Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Susanna Forrest

Bones, bridles and bits – but where’s the horse?

The German cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff has written that horses have as many meanings as bones. In the archaeologist William Taylor’s new history of horses and humans, we meet all those bones. Found in thawing permafrost, in caves, and buried ceremonially in graves in Siberia and Chile, the bones are cracked open by Taylor to show how the horse evolved in the Americas before its early encounters with human hunters. Does a 5,000-year-old worn tooth tell us it once chomped a bit? Does damage to vertebrae indicate a rider? Then came domestication, transforming the species from near extinction to tool and symbol on every major landmass on the planet. After

Andrew Lycett

The SAS explode from the shadows in six days that shook Britain

Ben Macintyre has a knack of distilling impeccably sourced information about clandestine operations into clear, exciting narrative prose. His latest book, about the April 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London, starts as it means to go on – with a snapshot of seven Range Rovers, two Ford Transit vans and two furniture lorries pulling out of Bradbury Lines, the then headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS) in Hereford. Lying low inside were 45 soldiers and ‘enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war’. Each man carried a submachine gun, mostly the ‘reliably lethal’ Heckler & Koch MP5, which fires 13 rounds a second, with four 30-round magazines of 9x19mm parabellum

Saturday

Imogen Yates

Fraser Nelson, David Whitehouse, Imogen Yates, Sean McGlynn and Ruari Clark

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Fraser Nelson reflects on a historic week for The Spectator (1:15); David Whitehouse examines the toughest problem in mathematics (6:33); Imogen Yates reports on the booming health tech industry (13:54); Sean McGlynn reviews Dan Jones’s book Henry V: the astonishing rise of England’s greatest warrior king (20:24); and Ruari Clark provides his notes on rollies (26:18).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Book Club: Craig Brown

32 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the satirist Craig Brown, talking about his brilliant new book A Voyage Round the Queen. Craig tells me what made him think there was something new to say about Elizabeth II, how he found himself in possession of the only scoop of his career and about his mortifying encounter with Her Maj. 

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

From ugly duckling into swan – the remarkable transformation of Pamela Digby

The tramp of lovers marching through our heroine’s bedroom in the first half of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker almost deafens the reader. But then not for nothing did Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman become known as the alpha courtesan of the 20th century. What is perhaps not so well covered is her decade-long influence on American politics before becoming the United States Ambassador to France under (no, not literally) Bill Clinton. The Hon Pamela Digby was born on 20 March 1920 and brought up quietly in Dorset, riding, hunting and meeting only those her parents (her father was the 11th Baron Digby) considered above the social plimsoll line. Early on she

Genevieve Gaunt

Undercover in the Dordogne: Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, reviewed

Creation Lake, by the American author Rachel Kushner, is a dazzling, genre-defying novel, satirical yet profound. In her 2018 novel The Mars Room, Kushner took us inside the US prison system and eviscerated it. Here she goes back a decade, as well as 40,000 years, interweaving into the main plot notes on the extinction of the Neanderthals. The book is a spy thriller which also interrogates the human condition, our origins, and the conundrum of mankind’s future.   The year is presumably 2013 (the song ‘Get Lucky’ blasts from every radio) and a 34-year-old American spy named Sadie Smith has landed in France, nursing a bruised ego after a failed FBI

Jude Cook

The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed

Money can’t buy you love, the Beatles sang. But that doesn’t matter so much if you’re not interested in love, like Brooke Orr, the 33-year-old heroine of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, Entitlement. In contrast to Alam’s wildly successful, lockdown-resonant Leave the World Behind, the latest book is set in 2014, during the era of ‘Obama’s Placid America’, a world depicted as a virtually frictionless pre-Trump utopia in which ‘black, gorgeous, serious, passionate’ young women such as Brooke can thrive. When she leaves her teaching job and joins the charitable Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation – started after the benign octogenarian billionaire Asher Jaffee lost his daughter – she realises that

Mark Cocker

Man’s fraught relationship with nature extends back to prehistory

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers? The extreme heat of the Sun at its core makes it the place least hospitable to life – yet it is equally the source of the whole process. Perhaps the greatest of all associated questions is whether humans are subsumed within, or inexorably separated from,

Ian Sansom

From tragedy to mockery: Munichs, by David Peace, reviewed

If you have been to a football match in the past few years you will doubtless be familiar with what the Crown Prosecution Service defines as ‘tragedy-related abuse’. It is when supporters, David Peace writes, sing, chant or gesture offensive messages about disasters or accidents involving players or fans – including references to the Hillsborough Disaster, Munich Air Crash, Bradford Fire, the Leeds fans killed in Istanbul or the death of Emiliano Sala in a plane crash. The word ‘Munichs’, for example, is sometimes used as a term of abuse for Manchester United fans, and it’s not unknown for the opposition at Old Trafford to extend their arms, like little

Sean Mcglynn

The mystique of Henry V remains as powerful as ever

A rare portrait of King Henry V of England painted in the early 16th century shows him in profile. This unusual angle may have served two purposes. One was as a rather outdated emulation of Italian profile portraiture, with its blunt references to the might of imperial Rome; the other was to hide a disfiguring scar from a dangerous wound suffered at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. Henry was only 16 at the time of the battle, and it was a brutal way to earn his spurs. An arrow had penetrated his cheek six inches and lodged at the back of his skull. He was lucky to have survived

Michael Arditti

The tedium of covering ‘the greatest trial in history’

Three-and-a-half miles south-west of Nuremberg in the small town of Stein stands the Schloss Faber-Castell, a 19th-century neo-Renaissance castle built for a dynasty of pencil manufacturers. In October 1945 it became home to hundreds of reporters who were covering the trial of 21 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher and Albert Speer, with Martin Bormann being tried in absentia. Alfred Döblin offered a first-hand account of the courtroom in which he never set foot Prominent among the reporters were internationally celebrated writers such as John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Elsa Triolet, Erika Mann and Erich Kästner, as well as the future German chancellor

