Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Trailing clouds of perfume

In his robust new biography of Alcibiades, David Stuttard describes how the mercurial Greek general shocked his contemporaries by adopting Persian customs: Certainly, he embraced their lifestyle, tying his hair up in a bun, curling his well-oiled beard (a symbol of machismo in the Persian court), dousing himself in the perfumes for which Sardis was so famous, and dressing not just in sumptuous robes and beautifully fringed tunics of linen, wool and mohair (deep-dyed in vibrant reds and vivid yellows, and adorned with ornaments in glittering gold foil), but in those other garments so associated by Athenians with decadent, eastern effeminacy: trousers. I’ll be honest. After reading this showcase sentence,

Edmund Gordon

Tokyo through the lens

In 1975, the 24-year-old Ian Buruma (now an award-winning essayist and historian, and the editor of the New York Review of Books) left his native Holland to study film at the Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo. It was a bold move. The 1970s was a wild, tumultuous decade in Japan, often known as the Showa Genroku, after the hedonistic period at the end of the 17th century, and Tokyo came as a shock to the few Westerners who went there: a teeming, neon-strafed megalopolis, where the trappings of hypermodernity jostled with elements of a sublime tradition, and the whole culture was drenched in eroticism. Buruma soon stopped going

Andre Van Loon

Love me, or go to hell

This is a wonderful and moving book of correspondence and biographical documents promising one Tchaikovsky in its subtitle and introduction, but actually delivering another — and thank the musical gods for that. Nothing here is horrid or even secret; the Russian edition was published in 2009 and has been used by English-speaking authorities since. And yet it claims to ‘unlock’ scandal: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky often swore in his letters (shock!), had many homosexual encounters, including one-night stands (covered in previous biographies) and felt at home in the upper echelons of the 19th-century Russian autocracy. Indeed, some find Tchaikovsky troublesome, such as the Soviets, readers of this book’s original Russian edition

Sean Mcglynn

Great balls of fire

Lionheart! Saladin! Massacre! There is no shortage of larger-than-life characters and drama in the epic, two-year siege of Acre, the great set-piece of the Third Crusade. But, as John Hosler relates in this accomplished study, there was so much more besides. Acre proved the strategic point for armies from across Europe, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Maghreb; and the siege provided a kaleidoscope of competing ambitions, objectives and self-serving manoeuvrings amid the most arduous conditions, in which Bedouins ‘exchanged the severed heads of their victims with Saladin in return for robes and gifts’. The coastal city of Acre, in present-day Israel, was the first objective of the crusaders, as it

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The acid test

When Peregrine Worsthorne was on Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. He may, according to the American journalist Michael Pollan’s fiercely interesting new book, have been on to something. Acid has a bad name these days: either a threat to the sanity of your children, or a naff 1960s throwback favoured by the sort of people who sell you healing crystals at markets in Totnes. Yet in LSD-25, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and others we have a family of molecules with startlingly powerful effects on the human mind. They are not addictive, carry little or no physiological risk, and their association

Thursday

Vonny Leclerc

Knickerbocker glories

One September day the 16-year-old Tessie Reynolds got on her bike. In a homemade suit, she pedalled from London to Brighton and back, in eight and a half hours. It was 1893. The intrepid velocipedienne made the 190km journey in record time in an age of masculine heroics. But it was not her derring-do that scandalised the press into conniptions but her clothes: she was in short trousers. This was an era when women were shunned for egregious displays of ankle, meaning that Tessie’s dress was both revolutionary and overtly political. Behind the public tutting, her ‘rationals’ ignited women’s imaginations, showing a new way of moving and being in the

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: The Order of Time

In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the brilliant Carlo Rovelli — who with the publication of his million-selling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics in 2014— took his place with Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman as one of the great popularisers of modern theoretical physics. We’re talking today about one of the most difficult fundamental questions in the universe: the nature of time. Do we have free will? Can you understand physics without maths? Just what is Roger Penrose on about? We tackle all these questions and more. Admittedly, it’s an unequal match. I supply the David Bowie quote: Carlo supplies the profound insights. But as he explains, the

Steven Poole

The soldier savant

Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking. But before he devoted himself to metaphysical meditations, he had spent a decade as a soldier-scholar travelling the hotspots of Europe. How might a greater understanding of this period affect our view of the great man? This is a fascinating if dry kind of pre-intellectual biography, which hopes to hint at how the philosophy grew out of the action. René Descartes was born to a family of minor nobility in 1596, and educated by Jesuits. He studied some mathematics in Paris and then acquired a degree in law, after which

Patrick Skene-Catling

School of Soho

This is an important, authoritative work of art criticism that recognises schools of painters, yet displays the superior distinctions of individual geniuses. Martin Gayford, The Spectator’s art critic, concedes that the identification by R.B. Kitaj, an American painter, of a ‘substational School of London’ was ‘essentially correct’, though in London there was no ‘coherent movement or stylistic group’.The only characteristic shared by London painters has always been merely that they live in London. There have been some influential personal relationships, even cases of a sort of cosiness, especially in the French Pub, the Colony Room and other drinking venues in Soho and Fitzrovia. In this comprehensive, intimate inspection of the

