Book Reviews

Nathalia Holt’s book begins irresistibly. The year is 1928. Two sons of Theodore Roosevelt called Ted and Kermit – yes I know we’re thinking it’s a Wes Anderson movie – have smoothed a map out on the table in front of them. Let’s imagine the setting is a bit like the Explorers’ Club in New York, with exotic anthropological curios on the walls – poisoned spears and wooden shields – and globes the size of beach balls lit up from within. The land they are examining is mainly coloured in greens, browns and greys. But running across the map, like the stripes of a tiger, are irregular white blotches. Each

Exclusive to subscribers, watch our latest event Living with a Politician live.  Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake’s Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP’s Wife) as they discuss the losses and laughter involved in being married to politics.

These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family’s prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV’s series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication of that pleasant teatime diversion’s accuracy: the actor playing Larry, Josh O’Connor, is 6ft 2in. Larry himself was a whole foot shorter.) How Louisa Durrell, struggling with life in Britain after returning from India, went in a bundle with her children to a Greek island of cheap Venetian mansions, heat and innocent adventure is always

Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’: Realise… that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t. There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD.

There is no such thing as a bad friend. The societal expectations and collective imagination of what friendship should look like have, over the past century, set unrealistic expectations, meaning we are all doomed at some point to fail as friends. At least this is what the cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues in her new book. Bad Friend is elegantly written as part memoir, part history, citing multifarious sources, from 12th-century Paris to the American sitcom Friends. The author weaves in her own experiences of female friendships, candid that her research for the book made her reassess the formative and transformative relationships she has cultivated in her life. Reading

War – huh – what is it good for? According to Duncan Weldon, throughout most of history it’s been fantastic for economic growth and development and has perhaps fuelled technological innovation and more. Blood and Treasure is a delightfully quirky approach to military history. Colonial Spain was thought to be cursed by the gold brought home from its colonies in the New World, since the crown somehow bankrupted itself multiple times during this period, despite the riches. Weldon contends that since the gold meant that Spain’s monarchs did not need to approach parliament for money, it left them untethered from their economies and constraints. He also offers an alternative theory