My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane. Consequently I went to bed with Joanna Trollope, woke up with Philip Roth, had an affair with Tom Bower’s Conrad Black biography (principally because I felt I had to) and spent several days by the pool in Banyuls as the cicadas blithely scratched away in the olive trees with Rupert Everett. I even spent an afternoon with James Patterson just to see what all the fuss is about. But what mostly captured my attention was castration. Ever since Antony Beevor and Simon Sebag Montefiore began having genuine hits with the likes of Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, the manicured beaches and the teak and stainless steel terraces of southern Europe during the summer months have been littered with what the literary fraternity still refuses to admit it calls war porn. And we all fall in.
On my own recent European soft-core tour I devoured The Islamist by Ed Husain (always good to have your prejudices confirmed) and Arkady Babchenko’s quite extraordinary memoir, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya (it’s published here in November). Drafted as an 18-year-old conscript, Babchenko turns from naive recruit to brutalised soldier in the space of months, and his book is truly shocking — Catch-22 in slo-mo, as vivid as modern unedited TV news footage. ‘The commander orders us to do a sweep through the village. All the men who could be found are herded into the square. They are thrown down in piles and then our soldiers start to hack them up. One guy pins a Chechen to the ground with his foot, while a second pulls off his trousers and with two or three hefty slashes severs his scrotum.
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