Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Christopher Meyer

The Special Relationship was never very special

I have a book of essays from 1986 by a group of British and American scholars called The Special Relationship. The editor, Professor Roger Louis, was advised to give it another title. The director of Chatham House, the late David Watt no less, called it ‘rhetorical nonsense’. Yet, as Louis noted: The ‘Special Relationship’ would not go away. Indeed it haunted the discussions. Eventually it was referred to as the ghost, ever present yet elusive, derided by some but acknowledged by all. Thirty-four years later the ghost is still floating around. Ian Buruma’s new book is the latest attempt to exorcise it. I suspect that it will be no more

Chloë Ashby

Family secrets: Love Orange, by Natasha Randall, reviewed

The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence, avoidance or — as Jenny, the dissatisfied housewife in Natasha Randall’s droll debut novel, calls it — life’s ‘marshmallow numbness’. Jenny’s drug? The sticky, sweet-smelling orange glue that seals the intimate letters she receives from a prison inmate called John — ‘just a little lick’ and a liquid warmth surges within her, letting her breathe, making the ground feel solid. But she isn’t the only Tinkley family member with a secret. Which brings us to the question posed by the outwardly forward-thinking Father Brian: ‘What sort of family is this?’

Lynn Barber

When sexism was routine: the life of the female reporter in 1970s London

This book made me almost weep with nostalgia, but heaven knows what today’s snowflakes will make of it. Fleet Street working conditions were horrendous — the offices were filthy, and covered in a thick pall of cigarette smoke. There’d be frequent wastepaper bin fires when someone threw a smouldering cigarette into a bin full of paper and a male journalist would pee on it to put it out. (Nobody had bottles of water on their desks in those days.) The noise was ear-splitting, with everyone shouting into their phones above the constant clatter of Remingtons. When the presses started to roll around 4 p.m., the whole building shook. ‘Actually,’ Julie

Suzi Feay

A dazzling fable about loneliness: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, reviewed

Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut from a cookery book editor seemed to promise an unfailing fountain of the creative imagination: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a three-volume reworking of Britain’s military tussle with Napoleon, but with added fairies, felt like Jane Austen brewed up with spells and a dash of the Brontës’ Angria sagas. A short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, set in the same eerie territory, followed, and since then — silence. Piranesi is a publishing event, therefore. Austere and classical, it has no fairies but plenty of magic. The title character

Juliet Nicolson

Bringing up Benzene: Charlie Gilmour adopts a magpie

One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely to survive. As the writer Charlie Gilmour and his set-designer fiancée Janina (Yana) find themselves scrutinised by the tiny creature’s ‘gemstone eyes’ they become caught up in an unexpected urge to save the fledgling’s life. As part of the unglamorous, much maligned, even feared Corvid species, Charlie’s foundling magpie, with its sinister ‘undertaker tails’ is not an obvious pet. And yet Charlie has ‘never felt so seen by an animal’. Growing out of this strange first encounter is a magical book of exhilarating complexity, the story of blood, bird shit,

Ian Thomson

City of dazzling mosaics: the golden age of Ravenna

When we refer to someone as ‘Byzantine’ we usually mean guileful or too complicated and labyrinthine in manner or speech. Perhaps the term is ill-applied: Byzantium, the medieval Greek city on the Bosporus which the Roman Emperor Constantine I renamed Constantinople, was not in essence an unfathomable, over-hierarchical or manipulative sort of place. It flourished for more than 1,000 years, until the Ottoman Turkish onslaught in the 15th century, by dint of its ‘extraordinary resilience and self-confidence’, says Judith Herrin, a leading Byzantinist. The northern Italian city of Ravenna, with its wondrous mosaicked churches and gilded mausolea that miraculously survived the aerial bombardments of the second world war, was manifestly

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ysenda Maxtone Graham: British Summer Time Begins

