Book review

Thursday

Michela Wrong

King of Kings: The Triumph and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia

Great men rarely come smaller than Haile Selassie. In photographs, the golden crowns, pith helmets and grey felt homburgs he often donned can’t conceal the fact that he is the shortest man in the room. It didn’t matter: for the 44 years of his reign — with a five-year interruption engineered by Benito Mussolini’s invading troops — he was effectively lord of all he surveyed. Ethiopia’s current government, established by a former Marxist rebel group, has always harboured mixed feelings towards Tafari Makonnen, as he was baptised. But for his countrymen he looms like a colossus, remembered for dragging his vast empire from feudalism into the modern age, and as

Josephine Livingstone

Long nights of delicious horror

The thick of autumn is upon us, dear reader, and with it the shivers. Around Hallowe’en you may be tempted to go and see yet another edition of Paranormal Activity (a quotation from the trailer: ‘There’s, like, obviously something going on here’) or something similar. Do not. There is nothing frightening about going to the movies. You are there with a crowd of other human beings, doing something fun and communal. This is not scary. If you’re serious about engaging with the spirit of the season, the thing to do is to stay up late alone, in bed, reading a terrifying book. Fortunately, the bookshop shelves are currently creaking under

Thursday

John Preston

Behind the scenes at the Brighton bombing

Sadly, I can’t see it catching on, but one of the notable things about Jonathan Lee’s new novel is that it features a fleeting appearance by John Redwood. The late Geoffrey Howe is there too, distractedly eating fishcakes as he holds forth on the difference between humans and animals. Redwood, Howe and the rest of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet have gathered in Brighton’s Grand Hotel on the eve of the Tory conference in October 1984. In Belfast, Dan, one of the Provisional IRA’s brightest young stars, has been given the job of helping real-life bomber Patrick Magee plant the device that would kill five people — there has always been speculation

David Crane

When English Catholics were considered as dangerous as jihadis

Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in the suffering of their 16th-century Tyburn heroes, but in a western world that has learned to be wary of extremist talk of ‘holy war’ or the intoxicating visions of the martyr’s crown that fuelled the prayers of England’s young exile priests — ‘the supreme privilege, of which only divine grace could make them worthy’, as Evelyn Waugh put it — somehow makes for less comfortable reading. It is hard to know whether the modern jihadist has given us an unwelcome insight into the past or disabled us from understanding it,

Mark Mason

From Spike Milligan — and Marge Simpson — with love, light, peace and great respect

This book is a serious bit of kit. Its hard covers measure 28.9 by 21 centimetres, and it weighs 1.62 kilograms — 324,000 times the amount of valium, we learn on page 98, that Tom Clancy needed to appear on Good Morning America (‘Sorry to wimp out, but, shit, I was scared’). The illustrations are beautiful. Very often they are simply the letters themselves (don’t worry about handwriting, there are transcripts too), but sometimes they reference the content. For instance a photograph of butterflies accompanies the biologist Rachel Carson’s letter about watching said creatures with a friend.. The butterflies were on their final migration, and Carson was dying of cancer:

Lee Langley

John Lennon’s desert island luxury

Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon, seen through the prism of Kevin Barry’s imagining. Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane, was a dystopian nightmare of comic vernacular and violence, showered with praise and prizes. Think James Joyce and Flann O’Brien collaborating on a script for Tarantino. Beatlebone, his second novel (on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths prize for fiction) has Lennon fleeing New York in 1978 for a secret visit to Dorinish, the uninhabited island he bought 11 years earlier. Burned-out, creatively blocked, he craves a few days of solitude, to sit and stare at

Hermione Eyre

Would even Blair have put Felix Dennis in the Lords?

This is not only an authorised but a commissioned biography. Felix Dennis, the tiny, depraved, manipulative media mogul, was hardly going to let a free hand choose the adjectives that defined him. The author recalls his initial fright at being contacted: “Of course I’d be delighted to speak to Felix,” I said, my voice an octave higher than normal.’ And so Fergus Byrne, of Dorset’s Marshland Vale magazine, was Dennis’s chosen one, flown to Mustique so they could sit in his paradisal grounds together, wondering at Dennis’s publishing achievements (from MacUser to lads’ mag Maxim), discussing his business technique (‘“I fucking hate accountants,” he shouted’) and remembering the laughs along

Frances Wilson

What does it really mean to have a tyrannical father?

What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The answer is that while all happy families are alike, the children of monsters are unhappy in their own way. Some dictatorial offspring are fairly normal while others are psychos. Nicu Ceausescu, son of the rulers of Romania, was from the age of 14 a figure of ‘comic-book evil’ whose hobbies included raping women. His brother, Valentin, is bookish and quiet, has a close circle of decent friends and works at the Institute of Atomic Physics outside Bucharest. For Svetlana Alliluyeva, being Stalin’s daughter was like being, as she put it,

Patrick Flanery

David Mitchell is in a genre of his own

David Mitchell’s new book, Slade House, is not quite a novel and not really a collection of short stories. It is, rather, a puzzle and an amusement. A member of the same family as last year’s The Bone Clocks, it also has a slight connection to his 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell has said in interviews that he thinks of his books being volumes in one mega work, or ‘übernovel’, and like his earlier fictions, Slade House meditates on varieties of predation, a theme explored to most moving effect in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten. The territory here is more straightforwardly supernatural, although the otherworldly high

Mark Bostridge

Charlotte Brontë: Cinderella or ugly sister?

