Our reviews of the latest in literature
34 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by Lucy Mangan, author of Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. She tells me what teenagers did before they had Young Adult books to read, the bizarre demise of the author of Goodnight Moon, and the wisdom of forsaking the busy world for an armchair and a good book.
52 min listen
Daniel Taub, former Israeli Ambassador to the UK, joins Damian Thompson to talk about his new book Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish art of constructive disagreement. In a fast-moving interview, Daniel explains how the art of arguing has shaped Jewish humour and scholarship, and Damian asks him about keeping kosher, life after death – and the influence of the Talmud on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
52 min listen
How Reform plans to win Just a year ago, Nigel Farage ended his self-imposed exile from politics and returned to lead Reform. Since then, Reform have won more MPs than the Green Party, two new mayoralties, a parliamentary by-election, and numerous councils. Now the party leads in every poll and, as our deputy political editor James Heale reveals in our cover article, is already planning for government. The party’s chair, tech entrepreneur Zia Yusuf, describes the movement as a ‘start-up’; and like a start-up, Reform is scaling up at speed. Among the 676 councillors elected last month, a number are considered more than ready to stand as MPs. James also
Studies of Christianity’s problems and prospects often entail a distinction between the singer and the song. At an institutional level, the world’s largest faith is in deep trouble throughout much of western Europe – and increasingly in North America, too. Widely rehearsed elsewhere, the reasons for this steep decline include the spread of individualism along with an allied flouting of deference, mistrust of agencies said to lie beyond the tangible, and self-inflicted wounds such as the abuse crisis. Yet many who mourn the spread of secularisation remind us that for all its flaws, the Church has a good story to tell overall. How so? Two answers stand out. First, Christian
The Appalachian Trail is America’s secular version of the Camino de Santiago but more than twice as long. In Amity Gaige’s Heartwood, Valerie Gillis is a 42-year-old nurse and experienced trail-walker who nonetheless vanishes one day in the northern stretch, in Maine, the wildest of the New England states. Heading the search for her is Beverly Miller, a senior game warden, who stands out among her colleagues because she is 6ft, female and not a native Mainer. As the days go by, and despite the impressive number of volunteers looking for Gillis, the chances of finding her alive diminish. Miller, a veteran of similar searches, has to continue to motivate
40 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian Alice Loxton, whose new book Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives is just out in paperback. In it, she tells the story of the early lives of individuals as disparate as the Venerable Bede and Vivienne Westwood. On the podcast, Alice tells me about Geoffrey Chaucer’s racy past, what Bede was like before he was venerable, and why her editor wouldn’t let her take her characters to Pizza Express. She also reassures me that – in a post-Rest is History world, where history is more exciting and accessible than ever – there is still a place
Horace suffers from a reputation as an old man’s poet. Classicists often joke that Catullus and Martial are for the young, and Horace for those of a certain vintage – wine being a favourite Horatian theme. Many lose their thirst for his Odes at school, only to realise their brilliance decades later. Classroom Horace is just a bit too bombastic and patriotic to be cool. The Horace of Peter Stothard’s beautifully written new biography surprises with his sexiness. Not many pages in we find him poring over scurrilous papyri in the libraries of Athens. A verse by the Archaic-era poet Archilochus has caught his eye. It describes a woman with
As the term refers to the stretch of the north Norfolk coastline between Sheringham and Mundesley, only one of the stories in D.J. Taylor’s engrossing new collection strictly takes place in ‘Poppyland’. However, the others seldom stray far. In ‘At Mr McAllister’s’, one of two stories set in and around Norwich market, the feckless employee of a down-at-heel toyshop decides to change his life, starting with talking to the pretty girl on the fruit and vegetable stall. In ‘Those Big Houses up Newmarket Road’, set nearby, social embarrassment inspires a class-conscious schoolboy to dream big. Such ambitions are unusual in these carefully worked stories of broken homes and precarious employment.
