Book review

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

Tormented genius

Married as I am to an antiquarian book dealer, and living in a house infested with books and manuscripts, I’m constantly having to edit my own little library so as to be able to breathe. But three volumes have survived successive culls — Pax Britannica, Heaven’s Command and Farewell the Trumpets — Jan (or James as she was when these books were written) Morris’s trilogy about the British empire. It is, Morris says, ‘the intellectual and artistic centrepiece of my life’, and it opens on the morning of 22 June 1897 with Queen Victoria visiting the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. She was,

Stephen Robinson

A race apart

South African democracy has not, on the whole, been kind to the Afrikaner. During Nelson Mandela’s benign oversight of the Rainbow Nation, liberal Afrikaners persuaded themselves that all would turn out well in the end. But in their hearts, they sensed it would go wrong. And so it has. At the time of writing, President Zuma is aggressively defenestrating his finance minister, one of the few competent figures in his tawdry administration, and the rand is sinking so fast as to make post-Brexit sterling seem positively muscular. Kajsa Norman notes that, since the first democratic election in 1994, at least 117,000 whites have been purged from the civil service, traditionally

Hermione Eyre

A tale of two prisons

The Marshalsea was the best and worst place for a debtor to be imprisoned. From 1438 until its closure in 1842, there was dishonour in its name, contagion in its air and cruelty in its very premise: once detained, debtors could take no action to improve their lot. Instead, imprisonment was meant to serve to ‘rally friends and family’. Where none were forthcoming, many inmates died of starvation. The ancient barbarity of the system was redressed in 1729 when an inquiry revealed that medieval instruments of restraint were still in use — as well as a 3ft-long whip that terrified the debtors, fashioned out of ‘a bull’s pizzle, dried as

Philip Hensher

A big beast in Hush Puppies

It always used to be said that, if it had been up to Guardian readers, Ken Clarke would certainly have been leader of the Conservative party. It might have gone beyond that. Some politicians are much loved by the general public, who never have to meet them, and loathed by their colleagues and unfortunate underlings — one thinks of Greville Janner or Alf Morris, who once pushed his fist into my face when I was refusing to do his bidding. That doesn’t seem to be true of Clarke, who is popular pretty much across the board, his instincts for decency and sceptical intelligence ensuring that. Although his Europhile commitments effectively

Susan Hill Susan Hill

TB or not to be

If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will have hung over your childhood and youth, as it did mine, and Linda Grant’s new novel strikes many a chord. My maternal aunt had the disease, and spent months in a sanatorium like the one described in The Dark Circle, but finally had a thoracotomy (removal of a lung and seven ribs). She was also given the ‘new’ wonder drug Streptomycin and together with the operation, it cured her to live until she was 86. From the sanatorium, she sent me drawings of herself lying under a blanket on the freezing terrace halfway up a mountain. I only include these personal

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Shiver me timbers

Brrrrr, this is a chilly book. Each time a character put on his sealskin kamiks, muskrat hat, wolfskin mittens and otter pelt coat I buttoned another cardigan toggle and shivered. It’s a book that gets you down to the marrow. The compass of Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter points north by northnorth. Up and up it goes, drawn by husky dogs towards the North Pole, chillier and chillier by degrees, frostbitten, snow-blind but determined. It follows three centuries of explorers of the North West Territories, each generation on its own frozen adventure: to find the NorthWest passage, to recover an ice-bound ship, to reach the Pole, to stake a flag,

Will Nicoll

The great Soviet gameshow

In the opening chapter of her history of Soviet Central Television, Christine E. Evans observes two Russian televisual displays of 2014. February saw the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics — which sought to depict a millennium of national history using glitter and gameshow grandiosity. April brought the stern, but no less theatrical, Direct Line with Vladimir Putin — an annual phone-in — during which the president celebrated Crimea’s annexation with an orgy of televisual patriotism. Although more glitzy than their Soviet-era equivalents, both can be seen as displays of continuity in Russian broadcasting, rather than incidences of invention. As Evans explains: The highly televisual Putin era represents the

A A Gill

Meaty matters

I’m writing this in the Highlands. Through the window I can see Loch Maree, being ruffled into white-tipped skirls by the westerly wind and a squall of cloud that’s shrouding Slioch, the Place of the Spears. The Munroes are steeples at the end of the water, a bastion reminder of Scotland’s eternal war between the fastness and the wetness. I’m up here for the stalking. I come every year. I haven’t taken a shot for some time. I love the stalk: stalking is to walking what opera is to whistling. And I also love going out with people who have never done it before, or for whom pulling the trigger

Hugh Pearman

Highly undesirable

Most of us just live in cities, or travel to see them and take them pretty much as they come, for good or bad, save for moaning about how much better they used to be. Does anyone ever say of their home city how greatly it has improved? But aside from all the travel writers, there is a cadre of critics and academics which is endlessly fascinated by cities as physical organisms. This field of study is very distinct from, and considers itself rather grander than, mere architecture, from Stalinist housing estates to the wreckage of post-industrial Detroit. Its status has increased since the moment was reached, some time in

Daniel Swift

Fierce indignation

In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When he was a baby in Dublin, he was put into the care of an English wet nurse, and one day she heard that one of her relatives back in England was close to death. Hoping for an inheritance, the wet nurse jumped on a boat back to Whitehaven in Cumbria, taking the infant Swift with her. ‘When the Matter was discovered,’ Swift wrote, ‘His Mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it.’ So the wet nurse kept

Thursday

Meryle Secrest

Special K | 20 October 2016

Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the case of the art historian Kenneth Clark. If anyone remembers anything about him, it is as the presenter of Civilisation, a TV series of the 1960s that rocketed him to stardom, and the author of the accompanying book, which sold over a million copies. He died in 1983 when he was a mythical figure, and any attempt to show his human dimensions was anathema, as I discovered to my cost. My own biography of Clark was published a year later. Nowadays, one can hardly get anyone to take him seriously.

