Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Stoker Devonshire

The winning streak

Fortunately the author explained how he came to make the choices for this book in his column here (29 September), because otherwise your reviewer might have wasted words in debating the criteria for inclusion. These are the 100 of the top racehorses that Robin Oakley admires the most and which he thinks are particularly popular. I will not argue the merits of what he has included, nor suggest horses which he should have made room for, but I must comment on the way the little histories are presented, and the disappointing errors. Clearly this book is written for aficionados, employing racing jargon without much explanation — ‘jamstick’, ‘a nursery stakes’,

Clive Aslet

Old palaces for new plutocrats

Having lived in London for 35 years, I thought I knew its architectural highlights pretty well, but this book is a revelation. It shows an aspect of the city that I hardly realised existed. I had always believed that, in what must now be called the Downton years, Britain’s grandest families preferred to sacrifice their London palaces in order to hang onto their country seats. The French had their priorities the other way about, our attachment to rural life being one of the things that made us British. Devonshire House, on Piccadilly, which was demolished in the 1920s, along with so many other Georgian buidlings, symbolised this retreat from the

Molly Guinness

The whole kitchen caboodle

Pretentious, effeminate, sinister and even obscene, the fork of folktale was a sign of loose morals, silly decadence or sexual deviancy. To insist on eating with a fork was a very bad sign until the 17th century. Italians were the first to relax their stance on ‘furcifers’ (fork bearers, like the devil) when they recognised that three prongs were better than one for twirling spaghetti; but even up until the end of the 19th century British sailors were still demonstrating their manliness by eating without forks. Consider the Fork is a delightful compendium of the tools, techniques and cultures of cooking and eating. Be it a tong or a chopstick,

Wynn Wheldon

Miami vice

This is an exhilarating novel. Its general gist is that in a multicultural society so-called honour often trumps virtue, political expediency frequently wins out over inconvenient truth, and comforting illusion tends to be preferable to disagreeable reality. And assimilation is very hard, especially in Miami, where the entire story is set. The two central characters are Nestor and Magdalena, second-generation Cubans, who begin the book as a couple. Each has a difficult journey to its end, both have to combat monsters (Nestor literally) and both learn a little more about themselves and a lot more about the wider world as a consequence. Magdalena, a strikingly beautiful nurse, keen to improve

Mark Mason

Just a guy who writes songs

There is a famous piece of film — well, famous to those of us who know more about the Beatles than is possibly good for our health — where John Lennon encounters a fan who has broken into the star’s Berkshire estate. Clearly a lost soul, the fan is searching for meaning, signficance, some sort of connection with his idol. Lennon replies, very calmly and kindly: ‘I’m just a guy, man, who writes songs.’ Sadly, this book proves him right. The good stuff first. It looks beautiful: the cover is ‘Imagine’-white, the pages carefully designed to weave Hunter Davies’s commentary around both the letters themselves and their transcripts. There are

John Preston

Colossal windbags

‘Senior British diplomats really knew how to write,’ declares Matthew Parris in his introduction to The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, a collection of ambassadorial despatches about funny foreigners and filthy, far-flung climes. Well, up to a point. The pieces in this collection, a successor to Parting Shots, are often elegantly phrased and colourful, but at the same time there’s a weird sense that they were all written by the same person — someone peering down a very long nose beneath which lies an indulgently curled lip. In 1962, Sir John Russell, the then ambassador to Brazil, writes that his plane had to make an unscheduled stop in a place called Belem.

Matthew Dennison

Another bleak house on the Fens

Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and the dramatic and sensational possibilities of this encounter. Hill’s ghost stories are consciously literary creations. Beginning with The Woman in Black, she revels in the long shadow of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She makes allusions to Wilkie Collins and throughout Dolly and The Mist in the Mirror (first published in 1992, now

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ace of bureaucrats

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is a man whose name is now better known than his doings. Its syllables conjure a world-famous hotel, a prep-school, the former business class brand of Singapore airlines, a shonky packet of fags, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and Viz comic’s Raffles the Gentleman Thug. He also gave his name to a tropical flower that has the largest bloom on earth, and which gives off ‘precisely the smell of tainted beef’. Most of us will have had the vague sense that he founded modern Singapore (we’re half right about that), and a still vaguer sense that his was a life of glamour, buckle and

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Plein-air pleasures and the great indoors

Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled classical ideas about the merits of a space not so dissimilar to this in character. Best to make one’s desk in a room adjoining the bedroom, he said. That way, the writer need not leave his cell at all. In ancient Rome, even more so, nature was often considered a distraction. Both writers and artists

