Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Richard Davenport-Hines

Nothing compares with Chips Channon’s diaries for sheer exuberance

‘Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all?’ When ‘Chips’ Channon strolled into the House of Commons tea room in 1951, this was the chant with which encircling drunken Labour MPs mocked him. Politically, he was inessential they thought, and epicene. He admitted to being the best-dressed of MPs, but reckoned the young socialist Anthony Crosland to be the most beautiful. As a historical record keeper, though, he has cut a deeper and more ineffaceable mark than any of his tormentors. Nothing compares with the unexpurgated Channon diaries. They are rich, exuberant, copious and shatteringly honest. For those interested in the parliamentary politics of 20th-century England,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

From the archives: Francis Fukuyama

37 min listen

This week we spotlight our most popular episode of the last year, Sam’s conversation with Francis Fukuyama about his book Liberalism and its Discontents. He tells Sam how a system that has built peace and prosperity since the Enlightenment has come under attack from the neoliberal right and the identitarian left; and how Vladimir Putin may end up being the unwitting founding father of a new Ukraine.

Sara Wheeler

How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again

Every country has an origin story but none has ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject is inseparable from myth. In this impressive and deeply immersive book, the author sets out to reveal Russia’s history, its people’s perception of their past and the manifold ways in which those in power manipulate both events and legend to shape the present. It is a saga of multi-millennial identity politics. A bestselling historian with a storied background himself, Figes arranges his material chronologically over ten chapters, beginning with the medieval chronicles of Kievan Rus. Those sources launched myths that became fundamental to the Russian understanding of nationhood. He

Thursday

Stuart Evers

Wall Street madness: Trust, by Hernan Diaz, reviewed

‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too much truth.’ I nodded and she laughed and we drank more wine, but that sentence stayed with me in all its aphoristic glory. When she died, this was the first thing I remembered: our conspiratorial conversation in the deepest dark of 1990s Soho. This is not true. It has the feel of lived experience, yet it is entirely invented. The context, its placement and the fact that it is printed in a magazine gives it credence. As readers, we do not expect to be lied to. With a work of

Stuart Jeffries

In praise of Birmingham, Britain’s maligned second city

During my gap year in 1981, I worked on the 24th floor of Birmingham’s Alpha Tower for the Regional Manpower Intelligence Unit. The city below, with its express ways racing past the Venetian Gothic of Joseph Chamberlain’s house and the Roman Revival of the town hall, were the realisation of the city planner Herbert Manzoni’s dream of creating a Midlands Motown. The Rotunda, the acres of systems-built tower blocks, even the inverted ziggurat of a modernist central library, together amounted to the antithesis of the smoky, tweedy, horse-powered, cut-throat Birmingham the world now knows from Peaky Blinders. That year, though, was the one which went wrong for Birmingham, Richard Vinen

Michael Arditti

Sixteen cathedrals to see before you die

There can be no clearer illustration of the central role that great cathedrals continue to play in a nation’s life than the outpouring of grief that greeted the catastrophic blaze in Notre-Dame in 2019. President Macron described the building as ‘our history, our literature, our imagination, the place where we experienced all our greatest moments’. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of any major European city without a cathedral at its heart. Emma J. Wells has written an accessible, authoritative and lavishly illustrated account of the building of 16 of ‘the world’s greatest cathedrals’. Her subjectivity is evident in that only seven feature among Simon Jenkins’s top 25 in his

Francis Beckett

The visionary genius of Harold Wilson

‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had Wilson not firmly resisted pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to send troops to Vietnam, Kellner and I were both old enough to have fought there. But in 1968 we loftily despised Wilson for twisting and turning to stay out of Vietnam and keep his party together. ‘What are the two worst things about Harold Wilson?’, we asked. ‘His face,’ we replied smugly. Britain has never quite forgiven Wilson for his cleverness. His reputation suffered a catastrophic decline in the immediate aftermath of his premiership. It was partially rescued by Ben

Jenny Colgan

How to snare your reader: the secret of a good blurb

It sounds disingenuous, not to say dis-respectful, but as a writer of 40 books, give or take, I never read blurbs. I can’t bear to. I love stories and am terrified of them being spoiled. There is no obvious twist or murderer so clearly signposted that I will ever try to guess them as I read. I never look at the end first. One of the great joys of books (and of life, more or less the same thing) is being happily surprised. I did accidentally read the blurb of Karen Jay Fowler’s superb We are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which gave away the (gorgeous) twist in the first line.

Max Décharné

The short-lived wonder of Creedence Clearwater Revival

Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership, which is frequently thrown together on an ad hoc basis by people barely out of their teens. They are tested to destruction by long hours, minimal sleep, deafening noise, international travel, a bedroom schedule that would have made Caligula blush and a seemingly unending cocktail of legal and illegal stimulants. As the old joke goes, there is also a downside. This is the accepted pattern. But Creedence Clearwater Revival – who enjoyed a spectacular worldwide run of hits during the brief period between their first great success in 1969 and

Alex Diggins

A lost brother: My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, by Paul Stanbridge, reviewed

Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in his auto-fictional My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is. This singular and striking book follows a narrator (the extent to which this figure overlaps with Stanbridge is kept teasingly obscure) mourning the suicide of his brother, an isolated, eccentric mathematician. Yet, while it contains passages of raw tribute, it is a self-consciously tricksy narrative. Stanbridge circles around his brother’s death via some of history’s more overgrown byways, such as ‘Clever Hans’, the mathematical horse, locked-in syndrome and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s enthusiastic onanism. There’s a suggestion of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights to