John Burnside

A matter of life and death | 20 October 2016

Shades of The Master and Margarita haunt Rabih Alameddine’s sixth book, in which Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet with a day job in IT, battles with drugs, insanity, visions of the Devil and a variety of Christian saints while trying to come to terms with the fallout from the Aids crisis. As that crisis wore on, ignored by the powers-that-be, Jacob’s lover and all of his closest friends died, leaving him with an apartment full of ashes and an eye-watering variety of instructions for their disposal. Yet, while echoes of Bulgakov’s masterpiece inform The Angel of History from first to last (there is even a cat named Behemoth), Alameddine has created

Jane Ridley

In the company of queens

Steven Runciman, the historian of Byzantium, is a puzzling figure. He was an outrageous snob, once remarking that he would have enjoyed being the widower of a Spanish duchess, which would have made him a dowager duke in Castile. He particularly relished the company of queens (of the female variety), and he took the Queen Mother out to lunch once a year at the Athenaeum. But as Minoo Dinshaw shows in this richly original life, the snobbery was a subtle pose. Runciman was a tease who liked to play games with people, and he made a career out of being enigmatic. His family were wealthy shipbuilders in Northumberland. His parents

Rose Prince

Apples for our eyes

Apple Day, on 21 October, is a newish festival, created in 1990, by the venerable organisation, Common Ground. Intended to be a celebration of the apple, its purpose is also to raise awareness of the importance of apples in landscape, ecology and culture. All over the country there will be many revels where you can taste apple varieties, jellies, chutneys and drinks; try apple-bobbing, take apples from your own garden for identification by experts, buy apple trees and all sorts. These are charming festivities, much better behaved than the ancient cider-makers’ ritual, wassailing. I have never taken part in the wassail, but from a description in Pete Brown’s The Apple

Tim Stanley

The passionate patriot

To anyone complaining that American politics in 2016 is uncivil, consider this: in 1804, the vice president of the United States shot the former Secretary of the Treasury in a duel. Alexander Hamilton, the retired secretary, probably fired first and aimed into a tree, to show he meant no harm. Vice president Aaron Burr, however, shot Hamilton in the abdomen and left him to die. He went home and had breakfast with a cousin, and failed to mention how he’d spent his morning. A few weeks later, Burr was back at his job, chairing the Senate. President Jefferson, who hated Hamilton, invited him to dinner. Trump calling Clinton a crook

Andrew McKie

Time is of the essence | 20 October 2016

Christopher Priest, now 73, has been quietly turning out oddly mesmerising fiction for nearly half a century but, like the protagonists of his 2005 novel The Glamour, somehow has the knack of never quite being noticed. It is true that he has devoted admirers; he has won awards; he was on Granta’s original list of best young novelists — scraping in on age, not quality — and Christopher Nolan filmed, cleverly, his even cleverer novel The Prestige (1995), which was about Victorian illusionists and duplicity. But though that book won both the ‘literary’ James Tait Black and the ‘genre’ World Fantasy Award, his work is not nearly as widely known

Helen R Brown

A bit player in the great drama

There’s a glorious scene in Astrid Lindgren’s first Pippi Longstocking book in which her fearless, freckled heroine strides to the centre of a circus ring and briskly lays out the World’s Strongest Man. Like most of the adults who expect to control her, he quickly learns that his inflated size, age and title are no match for the child’s bold pin-wielding attitude. As a little fan myself in the early 1980s I probably giggled as the strongman toppled. But reading it to my own children this summer I also felt a deep lurch of sadness. The strongman’s name was Adolf, and the book (published in 1945) was written as an

Graham Robb

Intoxicated with ink

One of the charms and shortcomings of biography is that it makes perfectly normal situations sound extraordinary. According to Michel Winock, Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), the author of Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale, contracted ‘an early and profound aversion to mankind’. To Gustave the schoolboy, man was nothing but a coagulation of ‘mud and shit… equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab-louse’. This might have been the influence of his freethinking father, an eminent Rouen surgeon, but perhaps it was just the spirit of the age. The Napoleonic adventure was over; the sun of Romanticism had set. As Winock reminds us, quoting Alfred de Musset’s Confession

Thursday

Caroline Moore

A study in alienation

Looking for the Outsider is the biography of a novel, from conception through publication to critical reception. Alice Kaplan’s life-story of L’Étranger (The Outsider in English translations, The Stranger in American) is a lovely work, lucid and thought-provoking. It makes one feel afresh the sheer strangeness of Albert Camus’s imagination. All genius is, perhaps, freakish; but Camus’s sprang from peculiarly unpromising soil. He was born in a white working-class area of Algiers. His father was killed in the battle of the Marne before he was one. His mother was deaf and illiterate, with a vocabulary of about 400 words; she worked as a cleaner. His uncle was also deaf and

William Waldegrave

Courting the Iron Lady

This is a strange book. Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS, is packing up his office. It is a year after Margaret Thatcher’s death, and Murdoch’s Wapping site is being destroyed to make way for new, expensive flats. As the national memory of Thatcher fades, and transmutes into myth and caricature, so the physical scene of one of the seminal battles of her time, where the old print unions and their rackets were destroyed, crumbles into dust. Into his room comes Miss R, a young and mysterious historian, to interview him for her thesis about Thatcher’s courtiers. The effect is dreamlike: partly a sort of Cherry Orchard, with Stothard