Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Today

25 Nov 2021
Sara Wheeler
The unfamiliar Orwell: the writer as passionate gardener

This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its intrusions. To explore the theme, Rebecca Solnit has produced a sequence of loosely linked essays around the roses and fruit bushes the author of Animal Farm planted in 1936 in the garden of his modest Hertfordshire house. A Californian with more than 20 books behind her, Solnit opens this latest with a pilgrimage to Wallington, where Orwell’s Albertine roses have endured. The blooms instigate a reconsideration of the man ‘most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism’, which in turn invites the author ‘to dig deeper’ and question ‘who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty.

The unfamiliar Orwell: the writer as passionate gardener

Yesterday

24 Nov 2021

Thursday

18 Nov 2021
Marcus Berkmann
Elephants walk on tiptoes — but can they dance? This year’s stocking-fillers explore such puzzles

It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that, should you be given one of these for Christmas by the aunt who hates you or the brother who merely despises you, you might actually enjoy it — more than the acrylic scarf or the comedy socks that I always get from my least favourite relatives, anyway. What with one thing and another, there are roughly four million new books by comedians, all written during lockdown when there was nothing else to do. The best I read was Bob Mortimer’s sweet, elegiac memoir And Away... (Gallery Books, £20), which tells of how an impossibly shy solicitor saw Vic Reeves performing on the tiny stage of a south London pub, was entranced by his comic brilliance and got involved in the show, first as a sidekick and later as a fully fledged partner-in-laffs.

Elephants walk on tiptoes — but can they dance? This year’s stocking-fillers explore such puzzles

Wednesday

17 Nov 2021

Thursday

11 Nov 2021
Laura Freeman
Laura Freeman
The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture

A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits, teeth. Suck it in, push ’em out, show your pearly whites. Leaving aside David LaChapelle’s portrait of Pamela Anderson, there’s a shortage of Ts in Phillip Prodger’s Face Time. This looks likea coffee-table book but doesn’t bark like a coffee-table book. On first flick through, I found the pictures desultory, even depressing. I was expecting more of a Condé Nast vibe. Glossy and glossier. On second approach, taking text and pictures together, it became a more interesting beast. Prodger is a former head of photography at the National Portrait Gallery and the founding Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture

Wednesday

10 Nov 2021

Thursday

4 Nov 2021
Frances Wilson
Yours disgusted, H.G. Wells: the young writer finds marriage insufferable

The Young H.G. Wells is a biography that takes biology seriously. This is partly because H.G. Wells was a biologist before he became a writer of science fiction (his first publication was A Text Book on Biology, which he illustrated himself), but also because Claire Tomalin is alert to the life of the body as well as the mind. In her hands, Wells’s youth was less about his rise from the lower classes to become the wealthy socialist who predicted the aeroplane, the tank and the atomic bomb than about the rise of his weight. There is never a point in these pages when we are not told what numbers Wells saw when he stood on the bathroom scales, or reminded of the connection between his physical evolution and his evolution as a writer.

Yours disgusted, H.G. Wells: the young writer finds marriage insufferable
Useful links
More from The Spectator
About us
Subscribe
Useful links
About us
More from The Spectator
Subscribe