Preparations for next year’s bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Charlotte Brontë haven’t exactly got off to a flying start. At Haworth Parsonage the Brontë Society is in disarray after Bonnie Greer, its resigning president, used one of her Jimmy Choo shoes as a gavel to try to bring the membership to order, and subsequently castigated some members as ‘malevolent lamebrains’. Three rounds of applause then for Claire Harman’s superb retelling of Charlotte’s story, which focuses anniversary attention where it should be: on the extraordinary creativity of the three sisters who spent most of their short lives in Haworth, that strange, windswept moorland village, and whose tragic destinies possessed all

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The swastika was always in plain sight

In 1940, when Stephen Spender heard a German bomber diving down towards London, he calmed himself by imagining that there were no houses, and that the bomber was ‘gyring and diving over an empty plain covered in darkness’. The image consoled Spender with his ‘smallness as a target, compared with the immensity of London’. But it also exposed the ‘submission of human beings to the mechanical forces that they had called into being’. It seemed to Spender that entire nations were gripped by the ‘magnetic force of power’. People ‘no longer had wills of their own’. As Tolstoy complained in the second epilogue to War and Peace, this sort of

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Mary Beard minds her S, P, Q and R

Having rattled and routed Mark Antony and his bewitching Egyptian at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian was on his way home to Rome when he was confronted by some punter. The man produced a talking raven, which obligingly squawked, ‘Greetings, Caesar, our victorious commander!’ Octavian was delighted at this evidence of loyalty, and rewarded the bird-trainer accordingly. However, it later emerged that the man had had another raven in reserve, which he had taught to croak, ‘Greetings, Antony, our victorious commander!’ He hadn’t been taking any chances. Nor, in a sense, does Mary Beard in her ambidextrous history of Ancient Rome, whose title proclaims her bifurcated programme.

Alexandra Coghlan

The polyphonous Babel of global music

‘Following custom, when the Siamese conquered the Khmer they carried off much of the population, including most of their musicians, to be resettled in what is now Thailand.’ The history of music isn’t a story of chords and scores, instruments or their players. Music’s story is one of wars, invasions and revolutions, religion, monarchy and nationhood. Whether you look at the histories of Africa or Iran, Europe or Uzbekistan, the narratives are the same: colourful, bloody, complicated. Music is not an aesthetic response, an artistic translation of life; music and musicians are society itself. It’s a principle that acts as the guiding thread through the labyrinth of traditions and terminologies

Tim Butcher

The greatest surprise about Nigeria on its centenary is that it exists at all

A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the trenches a framework was laid out for a nation that over the next century would grow into Africa’s mightiest economy, one with a population so prodigious it will soon overtake every other barring China and India. The founding on 1 January that year of the colony of Nigeria was an act of extreme imperial chutzpah. Desert emirates in the north and coastal kingdoms in the south had for years been under nominal control as British protectorates, but for London to unite such diversity was to believe a mosaic has no

Harriet Waugh

Curtain call for Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds or to unwitting acts of great courage — and extraordinary things can happen quite by chance to anyone. Carl, the central character, is a young man pleased with his life. He has written a novel that has been published, inherited his father’s small mews house in Maida Vale with its furniture and, significantly, a large supply of alternative remedies in the bathroom cabinet, and has a beautiful, kindly girlfriend called Nicola. He does not have a job, but he does have a tenant, Dermot, on the top floor who pays

Matthew Walther

The best thing about Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Inequality is the paper it’s printed on

Ten years ago, a philosophy professor at Princeton wrote a book with a provocative, slightly indecent title. It was a surprise bestseller, reaching number one on the New York Times’s list, and university book shops in America still do a roaring trade in copies of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, along with the usual Vonnegut and Sartre. In 2014, something similar happened when Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century sold 1.5 million copies in English, French, German, Mandarin, Urdu, Norwegian, Choctaw and so on. Not to be outdone, Princeton University Press has enlisted Frankfurt to produce a response to Piketty. On Inequality comprises two journal articles, ‘Equality as a Moral

Philip Hensher

Margaret Thatcher’s most surprising virtue: imagination

In almost every one of the many biographies of Margaret Thatcher that now exist, the story is told of her being congratulated for her good luck in winning a prize when she was nine — either for reciting poetry or for playing the piano. She indignantly replied, ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’ Now, in Charles Moore’s biography, we reach the splendid zenith of Mrs Thatcher’s career in the form of her second administration of 1983–7. We have to ask the question again: was she lucky, or did she deserve it? Clearly, one of the chief reasons that she was re-elected in 1983 after a period of staggering unpopularity was

Kate Womersley

Beyond the call of duty: the kindness of strangers is a pleasing mystery

When I applied to medical school, an experienced doctor offered me some advice: ‘Don’t give them reason to think you’re a “wounded healer”. They’re suspicious of that.’ The term is Carl Jung’s, by which he meant that personal difficulty is a powerful spur for joining a caring profession, but the results of such motivations are not always constructive. If you appear too altruistic, questions may surface about whether you might, in some way, be damaged. So what about those people who don’t just do their job, but dedicate their lives to helping others? The New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar examines our ambivalence about goodness in her brilliantly thoughtful new

Mark Cocker

Green is the colour of happiness

According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it is now. In those days people showed genuine wonder at their ‘strange existences and unquantifiable powers’, especially the British, who fashioned the most ambitious glass building of the age —the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park — drawing on the weird architecture of the amazonica lily as a blueprint. Richard Mabey suggests that these are more prosaic times, where trees are invariably seen as primary producers, economic heavy-lifters or practical oxygen-supply operatives, or merely as a vegetative background to the planet’s real agents: ourselves and other animals. In short the green

Thursday

Rose George

Lover and fighter

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed. But another dead man is the focus of this book: our hero is the captivating, frustrating, brutal Emile Griffith, who we meet at the age of 22, ‘happy and beautiful’, and who one year