Ian Sansom

Look back, face forward

You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star and scourge of political correctness whose book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a worldwide bestseller, beloved of serious young men seeking intellectual challenge and good old-fashioned fatherly advice. Summary: ‘Sort yourself out, bucko.’ We don’t really need the likes of Peterson here: we’ve got Ferdinand Mount. The book we should all be reading to sort ourselves out, buckos, is Prime Movers. Mount is, admittedly, an unlikely intellectual hero. Modest and self-deprecating almost to the point of absurdity, in his memoir Cold Cream: My Early Life

Daniel Hahn

They shall not pass

Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona desert. He has just received a college degree, studying international relations. His response to her bafflement — and concern — is that he wants to see the reality, what it’s like ‘in the field’. This will help him better understand the issues, so he can later use the power that this understanding gives him… for what? To attend law school? Become a policy maker? But first: to write this book. More than half of this memoir comprises brief, suggestive episodes from Cantú’s experience on the line, where he would eventually

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Make or break?

My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I asked him how he was getting on. He said: ‘I’ve just got to the knifing.’ I said: ‘What knifing?’ I’d already forgotten about the knifing. A whole knifing in south London, complete with innocent dead boy and devastated mother. The incident’s strange forgettableness was a sign of the flaws of a novel so nearly very good, and admirable in many ways. It’s sprawling (like the suburbs of south London in which it’s set), and many of its extended scenes, though beautifully and richly imagined, lack the vital element of plot-forwarding

Charlotte Hobson

A brutal band of thieves

Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more than timely. In these days of ever more bizarre Russian attacks, it reads like the essential companion to a bewildering and aggressive new world, a world that is no longer confined behind Russian borders but seeks actively to penetrate and disrupt our own society. Essentially a history of the development of Russia’s unique form of organised crime, it constantly illuminates and clarifies the familiar, legal narrative of Russian history and the attitudes of Putin’s clique. The Russian mafia’s distinctive culture originally emerged during the years of revolution and civil war.

Dorian Lynskey

Trading crime for rhyme

I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging them to repackage a horrendous experience as a juicy anecdote with which to promote an album. Some natural raconteurs are happy to play that game — 50 Cent can now tell the story of the day he was shot nine times with the fluency of Peter Ustinov on Parkinson — but many rappers are understandably coy, at least outside the recording studio, about sharing the gory details of their previous lives. In that respect, this memoir by one of the nine original members of the Wu-Tang Clan lives up to

John McEwen

His muse and anchor

Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013) CBE, RA, Hon RSA — to 20th- century Scottish art what his hero and acquaintance Hugh MacDiarmid was to Scottish poetry — but its inspiring message is that love conquers all. Helen Bellany is not a ‘quitter’, and her story triumphantly confirms it. It is a long book but does not drag. The past is so alive to her it seems only natural when she lapses into the present tense. She is a highlander from Golspie in ‘timeless and silent’ Sutherland, and the poetry of her descriptions encourages a visit

James Womack

Into the woods

This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a ‘Trunk’; a ‘Crown’; some ‘Seeds’), and which unashamedly references every tree you might half-remember, from Eden to Auden (‘A culture is no better than its woods’). It revolves around various efforts to save trees, whether by seedbanks or political activism, and details the ways in which its group of protagonists becomes radicalised and willing to put their lives on the line, or even kill, to save the few remaining patches of old forest in the USA. One of these protagonists, Olivia, turns towards the forest when she has a near-death

Francis Wheen

Overs and outs

E.W. Swanton’s first published article appeared in All Sports Weekly in July 1926, soon after his 19th birthday. Thence, swiftly, into Fleet Street, covering public-school sports for the London Evening Standard and ‘rugger’ for the Times. In the summer of 1930 he made his Test debut, reporting the Ashes match at Lord’s in which young Don Bradman scored 254 out of 729 for 6 declared. Swanton had not been selected for the cricket XI at school. He forestalled any such humiliations in adult life by founding his own team, the Arabs, whose one absolute club rule was that E.W. Swanton should open the batting. As for the other players, according

James Walton

Obsession and obfuscation

The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of not being entirely up to speed on the life and works of the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) seem destined — even intended — to find Patient X a less than alluring combination of the tediously baffling and the bafflingly tedious. Peace’s fact-based fiction has always demanded a fair amount of patience and concentration, with obsession serving as both his subject matter and his method. Yet in novels such as GB84 (about the miners’ strike) and The Damned United (about that other Yorkshire cataclysm, Brian Clough’s time at Leeds), the

James Yorke

Splendour and squalor

The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established his court there in May 1682 until his great grandson Louis XVI was forced to leave by a mob of 30,000 in October 1789. Such was its reputation that Lord Chesterfield earnestly advised his son that ‘an hour at Versailles is now worth more to you than three hours in your closet with the best books that were ever written’. Embassies came from as far afield as Siam and Persia. Leather-bound engravings of the palace served as diplomatic gifts and spread its reputation throughout Europe. Every sovereign, leafing through his

Simon Heffer

The Great War, viewed from all sides

The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians are finding angles hitherto unexplored that they can make books out of; or, at the lower end of the scale, they are content to retell the old story in a different way. What we have been short of in the English canon is a view of the war not just from the other side, but from all sides: it was, as Colonel Repington termed it, ‘the first world war’, and not simply four years of carnage between the British and the Germans. Jörn Leonhard’s epic and magnificent work — unquestionably,