Book Reviews

Although Gordon M. Williams died as recently as 2017, his heyday was the Wilson/Heath era of the late 1960s and 1970s. During that time he managed to appear on the inaugural Booker shortlist, dash off a ten-day potboiler, The Siege of Trenchard’s Farm, that would be filmed by Sam Peckinpah, and continue to file a series of ghost-written newspaper columns for the England football captain Bobby Moore. As these accomplishments might suggest, Williams was the kind of writer whom the modern publishing world no longer seems to rate. Essentially, he was a literary jack-of-all-trades, alternating straightforward hackwork with more elevated material as the mood took him, and eventually abandoning fiction

There isn’t another actor alive whom I’d rather watch than Michael Douglas. Just as Pauline Kael once said that the thought of Cary Grant makes us smile, so the thought of Michael Douglas makes me grin, smirk, nod, wink, cackle, cheer – and walk a little taller, too. Even his anti-heroes are heroic in their truth to self. From the sly, ophidian sneer of his washed-up money man in A Perfect Murder to the salty, satanic leer of his trigger-happy cop in Basic Instinct, Douglas has embraced self-destruction, stared down absurdity and made plain what Nietzsche meant when he said that man is either a ‘laughing stock or a painful

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.