Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

Three’s a crowd: The City Changes its Face, by Eimear McBride, reviewed

Nearly a decade after Eimear McBride published The Lesser Bohemians (her second novel after the success of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing),the Irish writer has returned to the drab, smoke-filled world of 1990s London. The City Changes its Face is told from the perspective of 20-year-old Eily, two years after she has left Ireland to study drama in London and has met Stephen, an established actor 20 years her senior. In the interim period, the pair have moved from Kentish Town to Camden. Eily has taken time out of drama school, and Grace, Stephen’s daughter from a previous relationship, has made an appearance. The novel consists largely of a

Ian Buruma

Any form of saturation bombing is a stain on humanity

At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured. Upon hearing the news, President Harry Truman called the bombing ‘the greatest thing in history’. Why the US unleashed the terrible bombs over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, has been much debated ever since. In his excellent short book on the subject, Richard Overy writes: The question asked is

Philip Mansel

The enlightened rule of the Empress Maria Theresa

The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism. Yet, partly owing to Maria Theresa’s force of character, this complex tapestry of nationalities remained a great power After she came to the throne in 1740, she felt ‘forsaken by the whole world’. Encouraged by France, Austria’s neighbours Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria invaded the monarchy in order to divide it between them. By

Friday

Hugh Schofield

Hugh Schofield, Igor Toronyi-Lalic & Michael Simmons, Lisa Haseldine, Alice Loxton and Aidan Hartley

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Hugh Schofield asks why there is no campaign to free the novelist Boualem Sansal (1:26); The Spectator’s arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, reacts to the magazine’s campaign against frivolous funding and, continuing the campaign, Michael Simmons wonders if Britain is funding organisations that wish us harm (8:00); Lisa Haseldine reflects on whether the AfD’s rise could mean ‘Weimar 2.0’ for Germany (17:08); reviewing Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain, by Blessin Adams, Alice Loxton explores the gruesome ways in which women killed (25:05); and, from Kenya, Aidan Hartley reflects on how a secret half-brother impacted his relationship with his father (35:13).  Produced and presented

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

New world disorder, cholesterol pseudoscience vs scepticism & the magic of Dickens

48 min listen

This week: the world needs a realist reset Donald Trump’s presidency is the harbinger of many things, writes The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, one of which is a return to a more pitiless world landscape. The ideal of a rules-based international order has proved to be a false hope. Britain must accept that if we are to earn the respect of others and the right to determine the future, we need a realist reset. What are the consequences of this new world order? And is the Trump administration reversing the tide of decline, or simply refusing to accept the inevitable? Michael Gove joined the podcast alongside the geopolitical theorist Robert Kaplan,

Lucasta Miller

An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery grave and as the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her. Not long afterwards she died of an opiate overdose in 1862, aged 32. Her early demise, echoing her association with Ophelia, left her ripe for myth-making, as first explored by Jan Marsh in her groundbreaking The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989). By

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

James Bradley: The World in the Ocean

49 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and critic James Bradley whose new book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He tells me how we need to rethink our relationship with the sea and the life it contains, why fish are much more intelligent than we are used to imagining, and why – amid planetary doom – there’s still room for hope.

Tuesday

Marcus Nevitt

Why were the security services so obsessed with the Marxist historian Christopher Hill?

What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the National Theatre simulating group sex in Hill’s name. The actors were performing in Keith Dewhurst’s radical stage adaptation of Hill’s masterpiece of 17th-century popular history The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and were embodying what it might have been like to be enthusiastic members of one of the radical millenarian sects at the centre of

Suzi Feay

A gloom-laden tale: The Foot on the Crown, by Christopher Fowler reviewed

Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho Black took a satirical poke at the film world, while Spanky set a sexy demon loose in London. More novels, many collections of short stories and three memoirs followed. The millennium saw a switch to crime fiction, with Full Dark House, which introduced his elderly detective duo, Arthur Bryant and John May, of London’s Peculiar

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

A mild diversion for a wet afternoon: Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler, reviewed

Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her. Instead, her boss suggests she finds another job, citing – to Gail’s surprise – her lack of people skills. It is the day before Gail’s daughter’s wedding and, shortly after she returns home early, her ex-husband Max turns up unexpectedly, hoping

James Cahill

The sexual escapades of Edmund White sound like an improbably sordid Carry On film

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic

Anna Aslanyan

Modernisation has sent Russia spinning back to the Stone Age

When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs. Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German

Alice Loxton

The gruesome fascination of female murderers

On 27 January 1688, Mary Hobry, a French midwife living in London, strangled a man to death. The corpse lay in her bed for several days before she carved it up. Then, in the dead of night, she used her petticoat to drag the dismembered body through the neighbourhood – Castle Street, Drury Lane, Parker’s Lane – to be disposed of. The torso was dumped on a rubbish heap; the legs, arms and head were tossed in a cesspit. What did Mary think, I wonder, as she tiptoed home, finally rid of her husband? The secret was not to last long. Within hours the evidence was uncovered, sending the West

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The supreme conjuror Charles Dickens weaves his magic spell

As Charles Dickens lay in his coffin, his will was read out to the assembled mourners. ‘I conjure my friends,’ he sternly instructed them, ‘on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or testimonial whatever.’ It’s an appeal that later generations have studiously ignored, as can be seen in the piles of commemorative merchandise that are available to purchase online. These range from a fully poseable Dickens action figure (‘with quill pen and removable hat’) to a T-shirt featuring his face and the slogan ‘I put the lit in literature’. They can also be seen in the shelfloads of biographies and critical works published every year.

Friday

James Heale James Heale

James Heale, Andrew Kenny, Lara Prendergast, Ysenda Maxtone Graham and Nina Power

41 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale wonders what Margaret Thatcher would make of today’s Conservatives (1:28); Andrew Kenny analyses South Africa’s expropriation act (6:13); Lara Prendergast explores the mystery behind The Spectator’s man in the Middle East, John R Bradley (13:55); Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks at how radio invaded the home (30:13); and, Nina Power reviews two exhibitions looking at different kinds of rage (35:13).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why militant atheists don’t understand religion: a conversation with Alister McGrath

36 min listen

In his new book Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, Prof Alister McGrath rejects the notion that belief is a relic of the past and takes aim at the ‘new atheists’ who attack religion without even knowing what it is. Prof McGrath, emeritus Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, has had a unique journey to religion. A former Marxist atheist with a doctorate in molecular biology, he’s now a world-renowned theologian and Anglican priest.  In this lively discussion with Damian Thompson he talks about the boundary between science and religion, something poorly understood by aggressive atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The magic of early radio days

‘Is it necessary to have the window open when listening to the new device?’ asked Edith Davidson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1923, referring to the latest fashionable contraption, the wireless. We might laugh – but it does take time for the older generation to catch up with new technology. To this day I instinctively roll down my car window (unnecessarily, I’m pretty sure) to point my phone towards the sensor that will grant me access to my local club. In her joyous, richly illustrated book about the early years of radio from the listeners’ point of view, the BBC radio producer Beaty Rubens takes us inside

Daniel Hannan

Reversing our economic decline is not easy, but it is simple

Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their

Susie Mesure

The perils of poaching: Beartooth, by Callan Wink, reviewed

Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are ‘moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer’. He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 – far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500. Thad and Hazan, aged 27 and 26 respectively, are in serious debt after their father’s recent death, and their roof is leaking. Logging in the Montana backcountry is

Nicholas Lezard

The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed

There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are. Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles. Weiner specialises in Harding, largely because