Book review

Thursday

John Niven

A watershed moment in music history

In 1994 I was working in marketing at London Records, a frothy pop label part-owned by the Polygram Group — both long gone, swallowed up by Warner Bros. That summer some Americans came into our office to pitch us a project. Rather than unfurling some band or singer, they wanted to talk about technology, specifically the internet and what it would mean to our business in the future. They were looking for an investment of around 50 grand. They talked about how, in the future, kids would buy music on their computers and that they would be able to do it anywhere — on the train, in the street. ‘But

Emily Rhodes

The traffic in human misery

When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she travels to Delhi to uncover the circumstances of his death. On the surface, Invisible Threads is a novel about an English woman on a personal journey to India, and comes with many of the trappings we’d expect. Lucy Beresford describes the country’s assault on her protagonist’s senses and observes the seeming contradictions of poverty, such as when Sara sees a barefooted beggar — her ‘hair is matted, her turquoise sari filthy, but she is carrying a mobile phone’. Sara also finds India to be palpably erotic, imagining how a sari

Paul Levy

From ambrosia to zabaglione

Should sugar be taxed? Some of the contributors to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets seem to think so. Sugar certainly appears less appealing than it used to. Its negative effect on our teeth is undeniable, and it now takes the rap for many of the ills we formerly blamed on fats, such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. But sugar is also now bound up with politics, because of its historical connection with slavery. Our awareness of this we owe to the groundbreaking, imaginative scholarship of Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is easily the most frequently referenced work

Philip Marsden

Bogs and fogs

In his poem ‘Eden Rock’, Charles Causley conjures up a dreamy memory of a childhood picnic ‘somewhere beyond Eden Rock’. He reported later: ‘Somebody asked me the other day where Eden Rock is —I mean I have no idea, I made it up! “Dartmoor,” I said — that’s always a safe answer.’ As southern England’s largest expanse of unenclosed land, Dartmoor has always been a good place to lose things: dangerous prisoners, children on their Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards, military manoeuvres. It has also swallowed up voluminous amounts of parliamentary time, ministerial reports, public enquiries and arcane legislation — all of which centres on one simple question: what’s it for?

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Celebrations of song and humanity

‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.’ Ask any musician for a one-sentence summary of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and they will probably tell you that he is Hungary’s national composer — a musical modernist who passionately championed his nation’s folk music tradition. David Cooper’s new biography seeks both to enrich and complicate that statement, questioning the definition of musical ‘nationalism’ in a country of such pronounced ethnic heterogeneity, at a time when borders were being drawn and redrawn, peoples created and destroyed, across Europe. The portrait that emerges is of no mindless patriot, celebrating his nation

Allan Mallinson

The bravest of the brave

‘It is the task of a Patton or a Napoleon to persuade soldiers that bits of ribbon are intrinsically valuable. The historian’s job, in part, is to spot contradictions and unravel obfuscations, and the history of the VC is steeped in both.’ To this job of de-obfuscating, Gary Mead, former journalist and military historian, might well add ‘though the heavens fall’. For although he concedes that, remarkably, the Victoria Cross remains ‘one of the few British institutions that is untarnished by accusations of corruption, scandal, political intrigue or manipulation’, the procedure for awarding the highest British decoration for courage in the presence of the enemy is ‘peppered with anomalies, contradictions,

Mark Cocker

To Hell in a handcart — again

Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent’s environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the world’s ecosystems. The case he lays bare with moving clarity in the opening chapters is compelling stuff. Essentially he argues that the world of wild creatures, plants, trees and whole habitats — you name it — is going to Hell in a handcart as a consequence of what he calls ‘the human project’. The cultural

Ian Thomson

Beautiful, bedevilled island

The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Arab rule was generally tolerant, its dolce far niente evocative of sultans, minarets, concubines and other jasmine-scented delights. Walking round Palermo today, however, one is assailed by less lovely smells. Parts of the city remain unreconstructed since the Allies bombed it in 1943: fire-blackened palazzi and rubble-strewn slumlands speak of the Mafia’s systematic ransacking of the public coffers. A still darker side of Palermo finds expression in the 19th-century catacombs of the Capuchin friary, situated near the Arab-Fatamid pleasure palace of La Zisa (‘the magnificent’). Some 8,000 embalmed corpses moulder

Keith Miller

Nasty piece of work

Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled detective fiction’. The new book is not so much hard-boiled as slowly poached, Heston Blumenthal style, in a sous-vide water oven, then finished on a violently hot grill. King has the popular novelist’s gifts in spades — a flawless sense of pace, an ear for dialogue, an eye for the telling detail, a no-mess-no-fuss approach to characterisation. He also has special insights into the uncanny: his frequent forays into the supernatural are wrenchingly plausible, while his rendering of ‘ordinary’ things — a face, a doorway, the hollowed-out roots of a

Houman Barekat

Lulzfags v. moralfags

It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about fine-dining establishments. Their star-rating system had become a mainstay of lifestyle reviews long before the Internet came along. In the digital age, this work has been comprehensively crowd-sourced: the immense success of review sites such as Yelp and Amazon has been built on the voluntary input of users. In theory, it should have been a consumer rights utopia. But product reviews are big business — and where there is lucre, there are shenanigans. ‘Astroturfing’ — the posting of fake reviews by competitors or business owners — is just one of

