Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Caspar Henderson

Britain’s lost rainforests

One of the most beautiful spots I know in Britain is a steep-sided gorge in Devon where the River Dart carves through the Dartmoor rock on its way to the sea. The trees on either side are small, twisted and covered in ferns, mosses and lichens, so that even on a dull day the colours, shapes and textures are vibrant and dynamic. It was here that I took my wife shortly before she gave birth to our daughter. Nowhere I have been is more utterly beautiful and alive. This extraordinary place is a fragment of temperate rainforest: a rich assemblage of life made possible by ample rainfall, mild winters and

Adam Begley

Man on the run: Sugar Street, by Jonathan Dee, reviewed

A man is driving alone across America, under the passenger seat is an envelope containing a large chunk of cash. For reasons unclear, he’s desperate to erase himself; he avoids surveillance with the inspired agility of the truly paranoid. His urge to disappear, ‘to leave as illegible a mark as possible on the Earth’, leads him to a city, ‘big enough to be anonymous in’. The clever premise hooks the reader. Will our unnamed narrator contrive to live an untraced life? And why does he want to make this new life ‘a kind of spacewalk: to step outside the capsule, to cut the tether’? What, as he would say, is

Nick Spencer

The true meaning of Jesus’s radical message

Biblical scholars, one of the greatest of them once remarked, go looking for Jesus only to find themselves staring at their own reflection down the bottom of a very deep well. As with scholars, so with cultures. The Victorian Jesus was meek and mild and proper and principled. There’s a rather good sketch of ‘GOP Jesus’ doing the rounds on Twitter in which Our Lord tells his followers: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat… And behold, now I’m all lazy and entitled.’ In our own politically troubled times, however, it is Jesus the zealous revolutionary who has risen. There is much to recommend this intense, radical

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

Spare reviewed: Harry is completely disingenuous – or an idiot

A surprising number of royal personages have published books under their own names, and sometimes they have even been written by the purported authors. The first, I think, was the Eikon Basilike, published shortly after Charles I’s execution and presented as his account of himself and of events. The authorship of this highly effective piece of propaganda has been questioned, but its simple, direct, haughty tone is very similar to the king’s recorded speech at his trial. After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria published two journals of her life in the Highlands. We know that she was an enchantingly vivid writer from her diaries and letters, with a novelist’s ear

Thursday

Orlando Bird

There are no ‘correct’ recipes when it comes to pasta

A few years ago I was feeling peckish at Catania airport. I wandered over to the main café and spotted – beyond the stacks of panini stuffed with wilting prosciutto – a sign promising pasta. I assumed they’d be doling it out ready-made from a hulking pot, school-canteen style. But no: they were carefully blanching each portion of rigatoni, then finishing it in the sauce (a humble pomodoro). Who cares about foot-tapping customers on the verge of missing their flights? There were more noble priorities. The celebrity chef Carlo Cracco caused an uproar when he included garlic in his amatriciana sauce This national pedantry – more interesting than the British

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

The art of exclamation marks!

This is a short book, but it carries a punch, as does its subject, the exclamation mark – or shriek, or bang, as it is occasionally and graphically called. I use the word ‘graphically’ advisedly, for the punctuation mark falls into an ambiguous territory overlapping orthography and illustration. I say to myself that I don’t like it, but I do on occasion. I recently used it to describe the noise of my horrible doorbell (‘BZZZT!’) to convey the sensation of panic that occurs when I hear it. I also love it when the speech bubble above a cartoon character’s head contains nothing but an exclamation mark: pure surprise. My favourite

Lynn Barber

The life of Elizabeth Taylor was non-stop drama 

What is so startling about Elizabeth Taylor’s life story is how quickly everything happened. She was an MGM star at 12, a wife at l8, a widow at 26 and a grandmother at 38. Aged 16, she was playing Robert Taylor’s wife in Conspirator while still doing school lessons every day. ‘How can I concentrate,’ she wailed, ‘when Robert Taylor keeps sticking his tongue down my throat?’ MGM paid her mother Sara to be her chaperone, and Elizabeth felt that the only way she could escape their control was to get married – which she did, to Nicky Hilton. He had managed to stop drinking while courting her, but two

Boyd Tonkin

Luminous fables: Night Train to the Stars, by Kenji Miyazawa, reviewed

Talking animals – as anyone who has watched a Studio Ghibli animated film will know – are big in Japan. But not always cute. The snooty hawk, for instance, looks down on the ugly but peaceable nighthawk (‘quite harmless to other birds’), who half-shares his macho name despite a deplorable lack of raptor credentials. Just to humiliate him, Hawk decides to call Nighthawk ‘Algernon’ instead. In despair, the little creature flies up to the heavens, only to be told: ‘One has to have the proper social status in order to become a star.’ The nighthawk awaits a lonely death in the frozen skies but finds his frail body ‘glowing gently

Chloë Ashby

A fierce defiance: Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré, reviewed

‘I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be any different from other kinds of love. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to stop loving each other? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to break up?’ So begins Love Me Tender, the simply told but deeply felt new novel from Constance Debré, a story inspired by the French writer’s experience of leaving her husband and losing custody of her child. A story that’s quietly heartbreaking and fiercely defiant. When we meet our narrator, Constance, she has been separated from Laurent for three years, though definitions are fuzzy: ‘I call him my ex, he still calls me his wife.’