Steerpike Steerpike

Cash prizes

A veritable ‘who’s who’ of SW1 has been lined up to judge the inaugural Political Book Awards. Sky’s Adam Boulton, the Mail’s Simon Walters and Labour’s Chris Bryant will be joined by that nice Mary Beard. The awards are being run by Total Politics, the magazine published by Biteback Media, which, completely coincidentally, also publishes political books. Lord Ashcroft, who put up most of the cash for the Biteback venture, will sit on the judging panel. And so will a number of Biteback contributors, including Edwina Currie and Deborah Mattinson, although they will be awarding prizes in different categories from their own work. Unusually for an awards ceremony, and despite

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Anton du Beke

Stalwart of Strictly, winner of Rear of the Year 2011 and author of B is for Ballroom: Be Your Own Armchair Dancefloor Expert, dancer Anton du Beke is on this week’s Shelf Life. He tells us what he’s reading and which self help book would make him foxtrot for the hills. He tweets @TheAntonDuBeke 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods, by Hank Haney Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank, by Barbara Sinatra Steps in Time: An Autobiography, by Fred Astaire 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton 3). Has a

Monday

Fleur Macdonald

Jobs for the girls

Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn’t exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with

Jonathan Mcaloon

Back to the start – Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one lover… one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon… [had] never been drunk… never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone.’ Born at the end of the nineteenth century and dead a year before the Summer of Love, Robert labours in the American West, cutting timber for railroad tracks and then, when he’s too old for that work, carting people’s possessions around the countryside. The book’s chronology is loose, or, rather, Grainer’s whole life comes at us at

Friday

David Blackburn

Route to conflict? David Priestland’s Merchant, Soldier, Sage

David Priestland is worried. Towards the end of his recently published book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, he warns: ‘[The crash of] 2008 has set the world on a course towards potential conflict, and the domestic and international forces that brought us the violence of the 1930s and 1940s are with us today – albeit still in embryonic form.’ It is fashionable, especially in heavily indebted Europe, to compare the uncertainties of the present with those of the 1930s. The Second World War is passing out of living memory and entering popular historical consciousness. Angela Merkel appeals to this when she warns that only the European project can guarantee peace; and Greek protesters

Thursday

Mark Mason

To take or not to take a pseudonym

Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is that my own literary alter ego, Charlie Croker, has a new book out. Why do writers use pseudonyms, and how does it feel to see a book you’ve written get published with someone else’s name on the cover? Strictly speaking this isn’t what happened to Rushdie. Joseph Anton was his actual pseudonym rather than his

George Chamier

Killing as entertainment

‘The history of our love affair with violence’ is how Michael Newton describes his new book, Age of Assassins. In fact, its scope is much narrower: assassination in Europe and the US from the murder of Lincoln in 1865 to the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981. So, no Gandhi, no Allende, none of the killings carried out in the name of militant Islam. Even some of the assassinations within the author’s time frame are not considered – Olof Palme’s, for example, or the murders in Italy’s anni piombi in the 1970s and ‘80s. Newton’s central argument is that in the period covered assassination became less about political causes and

Jonathan Croall

Gielgoodies

Timothy Bateson Richard Burton was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic, but he was very nervous and not at his best. John came round to his dressing-room afterwards, to find him stark naked. ‘I’m so sorry, Richard,’ he said. ‘Shall I come back later when you’re better — I mean when you’re dressed?’   To Vivien Leigh, after she suggested playing a scene from Romeo and Juliet for a wartime concert party: ‘Oh no, Vivien! Only a great actress can do that sort of thing.’   To Alec Guinness, then a rising young star, on meeting him in Piccadilly: ‘I can’t think why you want to play big parts. Why

John McEwen

Our most exotic bird

The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie is a freelance journalist but his mission is to save tetrao tetrix britannicus (the britannicus added in 1913). He devotes much of his time protecting a black cock and a couple of  its grey hens on 1,600 upland acres in Galloway; and has written a diary combined with a history of the species, touching on the evolution of landscape and shooting, as well as conservation politics. Sterile tree farms (forest too good a word) now carpet a quarter of once nature-rich Dumfries and Galloway. The black cock with its lyre-shaped

Lewis Jones

Off the beaten tracks

In 1941 Roy Plomley was 27, and living in Bushey, Herts. After stints as an estate agent, film extra and mail-order astrologer’s assistant, he had found a better billet on a wireless programme called Swing from London, and, though only a freelance, was excused compulsory enrolment in civil defence on grounds of his valuable contribution to the BBC (which then had two stations, the Home Service and the Forces Programme). In spare moments he pitched his ideas for new shows, such as This Too Too Solid Flesh: ‘The boys and I,’ replied Leslie Perowne, head of Light Entertainment, ‘have now digested your programme on the subject of corpulence … we

Bevis Hillier

… the bad, and the ugly

At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and Bindman already had an impressive collection of drawings. In his book Untold Stories (2005), Bennett wrote: David Bindman would show me Old Master drawings he had picked up for a song, and Bevis Hillier would fetch along ceramics. I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put