Book review

Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War, a charismatic Nazi concentration camp survivor, and more. In January 2005 he addressed the Spanish parliament to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He is, everyone agrees, an extraordinary man. Heroic, almost. The thing is, his extraordinary, heroic biography is at least partly a lie. But which parts? In The Impostor, the novelist Javier Cercas seeks to disentangle Marco’s lies from those small provable truths supporting them. Cercas is reluctant at first (troubled by Primo Levi’s ‘to understand is almost to justify’); but Marco himself is

‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation that turned PR and branding into art forms, wanted homegrown creative heroes. In design there were Charles Eames and George Nelson with their homey hopsack suits and wash’n’wear shirts, their sensible Wasp homilies: a counterattack against imported — and often baffling — exotics from the Bauhaus. It was the same in fine art. Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) was a roughneck from cowboy country in Wyoming who became a darling of the media, not least because of his readily reportable deplorable behaviour. And then there was Alexander Calder, not a

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without. By the time Iris Origo’s Italian

Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In a world where a quarter of people read literally no books in any given year, can we give each other a break on this kind of thing? If you found Angels and Demons good fun, thoroughly enjoyed The Da Vinci Code (as I unironically did), but despised Inferno for the worthless piece of rat doodah that it was, then the good news is that Brown is back on form here. Origin is brisk, fun and filled with adorably pointless Wikipedia paragraphs; and what’s at stake is endearingly grandiose. Here, the

Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by neighbours in one of the busiest parts of Paris? In 1906, at the age of 35, shortly after the death of his mother, he moved to a first-floor apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. ‘I couldn’t bear to live in a place that maman never knew,’ he explained. For this ghostly comfort, he paid a heavy price. Petrol fumes and tree pollen — to which he was almost fatally allergic — drifted up from the boulevard. In the absence of maman’s goodnight kiss, he sedated himself with valerian and heroin, but

Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this well-edited and serious volume Thomas Hegghammer — one of the world’s foremost experts on jihadism — has put together a collection of essays by an impressive group of scholars analysing what culture Islamism’s most adamant adherents might be said to possess. The book is not a long one. Designed for a primarily academic audience, Hegghammer’s introduction carries all of the baggage that such audiences demand. It is not writing so much as a set of pleas and signs sent out to academia’s own hostage-takers, who lurk in universities and colleges