Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

The empire that sprang from nowhere under the banner of Islam

When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America, they already had many centuries’ experience of foreign involvement. One of the most remarkable aspects of the force that reshaped Eurasia 1,000 years earlier is that there was no prelude: the Arab conquests, and the Islamic empire that they created, came out of nowhere. By the time of the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 most of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula had united under the banner of Islam, some out of faith, others from expediency. But few people outside Arabia knew who Muslims were or worried about

Alex Clark

An impossible guest: Second Place, by Rachel Cusk, reviewed

A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that the work will collapse into some or other version of nonsense. If it doesn’t, though, it is precisely the elements that flirt with disaster that will likely make it both superficially distinctive and artistically substantial. For the novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk, whose most recent creation, the ‘Outline’ trilogy, attempted a savage blending of the two forms, risk comes frequently in the form of sailing dangerously — and, for her admirers, thrillingly — close to the parodic. Second Place, which in bare-bones description tells of what happens if you invite

Craig Raine

Poems are the Duracell batteries of language, says Simon Armitage

Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’. Simon Armitage saying the same thing, memorably, genially, metaphorically, democratically: ‘How much power and force could be stored in — and retransmitted by — such compact shapes. Poems as the Duracell batteries of language.’ Both poets go straight to the point. But a shift has taken place — in tone, in attack — which can be illustrated also by the photographs Armitage found as a ‘sleep-walking’ teenager leafing through Worlds, a sampler of seven contemporary poets, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield: ‘Norman MacCaig watched television and smoked fags.’ We are in

Simon Ings

Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows

The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined it: a place of pre-established harmony, whose patterns are accessible to reason. It’s an optimistic world, and a theological one: a universe presided over by a God who does not play dice. It’s most decidedly not a 20th-century world, but ‘in any case’, as Gödel himself once commented, ‘there is no reason to trust blindly in the spirit of the time’. His fellow mathematician Paul Erdös was appalled: ‘You became a mathematician so that people should study you,’ he complained, ‘not that you should study Leibnitz.’ But

Alex Diggins

A draining experience: Insignificance, by James Clammer, reviewed

Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a plumber and the hero of James Clammer’s arresting novel, is having a pig of a day. He’s slept poorly. It’s the umpteenth day of a heat wave, and the biscuits left by his client Amanda Margaret Hollander are ‘a dispiriting selection, childish and sugary… unmanly biscuits’. Plus, despite her tight, ‘iridescent’ trousers, Amanda Margaret seems uninterested in a ‘little dallying, a little flirting’ and dashes off, leaving him to the job. Which, it transpires, is far more difficult than promised: ‘Truly, if it isn’t one thing it’s the other.’ For

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Julian Sancton: Madhouse at the End of the Earth

43 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Julian Sancton, whose new book Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night, documents the crew of men who were the first to experience an Antarctic winter trapped in the ice, in an attempt to reach the South Pole. Sancton tells me about the background of some of the eccentric characters that made up the Belgica – and the stomach turning cuisine that is penguin meat.

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Stirling Moss’s charmed life in the fast lane

‘Who do you think you are — Stirling Moss?’ a genially menacing traffic cop would ask a hapless motorway transgressor. At the peak of his popularity as the most successful English motor-racing driver, Moss personified the glamorous daredevilry of racing at top speed. Richard Williams, the author of this sympathetic, exhaustive anatomy of an international sporting hero, part-time playboy (‘chasing crumpet’) and ultimate family man, is a veteran sportswriter for national broadsheets. He has also written critically acclaimed books, including one with the wonderfully comprehensive title A Race with Love and Death. This new portrait of Moss is based on close acquaintance with all sorts of people involved in motor

Joanna Pocock

The many contradictions of modern motherhood

There are few certainties in life. Death and taxes are the ones regularly trotted out. However, there is another that rarely gets mentioned: the fact that every single human who has ever existed has come out of a woman’s body. This act of creation, while being a marvel, has also become banal. In Motherhood, Eliane Glaser deftly juggles the wonder and boredom, the joy and pain and the many profound contradictions that attend modern motherhood. Philosophers, child psychologists and anthropologists from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Donald Winnicott and Margaret Mead provide cultural and social contexts for how our attitudes towards motherhood have changed throughout history. ‘There is enormous diversity in the

James Walton

Haunted by the past: Last Days in Cleaver Square, by Patrick McGrath, reviewed

At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in a particular author’s work to say? (For one of Irvine Welsh’s, a single word of four letters might be enough.) In the case of Patrick McGrath, I’d suggest, the answer comes on page 55 of his new novel: ‘I confess I feel that my sanity is under threat.’ McGrath famously grew up in the grounds of Broadmoor, where his father was the medical superintendent, and his consequent lifelong interest in psychiatry is reflected in pretty much all of his fiction. As a rule, if you’re a McGrath protagonist, you’re likely

Adam Sisman

Arthur Bryant: monstrous chronicler of Merrie England

If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops. Obsolete volumes rest undisturbed on their shelves. The more popular they once were, the more unwanted copies accumulate. An almost inevitable presence nowadays is Sir Arthur Bryant, in his time a bestselling writer on historical subjects but now slumbering among the Great Unread. To browse in one of his books is a nostalgic experience. Their very titles — English Saga, for example, or Set in a Silver Sea — are evocative. They tell ‘our island story’, of an idealised agrarian past populated by merry monarchs, honest yeomen farmers, sturdy John

