Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Pulling through

Grief is not being able to eat a small boiled egg. ‘Could you face an egg?’ the widowed Jean asks her daughter Eve in Susie Boyt’s sixth novel, Love & Fame. It is not long after Jean’s husband, Eve’s father, John Swift, a sitcom actor, a national treasure, has died. Eve can’t face an egg; Jean has lost her appetite for anything but eggs. One small boiled egg, morning, noon and night. This is a clever, wise, often sad book about failure, dashed hopes and bereavement. It could be bleak, but Boyt is fiercely funny, skewering fads and self-help trends. A professional de-clutterer in the Marie Kondo mode is called

Rose Prince

On the wild side

The terroir of the Kentish coast is faultlessly represented in The Sportsman (Phaidon, £29.95), a book of recipes from an acclaimed pub restaurant in the village of Seasalter, close to Whitstable. On the bill of fare (it’s that English) you will find slip soles and thornback ray, salt marsh lamb and oysters, seaweeds of all sorts, wild berries, venison and much else from this landscape with its watery edge. The food is seasoned with home-panned sea salt and the kitchen churns its own butter. The Sportsman’s chef-proprietor,Stephen Harris, writes that terroir is a troublesome word that has come to mean too many things, especially with wine. The French have perhaps

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Gathering moss

Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I’ve been for the past four decades. It’s hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I’ve met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive in the Antipodes, while my colleagues were regularly flown to the USA and supplied with groupies and cocaine as if they themselves were rock stars. And then punk came along and rocked the gravy boat — and the internet finished the job. Last time I saw a copy, it was lying wanly in a bin

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Problems of her own

If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato nation, it will make you feel great affection for it. Sprawled on L-shaped sofas with comfort cushions or slobbering dogs on their tummies, or sitting side by side on armchairs with a vase of carnations on a doily between them, the programme’s chosen telly-watchers make what must be the most unselfconscious, and therefore genuine, remarks spoken by anyone on air. There’s no doubt in my mind that Giles and Mary are the most watchable of all the watchers. ‘Meanwhile, in Wiltshire…’ says the narrator, and you glimpse a thatched cottage,

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 16 November 2017

Daniel Swift I spent too much of this (and last) year reading anaemic updatings of Shakespeare plays: pale novels which borrowed plots and missed points and, oddly, always misunderstood the minor characters. After these, Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press, £9.99) came as a relief and a surprise. Her novel is big, beautiful, and most of all bold: a rewriting of King Lear, transplanted to modern day Delhi, which is both a dazzlingly original reading of the play and a full novel in its own right. A masterpiece, and by a long way my book of the year. Graham Robb Mike Lankford’s genial and sassy biography Becoming

Thursday

Laura Beatty

Angel and demon

Read cover to cover, a book of essays gives you the person behind it: their voice, the trend of their thinking, their tastes and the nature of their engagement with the world. So, here are two, one from each end of the human spectrum. Think of Milton’s Archangel Raphael, intellectually wide-ranging, lucid, informative and fair, and you have Francis Spufford. Think of his darkly glittering Satan — vivid, passionate, partisan and fatally persuasive — and you have Martin Amis. Read these books together and you have, in essay terms, a Miltonic whole. These are collections of what might be called ‘pre-loved’ pieces, not originally designed to cohere, so they have

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Anthony Powell

In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to Anthony Powell’s biographer Hilary Spurling about why A Dance to the Music of Time, far from being a museum piece, is a subtly avant-garde work. We talk about the rise and fall of literary reputations, why Powell wasn’t a snob, his rivalry with Evelyn Waugh, and — unexpectedly — how her biography of Matisse bears on her work on Powell. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Daniel Hahn

The art of deception | 9 November 2017

Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a charismatic Nazi concentration camp survivor, and more. In January 2005 he addressed the Spanish parliament to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is, everyone agrees, an extraordinary man. Heroic, almost. The thing is, his extraordinary, heroic biography is at least partly a lie. But which parts? In The Impostor, the novelist Javier Cercas seeks to disentangle Marco’s lies from those small provable truths supporting them. Cercas is reluctant at first (troubled by Primo Levi’s ‘to understand is almost to justify’); but Marco himself is

Stephen Bayley

High wire act

‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation that turned PR and branding into art forms, wanted homegrown creative heroes. In design there were Charles Eames and George Nelson with their homey hopsack suits and wash’n’wear shirts, their sensible Wasp homilies: a counterattack against imported — and often baffling — exotics from the Bauhaus. It was the same in fine art. Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) was a roughneck from cowboy country in Wyoming who became a darling of the media, not least because of his readily reportable deplorable behaviour. And then there was Alexander Calder, not a

Ian Thomson

Italy’s road to ruin

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without. By the time Iris Origo’s Italian

Mary Keen

The future isn’t rosy

Emotional geography is now a recognised academic subject. Is emotional botany heading the same way? This is a year for thoughtful books about plants and the way they affect lives, what they make people feel and how we can respect nature. Many of the year’s works might appeal to non-gardeners. Readers hoping for rose-tinted pages may be disappointed. Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £14.99) is ostensibly a diary of his allotment over a little more than a year. But, he writes: ‘Sometimes, when I think of this book, I am almost bewildered. It has taken such a turn. It was to be about gardening… with personal stuff added in.’