Oliver Soden

Caring for the dying in a world of Zoom

Ten years ago, recently graduated and unemployed, I sent my CV to a raft of radio producers. Just one replied. ‘Dear Oliver,’ wrote Marilyn Imrie, in an email with the subject line ‘YOU’: ‘How nice to hear from you and about you.’ Her generosity and enthusiasm were writ large in those three capitals, which headed a letter that came festooned with advice, offers of work experience and an anecdote about her adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. It takes skill to shorten one of the longest novels in the language, but then Imrie was a legendary figure in the world of radio. We briefly corresponded but did not meet. Runcie’s real

Clinton Heylin

Bob Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort

Between 2007-9, Bob Dylan compiled no fewer than 100 Theme Time Radio Hour broadcasts of songs he rated, prefaced by seemingly off-the-cuff verbal riffs on their meaning, history and importance. He was no natural DJ, but his love for the form shone through, as did a well-honed gruff ol’ man persona. The series was produced by Dylan’s ‘fishing buddy’ Eddie Gorodetsky, a successful sitcom scriptwriter (Mom, Big Bang Theory), with many of the selected songs more reflective of his taste than Dylan’s. Now we have Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, and the suspicion remains (confirmed by a generous dedication) that Gorodetsky is in the wings, throwing out suggestions again.

Sarah Crompton

Lord of the dance: the genius of George Balanchine 

Sex and dance were the twin themes of George Balanchine’s life. ‘I am a cloud in trousers,’ he said, using a phrase borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Jennifer Homans quotes the sentence early in her biography of the man who co-founded New York City Ballet: What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences. The first was the trousers – the earthly man, delighted by sensual feelings and desires, who loved good food, fine wine, beautiful women… The cloud or breath was

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

The depressing durability of dictatorships

Many years ago, in Tehran, I spent a few hours in a bookshop run by an Armenian whose adult life had coincided almost exactly with the existence of the Islamic Republic. As I browsed, he fell into conversation with a German-language student who had come in looking for what appeared to be an obscure Persian grammar. The student was hopeful for change in Iran. A young population with growing social media use, together with state-wide oppression and economic mismanagement, would, he argued, see the end of the mullahs soon enough. The bookshop manager listened politely for a long time and then, clearly deciding his potential customer could be trusted, replied

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How the Romans set an example of good business practice

‘The purpose of corporations,’ writes William Magnuson, ‘is, and always has been, to promote the common good.’ That’s a very bold claim in an era when the left is convinced that shareholder-owned limited liability companies (which is what Magnuson means by corporations) largely exist to exploit the customer, the worker and the planet for the enrichment of owners and executives; while plenty of entrenched boardroom opinion believes with Milton Friedman that the sole social responsibility of business is ‘to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits, so long as it… engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’. Henry Ford, the father of

Ruth Scurr

The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield

A hundred years ago, in a former Carmelite monastery 60 kilometres south of Paris, Katherine Mansfield ran up a flight of stairs to her bedroom and died of a haemorrhage.  She was 34 years old. She had known for five years that she had tuberculosis. After joining the spiritualist therapeutic community at Fontainebleau-Avon in October 1922, under the guidance of the Russian guru George Gurdjieff, she had been careful to avoid stairs, or only to take them very slowly. But on the 9 January 1923, her husband, the writer and editor John Middleton Murry, came to visit and they enjoyed an evening watching other members of the commune dancing. In

Monday

David Profumo

Miller’s thumb and Mother-in-law’s garotte: the marvellous lexicon of angling

Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the subject of precious little historical scholarship, giving rise instead to anecdotalists or grim technicians. So Chris McCully’s latest animated and vigorous addition to the Bibliotheca piscatoria arrives as fresh and welcome as a run of summer salmon from the estuary. The lexicon of angling, he suggests, can encode cultural histories – and so it does. The result is a stargazy pie of a book rich in natural lore and quirks, assembled with etymological rigour and finished with crisp wit. Drawn from diverse literary, ichthyological and halieutic sources – I ought

Ruth Scurr

Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes

The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial – lived for the last 40 years of her life in Farnborough, between the military towns of Aldershot and Sandhurst. There she created a home, museum, mausoleum and chantry in commemoration of the first and second French empires.  Farnborough Hill was the place she chose ‘après que tout fut fini’ (after it was all over).  In 1870, Eugénie had accompanied her husband into exile in England, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.  Together with their teenage son, they lived in Camden Place, a large country house in Chislehurst.

Mark Bolland

A courtier’s lot: writing to prime ministers one minute, acting as nanny the next

Apart from when the government has been self-immolating, the royal family has dominated the news recently: the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the solemn accession of the King; the continuing and rather tragic psychodrama of the Sussexes; the sad tale of the Duke of York. And, of course, we now have the latest series of The Crown. Apart from the weird sensation of seeing oneself portrayed on screen (thank you, Ben Lloyd-Hughes), I found the ten episodes, with their portent of tragedy to come, quite gripping. Just the right time, then, for a book revealing the hidden wiring which powers the royal family. Courtiers is a suave history of

Jonathan Sumption

The collectors’ obsession with rare medieval manuscripts

Why do people collect? Cicero said of the Roman governor of Sicily Gaius Verres that his appetite for Greek sculpture was called a passion by himself but a mental illness by his friends. Freud attributed the collector’s mania to bad toilet training. Others claim to have proved that it is due to abnormalities in the medial prefrontal cortex. Psychologists have filled thousands of pages on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. It is safe to assume that Christopher de Hamel has not read any of them. But in this fascinating book he presents 12 case studies of men and women with just one thing in common. They were all obsessed with

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another. I love some of his songs (‘One’, as performed by Johnny Cash, and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’,