Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

John Burnside

Blood on the tracks: the unsolved murder of the Japanese railway chief

‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and without getting into the detail of his argument, we can say that the impact of having read and admired others is always an issue for all but the most naive writers. And while Bloom’s attempts to ‘de-idealise our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another’ may seem a far cry from the workings of the current literary thriller, even a passing consideration of the influence of James Ellroy, master of LA noir, on his admirer David Peace quickly raises some interesting questions on how we perceive authorship,

Philip Hensher

How William Hogarth made Britain

Has any artist ever had a wider impact on the world than Hogarth? He was the motivator behind the most important legislation protecting artists’ copyright, meaning that artists from ordinary backgrounds no longer had to depend on the whims of rich patrons. Like Dickens, he used his art to laugh at and root out abuses — the proposals for electoral reform in the great ‘Humours of an Election’ series are as specific as satire ever gets (the haggling over the bribes, the man who somehow votes despite being dead). His early and energetic commitment to Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital did much to discourage the widespread practices of infant abandonment and

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Richard Ovenden: Burning The Books

50 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the chief librarian of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Richard Ovenden. In Burning The Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, he explores the long history and vital importance of libraries and archives — and the equally long history of their destruction in acts of war, vandalism or censorship and their loss through attrition and neglect. He tells me about the librarian heroes of Poland and Lithuania, the accidental survival of Magna Carta and what really happened to the Great Library of Alexandria.

Thursday

Jonathan Coe

Billy Wilder — the making of a great film director

Before Billy Wilder became the celebrated director of films such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment he was a busy jobbing screenwriter at UFA Studios in Berlin in the early 1930s, writing or co-writing the scenarios to more than 20 movies. And before that, he was a journalist. Starting in Vienna in the mid-1920s, where his earliest assignments included setting the crossword puzzle (a charming example is included in this volume), he quickly moved on to Berlin and became a prolific writer of occasional pieces for papers such as Der Querschnitt and the Berliner Börsen Courier. Selections of these articles have been published before but are

Adam Sisman

A divided city: the Big Three fall out in post-war Berlin

When did the Cold War start? Not when the second world war ended. There were many differences between the Soviet Union and its western allies, but they did not then seem insuperable. It was not obvious that the post-war world would be divided by ideology. On the contrary, the victorious United Nations hoped for an era of peace. The Americans planned to pack up and leave Europe as soon as possible. The future of Germany had been decided before a single Allied soldier had crossed onto German soil. Meeting at Tehran in November 1943, the Big Three — Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — had agreed that defeated Germany would be

Clare Mulley

The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg

Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish immigrants and a mother who never loved her, she was determined to make her life matter. A talented singer, she won a place at New York’s prestigious Schola Cantorum and performed at Carnegie Hall. Having found clerical work, she helped organise strike action and then won a court vindication. Seeing the rise of fascism, she came to embrace the concept of communism, and when war arrived she campaigned for America’s entry. Ethel’s exceptionalism did her no favours, however, in paranoid post-war America. Although she focused on her children, she was

Andrew Rosenheim

Secret treaties and games of cat and mouse: a choice of recent crime fiction

Almost any promising writer of spy fiction can expect at some point to be called the ‘next Le Carré’, an accolade even more promiscuously applied since the death of the master. James Wolff has immediate credentials to jump the queue, since, like Le Carré, he uses a pseudonym and claims to work at the Foreign Office — though his familiarity with surveillance techniques suggests a slightly different employer. How to Betray Your Country (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99) arrives as the second in a planned trilogy, hard on the heels of Wolff’s striking debut, Beside the Syrian Sea. August Drummond is a former British intelligence officer, cashiered for insubordination after the

Mark Cocker

A hymn to the hummingbird — one of the most astonishing organisms on Earth

Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful organisms on Earth. Yet for anyone who has never seen one in the flesh, it is difficult to convey the psychological effects of a first encounter. For beauty is only half the hummingbird story. Their impact is doubled somehow by the minuscule size of the creatures. How could anything so small, you wonder, embody so much life force? Even in ordinary flight the wings beat at 80 times a second, and in certain display modes this can rise to 200. The old name — ‘humbird’ — better expresses the electric

Daniel Rey

Snakes alive! Playing cricket in Latin America

Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather before feet were kicking pigs’ bladders. England vs Australia, first played in 1877, may be cricket’s iconic series, but the Ashes cedes ten years of history to the contest between Argentina and Uruguay — the rivalry of the River Plate. In Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion, James Coyne and Timothy Abraham, cricket journalists with a fondness for Latin America, travel from Mexico to Argentina with bat in rucksack and dates with fusty archives. A social history with elements of travelogue, the book tells a story of new horizons and false

Charlotte Hobson

Pure, white and native: the birch as a symbol of Russian nationalism

The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could do worse than to begin with the song ‘Why do the birches rustle so loudly in Russia?’ By the patriotic band called Lube — apparently Putin’s favourite — it’s a melancholic guitar ballad that also mentions the soul, accordions, suffering, falling leaves, an old woman waving goodbye, and a beloved woman (rodnaya) ‘my own’, from the same root as rodina, motherland. It also happens to be sung by a handsome young village policeman. Na zdarovya! A shot of birch kitsch at its most potent. As Tom Jeffreys mentions in his

