Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Michael Arditti

A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed

Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down from London to stay. The clear parallels with Angelica Bell and Charleston extend even further. Ivy develops a tendresse for, and eventually marries, Bear, a man 25 years her senior and Angus’s former lover. Like his prototype Bunny Garnett, Bear worked on the farm to avoid conscription during the first world war. Like Bunny with

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech?

45 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Fara Dabhoiwala, whose new book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea looks not just at the origins of free speech as an idea, but also its uses and misuses. Fara tells me the bizarre story of how he found himself ‘cancelled’, gives us the scoop on who actually invented free speech and explains how to think more deeply about free speech as a global as well as a local question – by tracing how we got into our current predicaments.

David Abulafia

The great explorers of the past dismissed as mercenary opportunists

Ceremonial cannibalism was not a European invention but a regular feature of South American societies Simon Park, who teaches Portuguese history and literature at Oxford University, aims to recast the early period of European exploration as a story of disasters rather than successes. His target is the notion that those who led the first European expeditions across the Atlantic or into the Indian Ocean were ‘heroes who pushed forward boundaries of knowledge’. An obvious case is Christopher Columbus, who refused to his dying day to recognise that he had failed to reach the outlying islands of China. He was already the butt of bitter criticism during his lifetime. Vasco da

Clare Mulley

Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany

Late one evening in 1994, an Italian magistrate walked into a storage room at the military prosecutor’s offices in Rome. There his eye was caught by a 6ft-high wooden cupboard, curiously positioned so that it faced the wall. His interest piqued, he pulled the cupboard around and opened its doors. Inside were stacks of documents dating from the mid-1940s. In all, there were 695 long-lost war crime investigation files, detailing more than 2,000 incidents that had taken place in Italy during the fascist period. Picking up the story, the Italian media dubbed the cupboard the ‘wardrobe of shame’ – which quickly became a metaphor for what Thomas Harding calls ‘Italy’s

Leyla Sanai

The psychiatrist obsessed with ‘reprogramming’ minds

When the actress Celia Imrie was 14, she was admitted to an NHS hospital where she was given medication intended for delusional, hallucinating, agitated schizophrenics. Though not diabetic, she was regularly injected with insulin, which lowered her blood sugar so that she became shaky, anxious, ravenously hungry and so confused she couldn’t recognise her own family. Yet she was one of the luckier ones. Other patients were given enough insulin to induce a coma caused by dangerously low glucose levels, and some even died.  Why was Imrie subjected to this? Because she was anorexic and had been placed in the care of a notorious psychiatrist who believed in aggressive physical

Sarah Ditum

Urban gothic: I Want to Go Home, But I’m Already There, by Roisin Lanigan, reviewed

A horror story in three words: London property market. That’s the starting point for Roisin Lanigan’s brilliantly creepy debut novel, set in the sheer hell of being a young renter. Because once you’ve run the gamut of carbon monoxide-leaking boilers, coked-up estate agents, absentee landlords and frosty housemates (and been gouged in rental costs for the privilege), maybe a haunting isn’t a deal-breaker. The main character, Aine, is adrift in her twenties with a vaguely online job and a prescription for unspecified mental health issues. She’s also pathologically passive: she ends up in London because Laura, her best friend from university, asks to flatshare and Aine can’t think of anything

James Ball

Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time at Facebook, has landed top of the New York Times’s bestseller charts and fourth in the UK’s Sunday Times equivalent. It owes its success in large part to a ferocious campaign that Meta – Facebook’s parent company – waged against it on publication. When Meta faces a barrage of public criticism, which it often does, it typically stays quiet and gets on with things. And that approach works – its share price has continued to soar despite scandal after scandal. So when the company not only published a series of furious denials but also had staffers post about the book on their

Philip Marsden

William Blake still weaves his mystic spell

Everyone has their own William Blake and each age finds something new in the ocean of his work: revolutionary Blake, Christian Blake, humanist Blake, Jungian Blake, Freudian Blake, free-love Blake, hippy Blake, occult Blake, eco-Blake. The only time that missed out was his own – then he was mad, delusional and ignored Blake. Philip Hoare brings the fizz of his own sensibility to bear on the work of a man whose progeny of artistic spin-offs multiply with each passing generation. The result is a book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all. As the author of Leviathan

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

The Pinochet affair: the pursuit of a Chilean dictator

Calle Londres 38 is the address in Santiago of one of the notorious detention centres where the government of the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered its opponents after the military coup of 1973. This book is mainly about the international row that broke out between 1998 and 2000 when Pinochet, by then retired, visited London for a medical operation and a Spanish judge applied to have him extradited for trial in Spain. There is a parallel narrative about the long and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring to justice Walther Rauff, a former SS officer deeply involved in the early stages of the final solution in Germany, who

Anne de Courcy

The last of the great salonnières

Lady Pamela Berry (Pam to everyone, so that is what I too shall call her) did many things in her life. She was president of the Incorporated Society of Fashion Designers and chair of the British Museum Society; and she conducted a passionate ten-year affair with the goatish Malcolm Muggeridge. But she was best known as a salonnière. In fact she was the last of the great salonnières of the past century. At her house in Barton Street, Westminster, within the sound of the division bell, she gathered parliamentarians, writers, aristocrats and wits, including the Lloyd Georges, Isaiah Berlin and Nancy Mitford. Across her table, where ‘gen con’ (general conversation)