Clare Mulley

Out-scooping the men: six women reporters of the second world war

Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced them to dive for cover. What the hell were they doing trying to cadge a ride when ‘war correspondents have their own jeeps and drivers?’ an American officer barked at them as his car screeched to a halt beside the shallow crater they had commandeered. ‘We happen to be women,’ Ruth Cowan replied steadily, as she straightened up and shook off the dust along with his words. Cowan was the first female journalist attached to the US army but, as a woman, she was denied the official facilities provided for

Christopher Shrimpton

A campus novel with a difference: The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen, reviewed

Dr Benzion Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. ‘A true genius, who also happens to be a major statesman and political hero,’ writes one former colleague in a letter of recommendation. Unhelpfully, another letter follows where a different former colleague describes him as a ‘prolific rabble-rouser’, with ‘a history of inciting terrorist violence’. These letters land in the pigeonhole of Ruben Blum, a historian at sleepy Corbin College in upstate New York. Ruben, the first and only Jew on the faculty (it’s 1959), is to interview Netanyahu for a position. Netanyahu is a revisionist Zionist; Ruben has carved a quiet patch in taxation studies. ‘We feel like you’re in a unique position

A.S.H. Smyth

A pawn in the Great Game: the sad story of Charles Masson

‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander the Great’s empire.’ By the early 19th century, though, very few had been identified. Moreover, the prevailing scholarly view was that there remained ‘not a single architectural monument of the Macedonian conquests in India’ — let alone in Afghanistan, which had, ‘for more than 1,000 years… been a blank space in western knowledge’. So finding one would be ‘a world-changing achievement’. At dawn on 4 July 1827, Private James Lewis of the East India Company’s Bengal artillery walked out of the Agra fort and into history — or at any

Emily Rhodes

The stuff of everyday life: Real Estate, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive fiction will appreciate the insights into her life; moreover, anyone with an ounce of curiosity will be fascinated by her compelling tour of city streets, island rocks and meandering diversions into ideas from a wealth of writers and artists. We begin the book with the author buying a plant from a flower stall. (Our modern-day Mrs Dalloway purchases a banana tree in Shoreditch rather than cut flowers in Westminster.) Levy then steps from this familiar act of flower-buying into the world of Georgia O’Keeffe, and we accompany her ‘from the

Roy Foster

Blindness and betrayal still bedevil Britain’s policy in Ireland

Charles Péguy’s adage that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics is sharply illustrated by the development of the Irish Revolution. In his previous scintillating studies, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion and The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918–1923, Charles Townshend traced the progress of Ireland’s long-drawn-out severance from Britain. The completion of the trilogy is delivered with his characteristic scholarly panache. And by foregrounding how Northern Ireland came into being in 1920–21, and was sustained by the notable fudge of a non-delivering Boundary Commission in 1925, he brings into unforgiving focus the carelessness, double-dealing and myopia which has bedevilled Britain’s government of Ireland, so spectacularly demonstrated in

Philip Hensher

Over the rainbow: D.H. Lawrence’s search for a new way of life

When it comes to biography, some authors draw the punters, and others leave the mob cold. D.H. Lawrence has been written about a lot, from the moment he died. At least ten memoirs were published in the five years after his death by authors ranging from his sister and his wife to patrons such as Mabel Dodge Luhan. More followed, and only professional Lawrence scholars will have read all of them. There must be dozens of them, and some, such as the Cambridge three-volume effort by different authors, are immensely long. By comparison, there are only a handful of full-scale lives of James Joyce, and poor old Arnold Bennett has

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Frances Wilson on the great and comedic life of D H Lawrence

44 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Frances Wilson, whose new book Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence sets out to take a fresh look at a now unfashionable figure. Frances tells me why we’re looking in the wrong places for Lawrence’s greatness, explains why the supposed prophet of sexual liberation wasn’t really interested in sex at all – and reveals that after his death Lawrence may have been eaten by his admirers.

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

How St Ives became Barbara Hepworth’s spiritual home

‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated, fertile imagination. Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), one of the leading and most popular British sculptors of the 20th century, fervently imagined that her works expressed cosmic grandeur and her own spiritual aspirations. In the foreword to this thoughtful and enjoyable biography, Ali Smith testifies that Hepworth was ‘fiercely intelligent’, while its author, Eleanor Clayton, candidly declares: ‘I write as a curator who loves the artist she presents, a fan writing of her hero.’ Her research shows how frequently the sculptures convey ‘concepts [Hepworth] considered universal and eternal’. Clayton, eminently qualified as

Adam Begley

New Yorkers talk the talk

New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains multitudes: it contradicts itself, wantonly. Any attempt to summarise will fail. Not even Craig Taylor’s delightful cacophony of voices, dozens and dozens of them spilling their New York stories, can compass its vastness and variety. But what a tasty slice Taylor serves up! Until you can fly into JFK and see, hear and smell for yourself, savour the grit, sweat in the choking humidity and shiver in the canyoned midtown winds — until then, his New Yorkers is just the ticket. This is Taylor’s second anthology of urban voices. It

Paul Levy

We shouldn’t be so squeamish about eating foie gras

In his excellent, brief chronicle of foie gras, Norman Kolpas lists Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Thandie Newton, Ricky Gervais and the late Sir Roger Moore as among those who don’t want you to eat it, as well as Fortnum & Mason and the state legislature of California, which declared its production and sale illegal in 2019. Why do they care about something so petty as the making and consumption of this buttery, savoury age-old delicacy? There is, of course, a hint of class warfare about advocating its prohibition, along with caviar and other treats of the well-off and indulgent. But the main opposition claim is that the production of the