Book review

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

Early Christian alms race

Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since his great life of St Augustine in 1967. His latest book, relatively short in volume but very wide in scope, explores Christian attitudes to the afterlife, from the time of Cyprian of Carthage (martyred in 258) to that of Julian, Bishop of Toledo in the late seventh century. Julian put together an anthology called the Prognosticon Futuri Saeculi. He viewed his book as a compilation of the shared wisdom of Christianity. What in fact he demonstrated, in this ‘futurology of the Christian soul’ as Brown calls it, was the extreme

Marek Kukula

Some watcher of the skies

We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, revealing a bizarre double-lobed mountain of ice and rock with landscapes of vertiginous crags and ashen scree slopes. In our image-saturated age it’s easy to forget that such views are only possible through the intermediary of sophisticated technology: cameras and computers and the spacecraft that carry them halfway across the solar system. And yet this is nothing new. Ever since the Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei first turned his telescope to the heavens in the autumn of 1609, advances in technology and great strides in knowledge have gone hand in

Philip Hensher

That unmistakable touch of Glass

Philip Glass is by now surely up there in the Telemann class among the most prolific composers in history. There must be an explanation, preferably a non-defamatory one, for how his technique has enabled him to produce such an enormous quantity of music. A glance at my iPod shows that Varese’s collected works are over in 150 minutes: Berg, Ravel and Debussy each managed to produce between ten and 15 hours of music at most. Glass’s style, which has been called ‘minimalist’, though he doesn’t accept the label, works on a bigger scale. He has written 25 operas, some, like Einstein on the Beach, as long as Die Meistersinger. He

Thursday

Honor Clerk

The self-taught maritime artist who transcends ‘naïve’ cliché

In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as much about the hunt for information as the processed results of the search. The facts of John Craske’s life are briefly told: born in Norfolk in 1881 into a fishing family, he suffered some sort of mental and physical breakdown while training with the army in 1917 and for the remaining 25 or so years of his life dodged in and out of invalidism, sometimes bedridden for long periods, sometimes out fishing with his brothers, sometimes working as a fish merchant and perpetually supported and nursed by his devoted wife,

Justin Cartwright

Justin Cartwright on redheads, anti-Semitism and the betrayal of Christ

Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the Catholic Herald. Writing Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened. Also, he may not have hanged himself. This is a fascinating story of febrile myth-making over two millennia, with very little historical fact. Stanford starts his pursuit of Judas with a visit to gloomy Hakeldama in Jerusalem, the place where Judas is traditionally said to have hanged himself — if he

Emily Rhodes

Melissa Kite comes out fighting. Again

Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing in court. She has been contrary since birth, putting her mother through six days of labour before eventually being pulled out by forceps. ‘Is she saying no?’ asks the doctor, perplexed by the distinctive ‘Naaaaaaaaah!’ sound of her new-born wail. Madison’s life begins with her voicing dissent and argument fills every moment of her adult life. Even her commute involves her quarrelling with the ticket officer about purchasing the lowest fare (she objects to an Oyster card because she doesn’t want ‘to be tagged and tracked like a sheep in

Matilda Bathurst

The secret life of the short story

The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of the novel. Denying itself the luxury of length, it is a martyr to the cause of shortness. When the short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel prize for literature, she seemed to personify the supposed modesty of her craft. With the blessing of the Swedish Academy, the short story had finally gained the status of a standalone art form: no longer, to quote Munro, ‘just something you played around with until you got a novel’. All this modesty seems at odds with the idea of an ‘epiphany’

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Brian Sewell does some donkey work: how Britain’s best-known art critic put his ass on the line

I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of this novella about a sensitive man called Mr B who rescues a donkey in Peshawar, names her Pavlova after the ballerina, and brings her overland all the way back home to Wimbledon to meet his dogs named after women painters of the 20th century, this feeling that the target reader is the childhood author himself is overwhelming. You learn more about the young, sweet, aesthetically precocious Brian Sewell while reading it than you do even about Persian carpets and the dusty towns on the old Silk Route. This is the

Frances Wilson

When Rex met Edith: a meeting of minds in interwar England

Rex Whistler — this book’s ‘bright young thing’ — was an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, and Edith Olivier, the ‘bluestocking’, was a novelist. They both deserve to be more famous than they are, and Anna Thomasson’s absorbing joint biography will doubtless make them so. They met through Stephen Tennant in 1924, when Olivier was 51 and Whistler was a 19-year-old student at what he called ‘the darling Slade’. She was snobbish and he was talented; liking one another from the start, they bonded over hair. Once Rex persuaded Edith to exchange her spinsterish bun for a ‘bingle’ — a daring combination of a shingle and a bob —

Peter Parker

The other trenches: the Dardanelles, 100 years on

In August 1915, in his tent at GHQ on the Aegean island of Imbros, General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief of the Gallipoli expedition, woke from a dream in which someone was attempting to drown him in the Hellespont. ‘For hours afterwards,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles were fatal: that something sinister was afoot: that we, all of us, were pre-doomed.’ This was not how it had seemed when what had been confidently designated ‘the Constantinople expedition’ set out for the distant and largely unknown Turkish peninsula. As an exhilarated Rupert Brooke had explained to his mother: We are going to be

Thursday

Tim Martin

Things fall apart in Denis Johnson’s latest novel of madness and anarchy in Sierra Leone

‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one of the morally bankrupt spies who careers around Africa in Denis Johnson’s tenth novel, but they might equally well describe Johnson himself, a writer always happiest in his work when the wheels come off and the world breaks down. His novels vary in setting (Prohibition America in Train Dreams, the Vietnam war in Tree of Smoke, a future post-apocalypse in Fiskadoro) but they share a mixture of gravitas and derangement, sarcasm and lyricism, comic danger and dangerous comedy that makes them reliably fascinating — and reliably peculiar. You certainly wouldn’t

Robert Collins

Miranda July may be a film director, performance artist, sculptor and designer — but she is no novelist

Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won the Best First Feature award at Cannes for her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. Two years later, she picked up the Frank O’Connor short story award for her debut collection No One Belongs Here More Than You. She has been feted at the Venice Biennale for her artworks and last year released an app called Somebody, which encourages users to deliver messages verbally to strangers. Now, she has published The First Bad Man, her debut novel. I know: a novel. After conquering every arthouse peak imaginable,

Philip Ziegler

Lesley Blanch: a true original on the wilder shores of exoticism

Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four upper-class European ladies who abandoned their natural habitat to seek and find romance in the Middle East. If one had to pick only one of Blanch’s books to read there could be no better choice than this; but, as this exotic potpourri reminds one, she was incapable of writing boringly or badly. The most substantial part of Lesley Blanch: On the Wilder Shores of Love (a title which seems designed to deceive putative readers into thinking that they have read it all before) is Blanch’s record of her youth —

Cressida Connolly

A mad menage — and menagerie – in Mexico: the life of Leonora Carrington in fictional form

Leonora Carrington is one of those jack-in-the-boxes who languish forgotten in the cultural toy cupboard and then pop up every few years to a small flurry of excitement. Born in 1917, the child of a rich Lancastrian industrialist, she ran away to Paris to paint and there became the lover of Max Ernst. She lived at the heart of the Surrealist group, fleeing war-torn Europe with a gaggle of artists to sail to New York, where she kept company with Peggy Guggenheim, Dalí, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp et al. Raven-haired and chain-smoking, she spent time in a Spanish lunatic asylum, married a Mexican, painted and wrote. There were lovers, a

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings (who ought to know) is not impressed by Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former adviser and self-styled ‘delivery man’

In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and brought him into Downing Street. Once there Barber set up Blair’s ‘Delivery Unit’ and oversaw his attempts to reform public services. He then moved to the McKinsey consultancy where he cloned his unit for governments around the world. He has now written a book, How to Run a Government, about what he calls ‘deliverology’ — an ‘emerging science of delivery’. It is part memoir and part a ‘how to’ manual describing ‘a set of processes that enables governments to deliver ambitious goals’. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s adviser, is reported saying

Alan Judd

Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war

Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day Normandy landings were merely a diversion. Great use was made of captured German agents in Britain who sent disinformation about invented army divisions and ships allocated to the supposedly ‘real’ landings still to come. Much less well known, though of arguably equal consequence, was a similar deception operation in the Middle East, based on an MI6 agent known as CHEESE. He came to be regarded by the Germans as their most valuable source in the region, despite the fact that the disinformation he fed them helped prevent them capturing Cairo

Matthew Walther

John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf

To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is synonymous with bogus spending on public works, insouciance in the face of mounting debt and, of course, homosexual promiscuity. It’s a virtue of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography that it makes clear how much this under-reads him. So far from being the flippant old queer calumniated by Niall Ferguson, Keynes worried himself sick about inflation and was far more alarmed by budget deficits than George Osborne seems to be. He was essentially a Nonconformist Liberal for whom faith was impossible, and who saw liberalism as something needing saving from itself. He was also,

Nigel Jones

The knives come out of the cabinet in Churchill’s wartime government

Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston Churchill as he struggled to survive, then win, a world war, while at the same time managing his fractious three-party administration at home. In this scholarly, yet grippingly readable study of the wartime coalition, Jonathan Schneer, an Anglophile American academic, reveals how much of a myth the popular legend of a political class and nation united behind their belligerent war leader truly was. Rather than the resolute, single-minded team rolling up their sleeves for the coming fight as portrayed by David Low in his famous cartoon ‘All Behind You, Winston’

Colin Fleming

A lost American classic to rival anything by Faulkner

It’s rare that granitic and iron-jawed prose is also enveloping and warm, but that’s just one of the many enticing literary paradoxes in the American writer John Ehle’s 1964 novel The Land Breakers. The work was the first of seven volumes that Ehle dubbed his ‘mountain novels’, books which today tend to get tagged as historical, a disservice that has kept Ehle a peg below some of the southern heavies (including even Faulkner) whom he sometimes manages to eclipse. There’s a twinge of something less artful when one tosses in the word ‘historical’, as though the resulting novel relies on borrowings from an earlier era rather than the author’s imagination.

Helen R Brown

Wolves in the Lake District get everyone’s pheromones going

Locate. Stalk. Encounter. Rush. Chase. The pace of Sarah Hall’s fifth novel follows the five stages of a wolf hunt as she imagines a pack of apex predators restored to the British countryside: the thrill of lean, grey flanks streaking through the bracken sending vital adrenalin coursing through an ecosystem grown sluggish. Her fiction is clearly based on the plans of Paul Lister, the heir to the MFI fortune who’s been assembling an ancient wilderness on his 23,000-acre Alladale estate in north eastern Scotland. The deciduous trees, elk and wild boar have already been slotted into place and in 2013 he announced he was conducting feasibility studies for the reintroduction