Travis Elborough

Doctor, Doctor: the genesis of a national folk hero

John Higgs begins his foray into the long-standing BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who with a personal anecdote about going to the pub with Tom Baker, the notoriously bibulous actor who played the part of the Doctor from 1975 to 1981 – still longer than anyone else. For me, as for Higgs, Baker was ‘my doctor’. He was the one I first watched as a child and who instantly comes to mind whenever I think about the character: sonic screwdriver, long stripy scarf, bags of jelly babies and tin dog companion. At the height of his Who fame, Baker turned, as Higgs doesn’t shirk from saying, into a ‘monster’,

Alex Burghart

Tony Benn, bogeyman to some, beacon of hope and light to many

Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter. This new collection of speeches and articles assembled by his daughter in the centenary of his birth, combines both the ancient history of his left-wingery and the ongoing relevance of his signposts. Melissa Benn’s intention has been to ‘lay to rest a few myths’ about her father and the left and to inspire a new

Alexander Lee

The Da Vinci world of known unknowns

When Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ was sold in 2017 for $450 million it caused a sensation. Dismissed as an anonymous ‘wreck’ just 12 years before, it had become the single most expensive artwork ever to come to auction. Newspapers – goggle-eyed at the price – hailed the discovery of a ‘lost’ Leonardo. The Louvre wanted to make it the centrepiece of a major exhibition. There was even talk of showing it alongside the Mona Lisa. It seemed almost too good to be true. And it was. Doubts were soon raised about the painting’s attribution. Amid a storm of controversy, it was quietly whisked away to a secret location. It

Boyd Tonkin

Murder she imagined: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami reviewed

‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ wrote W.B. Yeats. In the near-future America imagined by Laila Lalami, culpability starts there, too. Charged with the prevention of potential crimes, the Risk Assessment Administration monitors not just every aspect of citizens’ behaviour but, via tiny ‘neuroprosthetics’, the hidden drives revealed in sleep. As an RAA agent insists: ‘Every murder starts with a fantasy.’ If those nocturnal fantasies grow too ‘troublesome’, and your personal ‘risk score’ edges above the key threshold of 500, prepare for at least 21 days of ‘forensic observation’ as an inmate of a ‘retention’ centre. Not quite prison, ‘it’s not not a prison’ either: instead, a ‘kind of a grey area’.

Anthony Cummins

Satire and settled scores: Universality by Natasha Brown reviewed

In 2023 Natasha Brown published an article taking the reader behind the scenes of two interviews that she had given to newspapers in Australia and Spain while promoting her debut novel, Assembly. The point was to expose sleight of hand in the resulting write-ups, to say nothing of shabby conduct more generally. One interviewer, eager for her ‘to admit that I was influenced by two television shows which aired after my novel went to print’, asked, a propos of nothing, if she had a boyfriend. ‘It’s not clear whether this question came from the creased printout he regularly consults,’ wrote Brown, acidly. Skewering journalistic pretension to authority is the main

Wednesday

Lynn Barber

Poor little rich girl: the extraordinary life of Yoko Ono

David Sheff first met Yoko Ono in 1980 when Playboy commissioned him, then aged 24, to interview her and John Lennon. She asked him to send her his astrological and numerological charts before summoning him to the Dakota, where she and John occupied six apartments. (Elton John, a friend of theirs, wrote an excellent spoof: ‘Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do./ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.’) Yoko told him that his charts were good – ‘these are strong numbers’ – and that he would get on well with John. So they fixed a time to meet the next day. The interview lasted three

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Joe Dunthorne: Children of Radium

40 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne, who is here to talk about his new non-fiction book Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance. In it, he describes how he criss-crossed Europe in search of the truth about his great-grandfather, a Jewish scientist who found himself working on chemical weapons for the Nazis. Joe talks to me about historical guilt, the accidents of fate and human psychology – and making comedy out of tragedy.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

A novel in disguise: Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser, reviewed

Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who one presses upon intelligent acquaintances and whose books reward rereading. One of her regular subjects – she is a novelist of bookish, intelligent lives – is the inability of the Australian intelligentsia ever to read an Australian novel. As the author of The Life to Come, perhaps the best Australian novel since Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet,

Toby Young Toby Young

Why, at 75, does Graydon Carter still feel the need to impress?

When I started working for Vanity Fair in 1995 I remember coming into the office one morning to discover that most of the senior editorial staff had disappeared. They weren’t at their desks, and phone calls went unreturned. Was this a Jewish holiday? It turned out to be the day Graydon Carter had set aside to write the ‘Editor’s Letter’, a monthly column at the beginning of the magazine signed by him but which he almost always asked one of his staff to write at the last minute. None of them wanted to be the poor schmuck saddled with the task. The reason I mention this is because the previous

Christian House

Heroes of the Norwegian resistance

Reading Robert Ferguson’s fascinating history of the experiences of the Norwegians during the five years of German occupation between 1940 and 1945 – a collage of resistance, collaboration and the grey areas in between – I was reminded of the remarks of two Norwegian nonagenarians. In 2011, I interviewed Gunnar Sonsteby, a hero of Norway’s resistance movement, for The Spectator. The country’s most decorated man, Sonsteby told me that he was spurred to acts of sabotage and the ‘liquidation’ of collaborators by sheer outrage at the German presence. Conversely, earlier this year, I wrote the obituary of Olav Thon, the owner of a chain of supermarkets and hotels and one