Whatever happened to universities, beacons of the liberal enlightenment? Well, according to both these authors, they are in deep trouble. Cary Nelson is a distinguished literature academic who for six years was president of the American Association of University Professors, set up in 1915 by John Dewey to advance standards of excellence and academic freedom. His book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Anti-Semitic Assault on Basic Principles, published last year, has now been supplemented by this powerful thesis published by the Jewish Quarterly. Even before the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he argues, campus anti-Semitism was rife across the West. Following the attacks, 56 per cent of
This slim, unsettling novel opens with Lucia trying to navigate the ‘mess’ of her daughter Amanda’s return home to their apartment near Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo. Pieces of torn bread, a heaped-up blanket and other strange ‘traces’ are indications of Amanda’s emotional disarray after hastily leaving Milan on the eve of lockdown. But she’d already abandoned her university studies by the time she’d been violently mugged. Lucia attempts to achieve the difficult balance of caring for, but not suffocating, her daughter, resigning herself to Amanda’s ‘unpredictable comings and goings’ while leaving her ‘something nourishing in the fridge in case she skips breakfast’. But she has already spectacularly misjudged this. When
In October 1945, towns and cities across the United States celebrated ‘A Tribute to Victory Day’ in celebration of the United States’s military victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The biggest event was held in Los Angeles and broadcast live across the country. In scenes ‘reminiscent of the pre-war Nazi rallies at Nuremberg’, Iain MacGregor writes, more than 100,000 people crammed into the Memorial Coliseum to watch the ‘cinematic legend’ Edward G. Robinson lead a massive cast on giant stage sets recreating key moments of the defeat of the Axis powers. For the evening finale, in the glare of searchlights, three Boeing B-29 Superfortresses flew low over the stadium
Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB colonel smuggled out of Russia by MI6 in the early 1990s with a treasure trove of notes from the KGB’s archive. The resulting 3,500 CI reports (CI meaning counter-intelligence – information about hostile spies) identified 1,000 KGB agents around the world and were shared with 36 countries. The CIA rated it ‘the biggest CI bonanza of the post-war period’, while the FBI described as ‘the most detailed and extensive pool of CI ever received’. The story behind it was as remarkable as the haul itself. Gordon Corera’s fluent narrative draws on many sources, including the magisterial two-volume Mitrokhin Archive compiled by the historian Christopher Andrew
You know Mark Twain’s story. You’ve got no excuse not to; there have been so many biographies. Starting in the American South as Samuel Clemens, he took his pen name from the call of the Mississippi boatmen on reaching two fathoms. His lectures, followed by his travel pieces and novels, enchanted America and then the world. As a southerner, his principled stance against slavery gave him moral authority. The famous ‘Notice’ to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished’ – was swept aside, so that persons like H.L.
It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’. Chatwin died before I could accompany him to the Hill Lane Cemetery, but four years later I stood with his widow in front of Rosas’s ornamented tomb in Buenos Aires as we prepared to meander south on a 2,000-mile car journey in his footsteps. In 1989, the year of Chatwin’s death, President Menem decided to have Rosas’s remains repatriated as a
28 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Arabella Byrne on the social minefield of private swimming pools (1:13); Sean Thomas says that not knowing where you are is one of the joys of travel (5:34); reviewing Helen Carr’s Sceptred Isle: A New History of the 14th Century, Mathew Lyons looks at the reality of a vivid century (11:34); reviewing Tim Gregory’s Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World, Bryan Appleyard analyses the three parties debating global warming (16:07); and, Chas Newkey-Burden looks back to the 1980s nuclear drama that paralysed his childhood, Threads (20:42). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
40 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise our relationship with the natural world.
I have counted the days. It is my 122nd eighteenth of November. I have come a long way from the seventeenth and I do not know whether I will ever see the nineteenth. But the eighteenth arrives again and again. This is life for Tara Selter, the protagonist of On the Calculation of Volume, a mesmerising projected septology by the Danish writer Solvej Balle that will make anyone who has ever longed to pause time rethink their wish list. Book I, published in Denmark in 2020 and on this year’s International Booker Prize longlist, opens on Day 121. Tara, an antiquarian bookseller, is hiding from her husband Thomas in the
The collector, art historian and critic Douglas Cooper (1911-84) relished conflict. He was a formidable man, loud in speech and dress, with forceful views and a taste for ridicule. He could also be very funny. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, who knew Cooper better than most, said it was as though an angel and a demon child were perpetually fighting for control of his personality. Physically robust, Cooper survived being stabbed in the stomach when he was 50 after unwisely propositioning a French soldier. He is remembered today, if at all, for his legendary collection of Cubist art, focusing on the four greats of the movement: Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris.
In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year. Men froze half to death, even as their digging equipment foundered in winter mud. Sand, Snow and Stardust is the story of how the US military shed its ignorance and, by harnessing logistical intelligence and environmental knowledge, turned America into a global
Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence) to But Beautiful (a genre-blending and largely non-irritating meditation on jazz) to Zona (a mercifully unpretentious personal