Francesca Peacock

Murder most foul: The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, reviewed

There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the duke, whatever he might claim, did kill his wife: ‘I gave commands;/ Then all smiles stopped’, he lets slip. In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell’s sombre, haunting novel based on the historical couple described in Browning’s poem, this revelation comes rather earlier. The young Lucrezia knows with ‘a peculiar clarity’ that her husband ‘intends to kill her’ right from the first page. After leaving Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, Lucrezia died within a year. History records her death as being from ‘putrid fever’,

Leyla Sanai

A dying doctor’s last words

Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and sometimes failing, to save others from a terrible death, it carries the knowledge that the journey may be more traumatic than the fear or grief of the end. These are the concerns with which Henry Marsh, the eminent neurosurgeon and author, grapples after his own diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer more than a year ago. He believes this book will be his last and, unsurprisingly, he seems to be cramming everything into it. It makes for a discursive read and jumps about chronologically and topically, as if he wants to

Adam Nicolson

In the footsteps of the Romantic poets

Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with the departed dead’, found nothing in reply. Nothing reverberated. The ghosts were silent. But he felt something else non-human: the springtime breezes bringing a sense of the marvellousness of life itself. And so in that instant (or so he says) his mind changed. No more seeking after gothic horrors or pining for the worst; no more listening to the dead. Instead, ‘the spirit of beauty’ descended on him, illuminated him, shaping his life, becoming his goddess, the only force he could imagine that ‘could free/ This world from its dark

Brian Martin

Nazi on the run: The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, by Olivier Guez, reviewed

Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on live human bodies? Other characters in the French writer Olivier Guez’s story are also from the Nazi gang of debased criminals: Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, the concentration camp commandant, and Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons. This is a historical novel, and Guez has researched it well. He invests the structure of events with his imagination and has Mengele relate his experiences throughout his long avoidance of capture. There’s a vivid sense of reality about the crazed, unrepentant eugenist’s attempt at an acceptable fugitive way of life, and Guez holds

David Abulafia

Courage on the high seas

The Shetland Islands and the Faroes may seem to be somewhere out there in distant waters, marginal and in the greater scheme of things not very important in the history of the world. But from a maritime perspective it is precisely the fact that they are suspended in mid-ocean, surrounded by water that teems with fish (if one knows where to look) that has given them a role in human history out of all proportion to their size. In his fascinating account of the part played by these islands in the harvesting of cod and herring from the North Atlantic, John Goodlad raises vital questions about the world’s food supplies.

Nigel Jones

The nondescript house that determined the outcome of the second world war

Sometimes the struggle for a single small strongpoint can tip the whole balance of a greater battle. One thinks of the closing of the gates of Hougoumont farm at Waterloo, or the bloodless German seizure of Fort Douaumont at Verdun – an error it took an estimated 100,000 French lives to reverse. According to Iain MacGregor, this role at Stalingrad was played by a non-descript four-storey building in the city’s central district, codenamed ‘the Lighthouse’, but subsequently known as ‘Pavlov’s House’, after one of its garrison’s leaders, Sergeant Yakov Pavlov. MacGregor’s meticulously researched narrative of the titanic battle that was the turning point of the second world war focuses on

Frances Wilson

How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler

Today, the German city of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, is the world centre of the optical and precision industry; but in the 1790s it spawned an even more marketable commodity. It was then a small medieval town on the banks of the river Saale with crumbling walls, 800 half-timbered houses, a market square and an unruly university. Here, in the philosophy department, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a young professor inspired by Immanuel Kant and the French Revolution, proclaimed from the pulpit his theory of the ‘Ich’. ‘A person,’ he roared, ‘should be self-determined.’ In an age of absolute power and the divine right of kings, the idea of free

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Salman Rushdie: Quichotte

61 min listen

This week we revisit Sam’s conversation with Sir Salman Rushdie, recorded just before the pandemic. ‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis’, Sir Salman Rushdie said to Sam when they spoke in an interview for the Spectator’s 10,000th edition. They discuss everything from his latest book Quichotte, to his relationship with his father, who we learn made up the surname ‘Rushdie’, and how he feels about The Satanic Verses now.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Nothing is certain in Russia, where the past is constantly rewritten

Enforced brevity focuses the mind wonderfully. And when the minds in question are two of the West’s most interesting historians of Russia, the result is a distillation of insight that’s vitally timely. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92 during the collapse of the USSR (where he was the boss of Christopher Steele, of Trump dossier fame), then chaired the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He went on to write the brilliant Afgantsy, a history of the USSR’s disastrous Afghan war and its impact on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and Moscow 1941, a people’s history of the heroic Soviet fight against Nazism. Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian

Andy Miller

A shaggy drug story: Industry of Magic & Light, by David Keenan, reviewed

The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good Times (2019), Xstabeth (2020), last year’s magnum opus Monument Maker and now Industry of Magic & Light. At a comparatively modest 250 pages (Monument Maker weighed in at more than 800), it is practically a novella, or perhaps the sort of pamphlet one might once have picked up in a ‘head shop’ such as Compendium Books in Camden. The last book of Keenan’s I reviewed here I described as ‘either a cycle of novels or one vast fictional gallimaufry’ – to which I now approvingly add a third category. Industry