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

O father, where art thou? Fox Fires, by Wyl Menmuir, reviewed

Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for its discomfiting prose, but the fact that it had been written in a VW camper van on the north Cornish coast — where it was set — also drew attention. The village in The Many appeared to be forgotten by the outside world, and the setting for Fox Fires is similarly isolated. Nineteen-year-old Wren Lithgow arrives in a mysterious European city state called O with her concert pianist mother. The peril they are in isn’t laboured, but the reader realises it by degrees — as Wren does. She was conceived

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Charles Spencer: The White Ship

35 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Charles Spencer, whose book The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream is new out in paperback. He tells me why his story is like “Game of Thrones meets Titanic“, about the piety and the startling cruelty of medieval kings, the tantalising suggestion that the wreck of the White Ship may have been found off Barfleur — and how this 12th-century maritime disaster changed the course of English history.

Thursday

Kate Womersley

Why did no one diagnose my sister’s TB?

In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45. Until the last hours of her life, the cause of her coughing, chest pain, night sweats and breathlessness had eluded a series of baffled experts. But you do not need a medical degree to hazard a guess at what might have been behind these symptoms. From Keats’s famous death to the consumptive heroines of 19th-century opera, spots of blood on a handkerchief were all that was missing to complete the picture. Only after Fauzia had a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage, however, did someone think to test a sample of her spinal

Clinton Heylin

Richard Thompson’s memoir is worth reading for the ‘Fairport years’ alone

One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I found myself arguing with Linda Thompson about the merits of Nick Drake’s music compared with her own and her ex-husband Richard Thompson’s. She suggested Nick’s had a quality that was missing in the work she and Richard created, which explained its posthumous popularity. I maintained that Drake’s music appealed largely to coeds and other hopeless romantics, lacking the lyrical depth and musical breadth of the six albums the star-crossed couple made between 1973 and 1981, from the timeless I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight to the equally acclaimed

Michael Arditti

How Cecil Beaton offended the Queen Mother

In December 1979, the 28-year-old Hugo Vickers, dining with a friend, declared: ‘I see little point to life these days.’ The following day, an editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson rang to tell him that Cecil Beaton, seriously debilitated by a stroke, was looking for a biographer. Vickers visited Beaton three days before his death in January 1980 and, shortly afterwards, was confirmed as his official biographer. This was to give point, along with glamour and excitement, to his life for the next five years. Beaton’s sister, Lady Smiley, exhorted Vickers not to make it ‘one of those gossipy books. There’s so much more.’ He followed her counsel and his biography

Jonathan Boff

How Churchill’s success hinged on a small Mediterranean island

If you can tell the difference between Jack Hawkins and John Mills, and between a Stuka and a Sten gun, perhaps after long, wet afternoons watching black-and-white war films, this is the book for you. Max Hastings is a wily operator who knows exactly what his readers want and with Operation Pedestal he has produced it for them again. The latest book off the apparently unstoppable Hastings conveyor belt tells the dramatic story of one of the most ambitious and dangerous naval operations of the war, and tells it well. Malta, an island slightly smaller than Birmingham, sits at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, 60 miles south of Sicily. A

Guy Stagg

The difficulty of building heaven on Earth: why utopias usually fail

The years after the first world war were a boom time for utopian communities. As the survivors of the conflict began to recover, many were drawn towards experimental ways of living. Anna Neima looks at six of these communities, asking what brought them together, what kept them going and what legacy, if any, they left behind. In doing so, she offers an original perspective on the entire period and a new way of navigating its artistic and ideological upheaval. She begins with Santiniketan Sriniketan, the community founded by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal. Part ashram, part school, part agricultural college, it promoted the twin causes of

Ian Birrell

The scandal of OxyContin, the painkiller that caused untold pain

Last week I was staying in a cool hotel in the middle of San Francisco. When I walked out to find coffee in the morning, I came across a man with his trousers lowered as he injected himself in the groin. An older fellow nearby used the street as a toilet, adding to the human excrement on the pavement. A woman lay crashed out, hair matted over her face in the heat. Returning later in the day, passing the clusters of tents and people chasing dragons from foil, I was asked: ‘Do you want anything?’ These disturbing scenes of human despair were beside a smart shopping mall in the city

Christopher Hawtree

Journey to the Moon: The Things We’ve Seen, by Agustín Fernández Mallo, reviewed

‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing sound in the solar system?’ Although this observation was made by Chips Channon at Sandwich after the rigours of electioneering in 1935 it could be aptly cited in this novel by the radiation physicist Agustín Fernández Mallo. These past 15 years he has evolved a method in which, owing something to Borges and perhaps early Nicholson Baker, troubled narrators’ outlandish events draw seamlessly upon everything around them; on the page, advertising hoardings, the screen or mind, these fragments are shored against their ruins, catching our world in its present flux.

Diana Hendry

Mothers and daughters: I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud, reviewed

A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use of autobiography in fiction. Since her first novel, Hideous Kinky, Freud has frequently used an underpinning of autobiography, but mostly it’s been discreet. You didn’t need to distinguish what was life, what fiction. But with I Couldn’t Love You More the auto-biographical element has become overt and somehow obtrusive. Freud’s previous novel, Mr Mac and Me, concerned with Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s stay in Suffolk at the start of the second world war, is on the cusp of being an historical novel. This one is close to autofiction. In the acknowledgements,