Seán M. Williams

Observing nature observed: the art of Caspar David Friedrich

Imagine wandering through Germany. You might picture blustery Baltic seascapes, seen from island retreats such as Rügen. Or you might be hiking in the central Harz mountains, peering down at clouds that drift into green pastures and blend into brownish rock. Perhaps you’re standing at the country’s eastern edge, gazing at moonlight that gleams through gaps in the forests and ravines of sandstone highlands. What we sketch in our minds probably follows the contours of the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, Germany’s Romantic artist-in-chief. And these stock images have been reproduced in many a tourist guide. They’re now on display again, in full colour and new frames – literally and

Boyd Tonkin

An outcast among outcasts: Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld, reviewed

‘Nothing escape’s the wolf’s fangs,’ thinks the narrator of Katerina. Through an outlandish sequence of chances and choices, somehow its author did just that. Aharon Appelfeld, a child of assimilated parents, lived in the old Jewish heartland of Bukovina. In 1940, short-lived Soviet occupation gave way to Nazi control. His mother was murdered and his father disappeared. Young Aharon escaped the Czernowitz ghetto and survived as a wild child in the forests, sheltered by a village prostitute, then as the ‘slave’ of a Ukrainian bandit gang. When the Red Army arrived he cooked for them before, via a peril-strewn route through Italy, he migrated to Mandate Palestine. In newborn Israel

Helen Brown

The power of mushrooms to kill or cure

Weird, stinky and occasionally deadly: not everyone can make heart room for mushrooms. But Richard Fortey, a palaeontologist who recently retired from his post at the Natural History Museum after more than three decades’ service, has always found ‘pleasure and perplexity’ in the ‘alien’ world of fungi. In his lovably nerdish 2021 memoir A Curious Boy, Fortey credited the Observer’s Guide to Common Fungi with setting him on the path to a passionate life scientific. As the uncoordinated son of a sporty father (a champion fly fisherman who owned several fishing shops), the young naturalist got his teenage kicks stalking riverbanks and studying the strange organisms he found there. In

Marion Turner

The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with

In 1448, Margaret Paston, a wife and mother in her twenties, wrote to her husband John urgently requesting more weapons: she needed crossbows, poleaxes, windlasses and jacks. In John’s absence, a local lord was trying to take over Gresham, their property in Norfolk, and was mounting a violent siege of the manor house. Margaret was leading the defence. She was multi-tasking, however. In the same letter she also asks John to send some almonds and sugar, as well as woollen cloth for gowns for their young sons and broadcloth for a hood for herself. The missive survives as part of the Paston letters, the largest extant set of medieval correspondence

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

With Simon Raymonde

28 min listen

Musician Simon Raymonde is perhaps best known as part of the Scottish band the Cocteau Twins, but he has found further success as the co-founder of Bella Union Records. Bella Union produce music by Father John Misty, the Fleet Foxes, and Beach House, amongst others. His memoir In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me is released on the 12 September 2024. On this episode of Table Talk, Simon tells Olivia Potts and Lara Prendergast about the influence of Jewish food as he was growing up, life on tour, how he spends his time in his new home of Brighton, and his love of the restaurant chain Dishoom.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ian Thomson, Andrew Watts, Sam Leith, Helen Barrett and Catriona Olding

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Ian Thomson reflects on his childhood home following the death of his sister (1:20); Andrew Watts argues that the public see MPs as accountable for everything though they’re responsible for little (7:40); Sam Leith reveals the surprising problem of poetical copyright (13:47); Helen Barrett reviews Will Noble’s book Croydonopolis and explores the reputation of a place with unfulfilled potential (19:48); and, Catriona Olding ponders moving on from loss to love (26:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Simon Parkin

Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad

Even before the 872-day long siege ended, both survivors and onlookers had already begun to refer to Leningrad – formerly and currently known as St Petersburg – as a city of heroes. Tales of bravery and self-sacrifice were enshrined in memorials, histories and memoirs, which between 1945 and 1991 were published in the Soviet Union at an average rate of one per day. But heroism is, of course, only a partial description of life within the starving city where theft, murder, betrayal and a million smaller acts of self-interest were just as prevalent as acts of valour. The idea that Leningrad was a city of heroes was in part a

Alan Judd

The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce

‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (1899-1991) was a legend in his own lifetime within MI6. Born in Odessa to an Austrian countess and a British trader representing Vickers, his cosmopolitan upbringing endowed him with English, Russian, German, Turkish, French and Polish. His real first name was Wilfred, Biffy being acquired through youthful handiness with his fists. Biffy played an important role in smuggling the Polish copy of the Enigma cipher machine to London Education and family connections made him intimate with prominent Levantine trading families such as the Whittalls, Keuns and La Fontaines. Members of each served with him in MI6 and two into modern times. Early in the first world war he

Emily Rhodes

A necklace for the Empress Josephine: The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier, reviewed

The latest book from Tracy Chevalier, author of 11 novels, including the bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, tells the captivating story of Orsola Rosso, whom we first encounter in 1486 as a young girl on Murano, the glassmakers’ island in the Venetian lagoon. Within a few pages, her father, the maestro at the family’s workshop, is dramatically killed by a shard of glass flying ‘like a hot dart straight into his neck’. Orsola’s lazy, impetuous brother Marco, less skilful than their father, must take over, but orders soon begin to dwindle. How will Orsola help her family recover and prosper? Glassmaking is traditionally a male concern, but the girl