Ariane Bankes

Dizzying swirls of impasto

With a career of more than 60 years so far, Frank Auerbach is undoubtedly one of the big beasts of the British art world. His personal reticence, however, and the condensed, impacted idiom of his painting have contributed to his enigmatic, somewhat opaque reputation. Catherine Lampert, who has sat regularly and patiently for him since 1978, is uniquely qualified to throw light both on the man and his art, but the tactics she employs here are very different from those of Martin Gayford in Man with a Blue Scarf, his intimate, engrossing account of sitting for Lucian Freud. Matching Auerbach’s reticence with her own, she keeps herself largely out of

Simon Bradley

Something sensational to read on the train

Readers who have put in some time on the railways may remember the neat, brush-painted graffiti that appeared in 1974 on a wall facing the line just outside Paddington station: FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE. Not until Banksy took up his spraycan did a piece of London graffiti make such a stir. The Telegraph’s Peter Simple column attributed the long-lasting inscription to the shadowy ‘Master of Paddington’ and the Oxford commuter-poet Roger Green mused on the hauntingly unspecific slogan in his journal Notes From Overground, a minor publishing hit of 1984. Another 20 years passed before the perpetrators were outed; it turned out that their

Robert Collins

A triumphant failure

I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a nutty, occasionally hilarious, flaccid carrier bag of a comic romp, all dazzling one-liners and no comic paydirt. Like his debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole (about a misfit philosopher and his troubled son), it is narrated by a pair of human catastrophes: a New South Wales police constable, Liam Wilder, who’s a failed novelist; and his best friend, Aldo Benjamin, who’s a failed husband, entrepreneur, everything. Toltz probably intended this novel to be a failure. It’s that difficult beast, his second book, after all (his

Justin Cartwright

Lost in the telling

This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key fact I can provide without giving away the plot is that Caroline, the film-making wife of Michael, the novel’s main protagonist, is killed in the badlands of Pakistan by a drone controlled from a facility near Las Vegas. Caroline is filming Taleban leaders when they and Caroline are killed. Michael, who is ‘an immersive journalist’, has spent some years on a project with gangs in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is dangerous but rewarding work, and after a few years his findings are published to some acclaim under

Malcolm Rifkind

There’s no substitute for human intelligence

Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot over the years, and continues to do so. During the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, the main preoccupation of our intelligence agencies has not been with classic espionage by the Soviet Union, or with identifying new Philbys operating on their behalf. Espionage still goes on, but it is small beer compared to the terrorist threat that commands no less than 75 per cent of our agencies’ time and resources. Stephen Grey takes us through the transformation in the recent past experienced by MI6, MI5 and GCHQ, as

Philip Hensher

When we were very young

Few monarchs could become novelists. They wouldn’t be able to develop the practice, or possess the necessary temperament. No monarch could sit in the corner of a room observing, or walk the streets unnoticed. They don’t have much of a chance of a long morning working quietly, without interruption, or of seeing what ordinary people are like at their most natural and unselfconscious. (Imagine what changes would have had to take place in Edward VII’s life before he could have thought of writing fiction.) If they are never going to have the chance to observe and to write, they are also unlikely to have the disposition to do so. The

Thursday

Rose Prince

Romance of the old kitchen garden

Considerable areas of our memory are taken up with food: it might be the taste of Mother’s sponge, the melting texture of an aunt’s buttery pastry or something recent, like the flavour of the first spoonful of a sour and nutty south-east Asian dish. Especially good meals are recalled with the same clarity as revolting school dinners and the stench of stale fish — we can conjure aromatic memories with ease thanks to the olfactory nerve, the brain’s cache of stored eating experience that helps us to tell good from bad when choosing what to eat. Jennifer A. Jordan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, believes

Pippa Goldschmidt

The strangest objects we know of

The idea of black holes sounds so quintessentially modern and 20th-century that it may come as a surprise to learn that it originated over 200 years ago; John Michell, a natural philosopher and clergyman, used Newtonian physics to conceive of a star massive enough to prevent even light from escaping its gravitational pull. Marcia Bartusiak’s lively and readable account of the history of black holes kicks off with an account of Michell’s 1784 paper. There’s a lull in the story after that, because a proper formulation of the physics had to wait until Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915. This date is significant; it’s the 100th anniversary of this

Jonathan Meades

A 50-year infatuation

The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions to painting is René Magritte — whose best work David Sylvester rather rashly claimed induces ‘the sort of awe felt in the presence of an eclipse’. Julian Barnes discusses what he calls the artist’s doctrine (doctrine?) of ‘elective affinities’, which proposes the antipodes of Lautréamont’s ‘chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. Thus in the painting of that name a birdcage is filled not with a random safety razor or knuckleduster but with a giant egg. Barnes then introduces an acquaintance who ‘can’t drive

Mark Mason

Funny things happen on the way to the Scillies

It’s a real skill, writing about a journey where nothing ever happens. We shouldn’t be surprised that Simon Armitage is so good at it: he’s a poet, and therefore used to reporting on nothing happening, or rather spotting the little things that are always happening but the rest of us are too busy to notice. His chosen route this time — the South West Coast Path through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall and on to the Scillies — is normally praised because it gets you away from everything. Yet while he’s there Armitage discovers … well, maybe not everything, but certainly a very entertaining book’s worth of stuff. His schtick is