Our reviews of the latest in literature
49 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and critic James Bradley whose new book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He tells me how we need to rethink our relationship with the sea and the life it contains, why fish are much more intelligent than we are used to imagining, and why – amid planetary doom – there’s still room for hope.
What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the National Theatre simulating group sex in Hill’s name. The actors were performing in Keith Dewhurst’s radical stage adaptation of Hill’s masterpiece of 17th-century popular history The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and were embodying what it might have been like to be enthusiastic members of one of the radical millenarian sects at the centre of
Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho Black took a satirical poke at the film world, while Spanky set a sexy demon loose in London. More novels, many collections of short stories and three memoirs followed. The millennium saw a switch to crime fiction, with Full Dark House, which introduced his elderly detective duo, Arthur Bryant and John May, of London’s Peculiar
Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her. Instead, her boss suggests she finds another job, citing – to Gail’s surprise – her lack of people skills. It is the day before Gail’s daughter’s wedding and, shortly after she returns home early, her ex-husband Max turns up unexpectedly, hoping
Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic
When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs. Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German
On 27 January 1688, Mary Hobry, a French midwife living in London, strangled a man to death. The corpse lay in her bed for several days before she carved it up. Then, in the dead of night, she used her petticoat to drag the dismembered body through the neighbourhood – Castle Street, Drury Lane, Parker’s Lane – to be disposed of. The torso was dumped on a rubbish heap; the legs, arms and head were tossed in a cesspit. What did Mary think, I wonder, as she tiptoed home, finally rid of her husband? The secret was not to last long. Within hours the evidence was uncovered, sending the West
As Charles Dickens lay in his coffin, his will was read out to the assembled mourners. ‘I conjure my friends,’ he sternly instructed them, ‘on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or testimonial whatever.’ It’s an appeal that later generations have studiously ignored, as can be seen in the piles of commemorative merchandise that are available to purchase online. These range from a fully poseable Dickens action figure (‘with quill pen and removable hat’) to a T-shirt featuring his face and the slogan ‘I put the lit in literature’. They can also be seen in the shelfloads of biographies and critical works published every year.
41 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale wonders what Margaret Thatcher would make of today’s Conservatives (1:28); Andrew Kenny analyses South Africa’s expropriation act (6:13); Lara Prendergast explores the mystery behind The Spectator’s man in the Middle East, John R Bradley (13:55); Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks at how radio invaded the home (30:13); and, Nina Power reviews two exhibitions looking at different kinds of rage (35:13). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
36 min listen
In his new book Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, Prof Alister McGrath rejects the notion that belief is a relic of the past and takes aim at the ‘new atheists’ who attack religion without even knowing what it is. Prof McGrath, emeritus Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, has had a unique journey to religion. A former Marxist atheist with a doctorate in molecular biology, he’s now a world-renowned theologian and Anglican priest. In this lively discussion with Damian Thompson he talks about the boundary between science and religion, something poorly understood by aggressive atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.
‘Is it necessary to have the window open when listening to the new device?’ asked Edith Davidson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1923, referring to the latest fashionable contraption, the wireless. We might laugh – but it does take time for the older generation to catch up with new technology. To this day I instinctively roll down my car window (unnecessarily, I’m pretty sure) to point my phone towards the sensor that will grant me access to my local club. In her joyous, richly illustrated book about the early years of radio from the listeners’ point of view, the BBC radio producer Beaty Rubens takes us inside
Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their
Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are ‘moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer’. He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 – far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500. Thad and Hazan, aged 27 and 26 respectively, are in serious debt after their father’s recent death, and their roof is leaking. Logging in the Montana backcountry is
There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are. Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles. Weiner specialises in Harding, largely because
33 min listen
Sam’s guest on today’s Book Club podcast is the musician, writer and photographer Colin Greenwood, who joins me to discuss his new book of photographs and memoir How To Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead. Colin tells me about the band’s Mr Benn journey, photographing what you want to see… and what it takes to make Radiohead open a gig with ‘Creep’. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.
Occasionally a book is published, perhaps twice in a generation, which is so bad but internationally celebrated that one questions everything one has believed about literature. The Wizard of the Kremlin, written in French by the Italian political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix de Roman in 2022. It narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Booker, and has since been translated into 30 languages. If a novel this inept is so successful then we have truly entered Spenglerian end times. The book is not just poorly constructed, filled with two-dimensional characters, tin-eared dialogue and inauthentic settings. Its very premise is ridiculous. The
At the turn of the century, the ineluctable march of democracy seemed assured. The Cold War extinguished and eastern Europe freed, a Whiggish history of the world continued to be written. A quarter of a century on, the great wave has broken and rolled back. Democracy is not what it was in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Afghanistan. It has not emerged in China. The future looks less democratic than the past. Such concerns bother the big brain of the former Supreme Court judge and medieval historian Jonathan Sumption in his latest brilliant collection of essays. One might reasonably expect him, as one of the great
This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Based on the Coromandel coast at Chennai in south-eastern India, Yuvan Aves is an active naturalist and an ardent activist. Still in his twenties, he teaches outdoor classes, he campaigns and he notes down the movements and habits of invertebrates, birds and fauna in his local wetlands and littoral. All his observations and the wider thoughts on ecology that make up Intertidal are given added heft and poignancy by the searing account of his childhood which begins the book. His father was a philandering no-hoper whom his mother left for another man. That man was even worse. He took against the
Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History (2022): autodidact catnip. He’s a gifted chronicler of the odd, the interesting and the esoteric. Think non-fiction Umberto Eco. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that he’s now got round to writing about the Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:
27 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Katy Balls analyses the threat Reform pose to the Conservatives (1:20); Alexander Raubo talks us through the MAGA social scene and the art collective Remilia (6:42); Damian Thompson reviews Vatican Spies: from the Second World War to Pope Francis, by Yvonnick Denoel (12:27); Daisy Dunns reviews the new podcast Intoxicating History from Henry Jeffreys and Tom Parker Bowles, as well as BBC Radio 4’s Moving Pictures (17:50); and, Mark Mason provides his notes on obituaries (22:46). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
