Book review

Thursday

Claire Lowdon

In the name of the father

‘People talk about their childhood and it’s so mundane. I don’t remember much about it, if I’m honest. I can’t even tell you what my father’s voice sounded like.’ In Stuart Evers’s story ‘Frequencies’, in this collection, a besotted new father hears this pronouncement coming from the baby monitor. The monitor is picking up a radio signal, so the sound of eight-month-old Jack’s precious snuffling is overlaid with hardheaded recollections of an anonymous speaker’s parents. ‘They were such dull people… I… pitied them even before I knew what the word meant.’ Eventually the juxtaposition grows too much for the father, and he smashes the baby monitor. Then he goes to

Peter Hoskin

Kultural icon

The almond eyes that rise towards their outer edges. The cheekbones that curve down to the corners of those upholstered lips. The dark strands of hair that fall wisplike on to her chest. The hourglass extremities that will exercise your ciliary muscles until they snap. Dear me! After looking at this book, you’ll be more familiar with the particulars of Kim Kardashian’s body than with your own lover’s. For this is her hardback collection of selfies. It contains almost 500 photographs of Kim, by Kim. Six of them include her daughter; 60 of them feature at least one of her siblings; 100 have Kim in a bikini, in her underwear

Andre Van Loon

The elite who tried to save Russia

The veteran Russian historian Dominic Lieven’s new study of Russia’s descent towards the first world war is deeply researched, highly valuable in its focus on Russia, and unfailingly well-written: more proof of Lieven’s profound knowledge of the Russian empire. One of his earlier works, Russia’s Rulers Under the Old Regime (1989), focused on the 150 men who ran Russia until 1917. Towards the Flame shares that work’s careful attention to a tiny elite of well-educated, cosmopolitan, mostly aristocratic men. With breathtaking directness, he says that fewer than 50 men (and it was all men) in Europe in 1914 took the decisions that led their countries into war. Towards the Flame

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Pursuing the perfect scoop

Paradise City, Elizabeth Day’s third novel, comes with an accompanying essay on The Pool — an online magazine for the Instagram, iPhone woman. Day, a feature writer for the Observer, discusses the novel’s male protagonist (you couldn’t call him hero) Sir Howard Pink, an East End Jewish boy turned rag-trade multimillionaire. Day urges women to stop being so self-effacing, people-pleasing, and permanently apologetic and instead to ‘Be More Howard’. ‘He sprung on to the page as unashamedly male and blessed with a defiant sense of his own entitlement,’ she writes. ‘He saw money, sex and power as his due. He took what he could, where he could get it and

Will Nicoll

A nation in trauma

Albania is a small country of 2.7 million people, wedged within the Balkan peninsula. Separated from both Greece and Italy by mere kilometres of seascape and shoreline, it borders the European Union, and, with official candidate status as a member country, strongly hopes for closer ties. As Fred C. Abrahams describes it, the country’s transition from cultish Stalinist dictatorship to functioning democracy in only three decades should be a source of debate, intrigue and pride. The principal protagonists in the ‘drama’ of transition are ‘a paranoid dictator, an ambitious doctor, a scheming economist and an urban artist’. Observed by Abrahams himself — first as a media trainer, and next as

Anthony Sattin

Striking Middle Sea

With summer on its way, thoughts turn south to olive groves and manicured vineyards, to the warm water and hot beaches of the Mediterranean. But this sea that is a place of rest and beauty for some of us is the scene of drama and often despair for many others, among them people trying to cross from North Africa. So which is it, a place of calm and beauty, of refinement and culture, or one of drama and much tragedy, buffeted by the consequences of geo-political shifts? The Mediterranean has long been used to reconciling opposites, as two new books make abundantly clear. To ancient Greeks and Romans, the Mediterranean

Thursday

Matthew Dennison

It takes a thief…

In the words of one of his contemporaries ‘a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes’, the 17th-century ne’er-do-well Thomas Blood sounds an unattractive proposition. His latest biographer, Robert Hutchinson, works hard to imbue him with the pantomime glamour of a lovable rogue. Hutchinson roots Blood’s rackety life firmly within the context of the equally rackety Restoration underworld, with its network of spies and spymasters, venial courtiers and religious fanatics. Appropriately he makes vivid use of the sort of rhetoric more often associated with old-fashioned adventure stories. His Blood is a forerunner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, ‘a man of action who would risk all to liberate his

Ursula Buchan

Calm after the storm

I hesitate ever to criticise an author for the inappropriateness of a book’s title, since it’s more likely the fault of someone in marketing, who’s had a Bright Idea. But whoever is the culprit, the omission of the dates ‘1650–1800’ from the dust jacket certainly risks annoying the bookshop browser, who may grumpily set the book to one side in a huff. This would be a pity, since there is a great deal of value in Mark Laird’s exposition of his multifarious research projects. He is senior lecturer in landscape architectural history at Harvard Graduate School of Design, but probably best known this side of the Atlantic for the leading

D J-Taylor

Cats, curates and cardigans

Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take comfort from the roller-coaster career of Barbara Pym. Between 1950 and 1961 Miss Pym (1913–1980) had published six modestly successful novels with the firm of Jonathan Cape. Then, on 24 March 1963 — ‘a sobering fourth Sunday in Lent’, as Ann Allestree is careful to remind us — came a bolt from the skies, in the shape of a letter from Cape’s editorial director, Wren Howard, turning down the seventh with the age-old publisher’s bromide that ‘in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover

Sofka Zinovieff

The frog prince

It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert ‘the Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy. Both gorgeous young men were known for their risky sexual escapades. What did ruffle feathers, however, was when Watson subsequently gave the Mad Boy a car. Cecil Beaton was so jealous that he demanded one too. And it was forthcoming: ‘Do please select any roadster which catches your fancy,’ replied the exceedingly wealthy Watson, who inspired lifelong unrequited love in poor Beaton. The Mad Boy’s long-term partner was Lord Berners, the famously eccentric composer, painter and writer, who retaliated by pinning Watson to the page of

Daniel Swift

‘What will they do when I am gone?’

Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more & more from a silly but unavoidable nervous interest in the children’s movement in and out of the house’. The following year, he noted, I have no ‘interests’ at all, and marriage, he said, is ‘continually encrusting the soul’. To be fair, his life was a torment — depression, worrying about and writing for money, a miserable marriage — and perhaps most cruel of all he was denied the comfort we have, as later readers, of knowing that it will all turn out all right in the end. His was a

Charlotte Hobson

Micro-managing the terror

‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in his introduction. Indeed, in Putin’s Russia Stalin’s apologists and admirers seem daily to become more vocal. The language of the 1930s is used in televised tirades against ‘internal enemies’ and ‘foreign agents’. Stalin himself is upheld not only as a strong leader, but also as an ‘effective manager’ who, despite his mistakes, did what was necessary to modernise the Soviet Union; or, contrarily, as a benevolent dictator who was unaware of the corrupt actions of his officials. In short, there could hardly be a more opportune moment for the publication

Frances Wilson

Demonised Barber of Fleet Street

We know a great deal about Samuel Johnson and virtually nothing about his Jamaican servant, Francis Barber. The few facts of which we can be certain are these: born into slavery, Barber was aged about seven when his owner, Colonel Richard Bathhurst — who may, Michael Bundock suggests here, have been his father — brought him to England in 1750 and placed him in a Yorkshire school. Five years later, on his deathbed, Bathurst bequeathed Barber £12 and his freedom. It was Bathurst’s son who introduced Francis, now 12 years old, to Dr Johnson, whose wife had died two weeks earlier. Thus Barber spent his next 30 years in Gough

Cressida Connolly

Throw away the Valium and start bragging instead

This is not a book to be read in solitude. Not for the obvious reason that it’s frightening, but because every few lines some fascinating or unexpected fact forces you to exclaim: ‘Blimey! Listen to this …’ The three authors are American psychology professors. As young academics they were much influenced by the work of the anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose final book, The Denial of Death, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. This work struck them as a most important and potentially fruitful area for further investigation. Over the past 30 years, between them, they seem to have invented a new area of research with the unpromising name of Terror Management

Caroline Moore

God help me shippies!

T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, of which Flood of Fire is the final volume, talk like a whole Benares brass bazaar. As an avid reader of both Hobson-Jobson (the dictionary of Anglo-Indian slang) and Patrick O’Brian, I thought that the trilogy, set in the First Opium War, would combine the delights of both. And so it does; but one can have too much of a good thing. The linguistic pudding is often so over-egged that it clogs the arteries of the narrative. Ghosh’s rendition of the ‘Laskari’ of eastern sailors is superb: That

Rose George

Suffering a sea change

The oceans cover seven-tenths of our planet, and although it may not seem like it above the surface, they are very busy. Helen Scales and Christian Sardet are marine biologists: Sardet is apparently known as Uncle Plankton, and those multitudes of drifting organisms — ‘plankton’ comes from the Greek planktos, meaning to wander or drift — are his life’s work. Scales’s focus is the shell-making creatures that are molluscs, though focus seems an inappropriate word for such a vast body of life: a 1993 survey of just one island, New Caledonia, found 2,738 distinct species, and 80 per cent of them were new to science. They are ‘some of the

Thursday

Caspar Henderson

Raiders of the lost Ark

Years ago, in an ill-conceived attempt to break into natural history radio, I borrowed a nearly dead car from a friend in West Hollywood and drove across town to the Los Angeles Zoo to report on a project to save the California condor from extinction. By the 1980s the number of condors had — thanks in part to the birds’ tendency to fly into live power lines — plunged to a few tens, and the species was on the brink. The remaining individuals were taken into captivity and a breeding programme begun. Newly hatched chicks were raised by hand — that is, by glove puppets made to look like adult

Helen R Brown

Punk in a funk

Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find the comments posted beneath it full of praise for the liquid melancholy in her lovely voice. The simple sound of air passing from her lungs, across her larynx and out of her lips in the 1990s is ‘sexy’, ‘soulful’, ‘classy’ and, most often, ‘perfect’. And don’t get her wrong; she’s chuffed that people like the noise she makes. But she frets about how much this ‘disembodied voice’ has to do with the rest of Tracey Thorn: the introvert with the ‘suburban’ speaking voice. The anxieties she has built up around

Conrad Black

Not-so-evil genius

It is almost inconceivable that there could be a more densely detailed book about Napoleon than this — 800 crowded pages to get him from his birth in 1769 to his acclamation as First Consul for life in 1802. When completed in three or more further volumes, this will be an extremely comprehensive study. As only French biographers can do, every conceivable motive and alternative scenario is presented at every stage in the astonishing rise of the subject from the petty and parvenu and rather impecunious nobility of Corsica to a greater position of power than anyone had exercised in Europe since Charlemagne, if not the greater Roman emperors. The

Mario Reading

A choice of first novels | 14 May 2015

As all writers know to their cost, first novels are never really first novels. They make their appearance after countless botched attempts at the perfect debut — a debut that always lurks just out of view, but seems tantalisingly easy for everyone else. My first published novel was fifth down the line. It was a line of sad, self-obsessed and achingly self-conscious junk manuscripts that now gather dust in a filing system that has long since lost any recognisable methodology. Jesse Armstrong, on the other hand, although making his debut in fiction with Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals, is no stranger to writing success. He already has a