Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Johnnie Kerr

A most unlikely hero

What is it about George Smiley that makes him translate so well onto the screen? The man doesn’t fight, he doesn’t gamble, and he barely seems to notice women (apart from the wife who continually cuckolds him) — in fact the only hobby that appears to brighten him up a bit is a homely interest in old books. For a spy novel this is not what you might call ‘a winning formula’ — although, of course, clearly it is. Actually, John le Carré invention of Smiley as the ‘anti-Bond’ was a conception near to genius, a literary masterstroke that proved spies didn’t have to dodge bullets to be thrilling. But

Monday

The Spectator

Online poetry competition

Thank you to all those readers who entered our online poetry competition last week. There were lots of novel, witty and entertaining entries on the ostensibly mundane subject of ‘games’. The winner is ‘hc18’, who should contact dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk to claim their bottle of champagne. Here is the winning entry: ‘The sweat, the fear, the aching limbs, the scowling face of Mr. Symms. The pain, the tears, the shrieks and howls. the muck, the grime, those sweaty towels. Running round the pitch in rain. “You’ve done it once, get to it again!” Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, Mud on your face and grit in your eye… How I miss those

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 10 October 2011

Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel laureate, is the toast of the literary world at present. He was a near ubiquitous presence in the weekend’s books pages. Philip Hensher has written a profile in the Telegraph that says anything and everything you need to know about the enigmatic Swedish poet. ‘Tomas Transtromer was by profession a psychologist who worked with criminals, drug addicts and in prisons. He published small amounts of poetry over the years, much of which reflects an interest in nature and in a kind of imagistic approach to the natural world. In 1990, Transtromer suffered a major stroke which made it impossible for him to speak in public. However, he

Sunday

Jerry Hayes

Better than his party

I have been awaiting a definitive biography of Nick Clegg for a while. And while I’m not entirely sure whether Chris Bowers’ Nick Clegg, The Biography quite gets there, don’t let me discourage you. This is an excellent book and a fascinating insight into the man. The trouble is that most of us who enjoy reading about our leaders have been used to being thrown great hunks of red meat scandal, vile gossip and an undertone that the subject is far more of a shit than we had dared imagine. We then toddle off to bed, sleeping soundly in the reassurance that our hero has feet of clay like the

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The Brilliance in the Room

It is difficult to conceive of a writer more passionately loved by his audience than Dickens was. It went on for a very long time, too. We learn from the historian David Kynaston that, immediately after the second world war, Dickens was one of the five most borrowed authors from public libraries. My grandmother was probably a typical reader of Dickens: she left school at 14 before the first world war, yet had a cheap set of Dickens in the house (I think it was a promotional giveaway by the Daily Express at some point in the 1930s.) I have the set — the typeface and the acid paper nearly

Andrew Gimson

Work in progress

At long last Johnson Studies is starting to take off. It had always been my hope, after publishing my own slim volume on Boris Johnson, that the baton could be passed to younger and fitter hands who would place the subject on a proper academic footing. Scholars from Balliol to Bangor would churn out papers and hold seminars on the symbolism of the Boris bike, or the duel between Boris and George Osborne for the Tory leadership. Very soon the American and Chinese universities would insist on getting involved, and would buy up some of the best people. A young man from the University of Hull came to interview me

Richard Davenporthines

Well-lived

‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. ‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. A little later Horne was being trained as a Guards officer at Pirbright camp, under a troop sergeant with terrifying powers of verbal demolition, well on his way into the pants of girls. One of Horne’s fellow cadets —heir to a dukedom — went to an Oxford cinema where he ‘partially lost his virtue’ to the ruthlessly roaming hands of ‘two beefy Land Girls

James Mather

The radical imperialist

In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. A militia of several hundred barristers, equipped with muskets but doubtful aim, assembled to guard the Middle Temple.  At the 11th hour they were spared by the intervention of the army, whose firing into the crowd quelled the mayhem.                       Sir William Jones — soon to be appointed a judge of the

John Laughland

Deeply perplexing

This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only 49 returned to France. The book’s whimsical but ultimately uninformative title belies a book which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling. The first 150 pages deal with the women’s Resistance activities — attending secret meetings, arranging safe passage to the free zone, running clandestine printing presses. The

Cressida Connolly

Refreshingly outspoken

She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . This is what Diana Athill has to say about interviews written by Lynn Barber, and it’s a pretty apt description of her own writing. As is well known, Athill was an esteemed publishing editor throughout her working life (John Updike,

Anita Brookner

A mystery unsolved

This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. It features Simon Serailler, the author’s usual protagonist, investigating a cold case of a missing teenager who was last seen waiting at a bus stop some 16 years previously, and whose skeleton was found when heavy rain washed down sludge and rubble from a neighbouring hillside. But it also has a secondary theme — rather more serious than its ostensible subject — that of assisted suicide. Hypochondriacs are warned. What is examined, in admirable detail, somewhat overshadows the police procedural which is