30 min listen

In this week’s books podcast my guest is the writer Ysenda Maxtone Graham, whose new book casts a rosy look back at the way children used to spend their summer holidays. British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980 is a work of oral history that covers everything from damp sandwiches and cruelty to animals to tree-climbing, messing about in boats or endless games of Monopoly; intimidating fathers, frustrated mothers and grandparents who, if you weren’t careful, would eat your pet rabbit. The good old days, in other words. Ysenda tells me why she sees ‘spiritual danger’ in iPads, how she longed to visit a motorway service station on

Monday

Clare Mulley

The pram in the hall was one spy’s best friend

‘If you had visited the quaint English village of Great Rollright in 1945, you might have spotted a thin, dark-haired and unusually elegant woman… climbing on to her bicycle,’ Ben Macintyre opens his latest book, like the start of a gentle Ealing comedy. It will come as no surprise to his fans that the elegant Mrs Burton, Cotswolds housewife, baker of excellent cakes, mother of three and wife of a chap called Len who works in the local aluminium factory, is in fact Colonel Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army, aka Agent Sonya, whose clandestine mission is to help the Soviets build the atomic bomb. Agent Sonya was allocated her

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray, Francis Pike and Philip Hensher

32 min listen

On this week’s episode, Douglas Murray asks – why would anyone want to be a government adviser, given what’s happened to Tony Abbott? The historian Francis Pike reads his piece on Thailand’s Caligula; and Philip Hensher reviews a new book on Wagner. Spectator Out Loud is a weekly audio collection of three Spectator writers reading their pieces in the latest issue.

Thursday

Derek Turner

Eager for beavers: the case for their reintroduction

Conservationists are frequently criticised for focusing on glamorous species at the expense of others equally important but unluckily uglier — pandas rather than pangolins, birds rather than bats, and monkeys rather than mole-rats. Europe’s frankly lumpy largest rodent, the European beaver, Castor fiber, is therefore fortunate to have found an ardent advocate in Derek Gow. Beavers have always attracted attention, generally of the wrong kind. Not only do they have lustrous pelts, and flesh edible even in times of fasting (because conveniently classified as ‘fish’) but castoreum, exuded from sacs near their anal glands, which they use to scent mark territory, was thought to have medico-mystical properties. Medieval apiarists believed

Philip Hensher

Hitler’s admiration has severely damaged Wagner’s reputation

In the early 1920s a French businessman, Leon Bel, was looking for a name for his new brand of processed cheese. He remembered seeing a meat wagon on the first world war battlefields with the sardonic name ‘La Wachkyrie’. Like the Valkyries in Wagner, it brought solace to fallen soldiers in the field. Bel thought it would do very well, and gave his cheese the same name in a more orthodox spelling. La Vache Qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) is still very popular today. Reading this completely unsuspected story of a trademark in Alex Ross’s book, I wondered with some astonishment at this world. A businessman looking for a striking

Tom Lathan

Why fungi might solve the world’s problems

The biologist Merlin Sheldrake is an intriguing character. In a video promoting the publication of his book Entangled Life, which explores the mysterious world of fungi, he cooks and eats mushrooms that have sprouted from the pages of a copy of the book. In another video, the double bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado ‘duets’ with a recording made by Michael Prime of that fungus eating the book. Readers of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland will recognise Sheldrake from his appearance in that book, where he serves as Macfarlane’s guide to the hidden world of fungi as the two hike around Epping Forest. Sheldrake doesn’t just bring his scientific knowledge to this encounter, but also

Kate Womersley

The skeleton is key to solving past mysteries

One hot summer’s morning, as a nine-year-old girl living on the rim of a Scottish loch in the hotel owned by her parents, Sue Black was unaware she was about to ‘leave those days of innocence behind’. A man delivering groceries sexually assaulted her. Many years later, Black imagines how this unspeakable childhood trauma might have been written into her very bones. Extreme stress can cause a temporary halt in the growth of a child’s arms or legs, which leaves a ‘Harris line’ that is visible on X-ray. This white mark would have said what she couldn’t. The abuse remained secret for a decade, and when she finally told her

