Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Yesterday

25 Feb 2021
Craig Brown

Hellcat on the loose: Samantha Markle rants about Meghan

A while ago, Samantha Markle declared that her forthcoming book would be about ‘the beautiful nuances of our lives’. Was it a misprint for beautiful nuisances? Or did she have a change of heart? Either way, there isn’t a beautiful nuance in sight. Instead, it is like a blunt object found at the scene of a crime. As royal memoirs go, it is by far the most macabre, and perhaps even loopier than the Duchess of York’s Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself. By the third page Samantha already has her knives out. The first person to get it in the back is her mother, a forgotten figure who met Thomas Markle on a blind date. ‘Roslyn was 5ft 9in, had red hair, was not shy and was quite “available”,’ writes Samantha, who employs inverted commas like rubber gloves, to insulate herself from what she is saying.

Hellcat on the loose: Samantha Markle rants about Meghan

Wednesday

24 Feb 2021

Thursday

18 Feb 2021
Rodric Braithwaite

The true diplomat considers the future more than the present

The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country’. It is a neatly punning definition. An ambassador is a messenger, who has to live (lie) abroad long enough to understand the interests, the preoccupations and the driving emotions of the people he deals with. He has to be honest if his own government and his foreign interlocutors are to trust him to manage their business effectively. He may occasionally have to be economical with the truth to further his government’s interests. If he doesn’t relish that, he can resign; few do. He may find himself disobeying his masters’ instructions if that is the only way he can achieve what they need. The work is rarely glamorous (the champagne and chandeliers are usually conspicuous by their absence), often tedious, sometimes dangerous.

The true diplomat considers the future more than the present

Wednesday

17 Feb 2021
The Book Club

Judith Flanders: A Place For Everything

43 min listen

My guest in this week’s books podcast is the historian Judith Flanders, whose A Place For Everything tells the story of a vital but little considered part of intellectual history: alphabetical order. Judith tells me how this innovation both reflected and enabled the movement from oral to written culture, from a dogmatic to a secular worldview, and made possible the modern administrative state. And we touch on, among other things, prototypes of the Post-It note, the contribution of the French Revolution to indexing, the bizarre British Library shelfmark for Gawain and the Green Knight, and why Dewey, of decimal fame, was an utter rotter.

Judith Flanders: A Place For Everything

Tuesday

16 Feb 2021
Joanna Blythman

When poison is the cure: examining today’s processed meat

Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich? is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was first published in France in 2017 as Cochonneries, a play on words that better reflects the nuanced nature of his argument. Cochonnerie means rubbish, or junk. Derived from cochon — pig — it’s a clever title for a volume that examines, with impressive historical and scientific depth, a group of chemicals extensively used to manufacture processed meats. Investigations into cured meats, such as saucisson, bacon and ham, are big in France, but until now rare in the UK where the word charcuterie barely trips off the lips of the affluent classes, let alone the general populace. But Coudray, a documentary film maker, follows in the footsteps of the food journalist Jean-Pierre Coffe, who from the 1990s warned the French public that their time-honoured artisan foods were being supplanted by hi-tech look-alikes.

When poison is the cure: examining today’s processed meat

Thursday

11 Feb 2021
Jamie Collinson

On the track of a mysterious recluse: Maxwell’s Demon, by Steven Hall, reviewed

This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp in 2007, when the critic James Wood had declared in favour of realism, and Steven Hall published his debut, The Raw Shark Texts. It was a British metafictional novel that created a big splash. Noted for its innovative design, it transformed into a flick book in which a text-block shark menaced the reader. In the years since its publication, mainstream experimentalism has paled into the cosy, metafiction-lite of Matt Haig, though there’s quality stuff on the fringes — Rob Doyle’s Threshold, for example. Hall has been undeterred by shifting fashions, and his follow-up shares many of the features of his debut.

On the track of a mysterious recluse: Maxwell’s Demon, by Steven Hall, reviewed

Wednesday

10 Feb 2021

Thursday

4 Feb 2021
Philip Hensher

Imagining a future for John Keats — the novelist

Keats long ago became the meaningless emblem of poetic genius. When the poet Amanda Gorman appeared at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, both detractors and admirers wanted to set her against the highest possible comparison. They didn’t reach for the US’s new Nobel laureate, Louise Glück. They went for Keats: either ‘Amanda Gorman is Keats-level brilliant’ or ‘Well, it’s not exactly Keats’. But what is Keats, exactly? It seems to me that there is a difference between the 5ft English poet who worked for a very few years before dying at 25 in 1821, and the idea of ‘Keats’. The idea of ‘Keats’ encompasses a great love story with Fanny Brawne; some beautiful, dreamy phrases; and a couple of impressive philosophical statements which, as it happens, fit very well into a tweet.

Imagining a future for John Keats — the novelist
Useful links
More from The Spectator
About us
Subscribe
Useful links
About us
More from The Spectator
Subscribe