Claudia Massie

A blunt instrument of war

It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura lamenting ‘the number of bad books that have been written and will be written’ about it. Fortunately, James Attlee’s study of Picasso’s superstar work of art is not a bad book and he builds on a solid cultural and historic understanding of the painting to collate 80 years of evolving reaction to it. Attlee begins in May 1937, when, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republic commissioned Picasso to create a painting for its pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. They hoped the famous artist

Hugh Thomson

Blowing hot and cold | 9 November 2017

I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how capricious Homeric weather can be. In the space of a few days the wind shifted dramatically to three different points of the compass — and none of them was the gentle westerly Zephyr that brought Odysseus and his men back to almost spitting distance of their homeland. Almost, because just as they approached, the crew became suspicious of the goatskin bag in which Aeolus had helpfully packed away the other hostile winds and let them all loose. Nick Hunt tries to track down a few of Europe’s more errant and

Nigel Jones

The revolution devours its children

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of his native Georgia, and was an avid reader of history, novels and Marxist-Leninist theory, marking the pages of the 20,000 books in his library with expletives scrawled with the same coloured crayons with which he signed mass death warrants and international treaties: ‘Rubbish!’, ‘Piss off!’, ‘Fool!’, ‘Scumbag!’, ‘Ha-Ha!’ The second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s wrist-breaking

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 9 November 2017

A.N. Wilson Elmet by Fiona Mozley (John Murray, £10.99). It is difficult to convey the full horror of this spellbinding first novel. The young author, a medievalist, presumably knows the no less violent Njál’s Saga. Elmet, though set in the modern age, concerns timeless protagonists who have contrived to live outside the normal modern settings. Dad is an ex-prisoner, who earns his living as a prize-fighter — at illegally organised, very bloody bare-knuckle fights. Somehow he and his children manage to build a house on land belonging to a sinister figure called Mr Price, without any bureaucrats from the local planning office materialising to ask what he is up to.

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Philip Pullman

In this week’s Books podcast I talk to Philip Pullman about his captivating new novel La Belle Sauvage — in which he returns to the world of His Dark Materials — and Daemon Voices, his new collection of essays on storytelling. He talks here about his magpie habits, why he thinks realism is better than fantasy, the uses of Spenser, why he isn’t a literary outrider of New Atheism, and why first-person narrators — everywhere now — really turn him off. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Ruth Scurr

A vanishing vision

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey at Oxford. One of their earliest conversations concerned the political implications of the passions. A month later, on 28 July, the French Revolutionary Terror climaxed in the guillotining of the Incorruptible, Maximilien Robespierre. Evidence from across the Channel notwithstanding, Coleridge and Southey were certain that the passions are not vicious — ’tis society makes the indulgence of them so. They resemble an assemblage of waters, destructive if they run wildly over the country, but the source of abundance if properly guided. With youthful utopian optimism they theorised an imaginary community

William Leith

Sweet dreams are made of this

I’ve read several books​ ​about​ ​sleep recently,​ ​and​ ​their​ ​authors​ ​all​ ​tell​ ​me​ ​the same​ ​three​ ​things.​ ​The​ ​first​ ​is​ ​that,​ ​in​ ​the modern​ ​world,​ ​it’s​ ​hard​ ​to​ ​get​ ​enough sleep.​ ​The​ ​second​ ​is​ ​that​ ​sleep​ ​is​ ​very important.​ ​Every​ ​night,​ ​we​ ​pass​ ​out.​ ​Every morning,​ ​we​ ​regain​ ​consciousness, half aware​ ​that​ ​time​ ​has​ ​passed.​ ​For​ ​a moment,​ ​we​ ​might​ ​have​ ​the​ ​impression we’ve​ ​just​ ​been​ ​flying​ ​through​ ​the​ ​air,​ ​or that​ ​we’re​ ​about​ ​to​ ​be​ ​executed.​ ​The whole​ ​thing​ ​is​ ​totally​ ​weird.​ ​That’s​ ​the​ ​third thing. Before​ ​I​ ​get​ ​into​ ​the​ ​weirdness,​ ​I’ll​ ​say something​ ​about​ ​the​ ​importance​ ​of​ ​sleep. Authors​ ​tend​ ​to​ ​think​ ​that​ ​what​ ​they’re writing​ ​about​

Helen R Brown

A cold coming to Cornwall

In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge her passion for abstract form. But her commitment deepened. The solid ovoids she sculpted carried the weight of grief and the hope of eggs. To Hepworth, they became ‘forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’. They were a means of retaining freedom whilst carrying out what was demanded of me as a human being… a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic ‘will to live’ as opposed to the extrinsic disaster of the world war. References to Hepworth roll all the way through Ali Smith’s new novel,

Richard Emeny

Another country | 2 November 2017

In 1970 I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard in which stood three circular hay stacks, each beautifully thatched. It resembled a picture by the 18th-century painter George Morland. There was nobody about and the yard had a haunted air. In a pub a few miles away, I discovered that the settlement was called Riddlecombe. Two years later James Ravilious started work for the Beaford Centre, recording the society of this inaccessible and largely unchanged part of Devon. Seventeen years and 75,000 photographs later the project was closed. Ravilious’s pictures now form the major part of the archive, a