Tom Miller

The Tibetans’ fight for freedom continues — but only just

‘Free Tibet!’ used to be a rallying cry for Hollywood A-listers and rock stars. Richard Gere hung out with the Dalai Lama; the Beastie Boys organised a series of giant benefit concerts. Global attention has shifted to other regions suffocating under the jackboot of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), notably Xinjiang and Hong Kong. But the Tibetans’ fight for freedom continues — though only just. Since 2009, 156 Tibetans have set themselves alight in protest at China’s repressive policies. Nearly a third of them are from Ngaba, a small county on the south-eastern edge of the vast Tibetan plateau. Ngaba (pronounced Nabba and known as Aba in Chinese) is home

Claudia Gold

How the wreck of the White Ship plunged England into chaos

Never was a monarch so undone by water as Henry I. A fruit of the sea killed him in 1135: he ate too many lampreys, a jawless, parasitic fish that sucks its prey to death. But the tragedy of his reign occurred 15 years earlier. At the most ill-fated party of the Middle Ages, his heir — the 17-year-old William Ætheling (Anglo-Saxon prince) — drowned when the White Ship sank, taking nearly 300 of his friends and relatives with him. The ramifications of his death were seismic, leading to a succession crisis that saw thousands die in a bitter civil war. The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle famously described this

Philip Marsden

Is it possible that Neanderthals had a spiritual life?

When I studied anthropology back in the early 1980s, Neanderthals were still largely the bulk-browed brutes of yore, grunting in smoky caves and loping across the tundra. Their vanishing from the fossil record some 40,000 years ago was a result of competition, along with a little interbreeding, with our own forebears. The story, as I received it then, retained something of the racially hierarchical views at large when the first fossilised bones were recovered in Germany, from near the Neander river, in 1856. Neanderthals were made extinct by an altogether smarter creature. It was inevitable — the clue was in the name: Homo sapiens. Neanderthals have come a long way

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Gay abandon: Islands of Mercy, by Rose Tremain, reviewed

Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’. The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described

Andrew Preston

The magic of JFK remains undimmed

It’s easy to forget that John F. Kennedy lived such a short life. At 43, he was the second youngest president in history; when he died, he was younger than Barack Obama was in 2009. Kennedy’s presidency was brief —‘a thousand days,’ as the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger Jr memorably put it — but included some of the most intensively covered episodes in modern history, from the civil rights movement to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a result, JFK has not lacked for attention. So, what more is there to say about him? A good deal, it turns out. Kennedy is familiar yet mysterious, and therefore difficult to

James Bloodworth

Too much learning is a dangerous thing

It is often said that the left does not understand human nature. Yet it is difficult to think of anything as antithetical to Homo sapiens as the notion, popularised by free marketeers during the 1980s, that people would willingly evacuate those parts of Britain where ‘market forces’ had decreed that collieries and steelworks were no longer profitable. People did not ‘get on their bikes’ — in Norman Tebbit’s notorious phrase — once industry was shut down; instead they grew resentful at a world they felt had little respect for their lives or communities. We often refer to these people as ‘left behind’ — or as the journalist and author David

Francesca Steele

Primal longing: Blue Ticket, by Sophie Macintosh, reviewed

Sophie Macintosh’s Blue Ticket is not classic feminist dystopia. Yes, it is concerned with legislated fertility, a world where women’s bodies are monitored like science projects by condescending medics.But the horror here is not impregnation but unwanted childlessness. Blue tickets, dispensed (randomly? It’s not clear) by a machine on a girl’s first bleed, decree a childless future; white tickets the opposite. Victims are not raped handmaids but sexually liberated working women, desperate to conceive and forbidden from doing so. Our narrator is Calla, a blue ticket, who grows increasingly dissatisfied with her lot, nurturing a ‘new and dark feeling’ inside herself. ‘I had never felt a baby’s leg in my