, and how he got monstered by Copenhagen’s equivalent of Private Eye. There ain’t nothing like a Dane.

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

It’s time to revive Communist literature – it’s never been more relevant

I was surprised to learn that the novelist Milan Kundera celebrated his 90th birthday on Monday. I had no idea he was still alive. He has taken up residence in that old people’s home that many former luminaries of western culture now occupy — the one with the sign above the door saying ‘Forgotten, but not gone’. In Kundera’s case, his decline into obscurity is probably connected to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Czech émigré was all the rage in the mid-1980s when he was a critic of his country’s brutal regime. Now that the Soviet Union and its satellite states are a distant memory, he seems less