The Telegraph has an exclusive extract from Alan Hollingshurst’s The Stranger’s Child. And Hari Kunzru reviews the novel for the Guardian.
‘As an accounting with class and history, Hollinghurst’s novel will inevitably be compared to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It is at its strongest when teasing out nuances of social behaviour: Paul Bryant, the shy bank clerk, is so concerned to behave appropriately with his employer’s family that as he walks home after spending time in their company, “the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face”. The fashionable decorator, Mrs Riley, makes Daphne uncomfortable by observing her “in her disappointed and reducing way”.
As should be clear by now, The Stranger’s Child is a profoundly nostalgic book, in the strict Greek sense of “homesickness”: it longs to go home to the prelapsarian past, from whose
sensuous immediacy (two lovers in a wood) we have been exiled into the rootless present. The modern world (and indeed the world of modernism) appears to have few positive qualities. We hear that
the poem “Two Acres” “will be read for as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things”. The unspoken implication is that such an
aesthetic appreciation is getting increasingly rare, and though these words are placed in the mouth of Cecil’s editor, Sebastian Stokes, the reader feels that it is a position with which the author
has sympathy.’
The Telegraph’s Peter Oborne reviews
Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre’s controversial biography of Ed Miliband.
‘The story of how the younger Miliband stole his brother’s patrimony will be told again and again because it stretches so deep into the human psyche. Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre
have made an excellent preliminary investigation. Their book is shrewd, scrupulously researched and provides revelations on every page: for instance, the fact that Gordon Brown adores Ed Miliband
“like a son”; the strength of the collusion between Ed and the trade unions; the decisive role played by Neil Kinnock in persuading him to run against his brother. It provides the basis
for any serious understanding both of Ed Miliband and the modern Labour Party.
This epic tale starts with Sam Miliband, a Jewish leatherworker from Brussels who was suddenly forced to flee with his son Adolphe from the advancing German armies in early 1940. Upon arrival in Britain they discover a nation at war: to avoid confusion Adolphe changes his name to Ralph. Like so many Jewish immigrants, young Ralph flourishes in Britain. He settles in leafy Primrose Hill and becomes a widely revered Marxist social scientist, urging revolution to bring down the hated British ruling class.
He and his wife, Marion, have two sons. David, the eldest, is brilliantly successful. He reads Politics Philosophy and Economics at Corpus Christi, Oxford, does a postgraduate course in the US, then returns to Britain as a Labour Party researcher and later a highly regarded special adviser in the Blair government, and is in time promoted to the Cabinet.
Younger brother Ed follows David’s course every step of the way. But he is quieter and more introspective than his brother, and it is widely assumed that he is content with this secondary role. Then comes the general election defeat of 2010, and a moment of dramatic crisis.’
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