Andrew Taylor

The play of patterns

Labels mislead. In the taxonomy of literature, both James Sallis and Agatha Christie are often described as crime writers. True, they have in common the fact that their stories tend to include the occasional murder, but there the resemblance ends. Sallis’s outlook is closer to that of Samuel Beckett, whom he cites as one of his influences; and his characters are more Pozzo than Poirot. Sallis’s novels have gradually attracted a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic; No Exit Press, a small British publisher, has resolutely championed his work for the last 15 years. Now there are signs that his books may at last reach the wider audience

Sophia Waugh

Bookends: Getting it perfect

There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect (Fig Tree, £18.99). And the idea is a good one. Cloake has done all the hard work — read all the top cookery writers, tried out their versions, and then picked the best, or ‘Perfect’ one. So you have 68 ‘perfect’ recipes. The title is meant to be comforting, or encouraging, but it could be a little

Friday

Sophia Waugh

Bookends: Getting it perfect | 7 October 2011

Sophia Waugh has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect. And the idea is a good one. Cloake has done all the hard work — read all the top cookery writers, tried out their versions, and then picked the best, or ‘Perfect’ one. So you

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Nadine Dorries, MP

This is the second instalment in our Bookbenchers series. What book’s on your bedside table at the moment? There are two books on my bedside table. I’m a Gemini so one is never enough. I am simultaneously reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. The Book Thief is the story of a young girl whose parents have been taken to a concentration camp and who is fostered by a family in Nazi Germany. The book is narrated by death, which is both peculiar and gripping. It’s a wonderful insight into humanity in the most extreme of circumstances. What book would you read to your

Thursday

Peter Robins

Your Nobel Prize for Literature link round-up

1) The official announcement of Tomas Transtömer’s victory  2) The one person in Britain we can be absolutely certain has read Transtömer: his translator.  3) An excellent summary of the preceding hoaxes and Dylanology. 4) John Dugdale on the Nobel committee’s chequered history in literary matters.  5) No announcement yet on the Nobel laureate in Ted Gioia’s alternate universe.

David Blackburn

Poetry competition

It is National Poetry Day, so, dear readers, let’s have a frivolous competition. There’s a bottle of Pol Roger for the person who composes the best poem on the theme of this year’s NPD: “games”. As this is a blog and things ought to be snappy, entries should be in the form of limericks, sonnets and so forth – an epic on the misadventures of Mike Tindall will, reluctantly, be disqualified on grounds of length. Please leave your contributions in the comments section below. The competition will close on Sunday 9th October at 23.59. Good luck. If you’re looking for inspiration, what better place to start than John Betjeman’s Seaside

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

On the Centenary of Flann O’Brien

How many times must a man be considered “overlooked” or recalled as a “forgotten genius” before it must become apparent to even the meanest inteligence that he can no longer sensibly be considered “forgotten” or “overlooked”? This is something worth observing in the case of Brian O’Nolan, better known to you perhaps as Flann O’Brien and, to the true cognoscenti, as Myles na Gopaleen too. What with an official stamp available as of this very day, the centenary of his emergence in bonny Strabane, a lengthy piece by Fintan O’Toole to say nothing of puffery in the New Yorker and the Guardian and lord knows where else, you cannot credibly

Anna Baddeley

Hatchet Jobs of the Month

David Sexton on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy (Evening Standard) ‘It all feels very GCSE … there’s too much verbal prancing, too little that’s original being said, particularly when the poems are not personal. You end the book thinking that if this is poetry, it’s a trivial art. But it is not.’ David Annand on Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (Literary Review) ‘Part Judy Blume homage, part Wiki-guide to theological anthropology, part metafictional meditation on the autonomy of imagined characters, part Breakfast Club pastiche, part juvenile fantasy romp and part Brangelina character assassination: it manages, beyond all reasonable expectations, to be worse than this makes it sound.’ Nicholas Tucker on

Tuesday

Fleur Macdonald

Boris ain’t no Dr Johnson

Inspired by Boris’s recent oration, I was going to compose an epigram in praise of his prose, a dirty limerick in honour of his hobbies and a white paper for the promise of his politics. That was until I came across the unthinkable: Boris Johnson split the infinitive. He’ll probably try and defend himself: the Mayor of London can’t proof read every Greater London Press Release – and Greater London isn’t even really London – and so it’s unfair to hold him directly responsible. But, it happened on his watch. Last week’s press release “Mayor tightens grip on disruptive roadworks in London” contained not one but two horribly dismembered infinitives, namely: