Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Lisa Hilton

Bullying on Twitter is nothing compared with what Charles II’s mistresses endured

Strolling through Whitehall Palace in the early years of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys was thrilled to spy a washing line displaying ‘the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine’s… and did me good to look upon them’. The owner of the glamorous undergarments was Barbara Villiers, the first of the many maîtresses-en-titre of King Charles II who form the subject of this incisive new study. Linda Porter’s eye for detail is no less acute (though certainly less creepy) than Pepys’s. In her hands the lives and characters of the women who shaped the reputation of the Restoration court emerge as far more discrete and individual than the identikit

Andrew McKie

Children go missing: the latest crime fiction reviewed

Hot on the heels of The Stranger, the Netflix series based on his novel but transplanted to the UK, Harlan Coben returns with his 32nd book. Some of us have been getting our regular dose ever since he introduced his sports agent sleuth Myron Bolitar in the mid-1990s, and The Boy from the Woods (Century, £20) contains all the usual ingredients. For those new to Coben it has the virtues of The Stranger — addictive and full of twists, with an intriguing premise. It also has its deficiencies: too many subplots, a tendency to drop promising strands of the story when something else comes along, and characters whose motives are

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

My mother — as I remember her best

Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the Times crossword almost completed at the Formica table; knitting on the go; and novels — she always read the last page first. She was one of that generation of women who didn’t go to university but were incredibly well-read and knew poems by heart. This was Kathleen, the mother of Nicholas Royle, novelist and professor of English at Sussex University. In a remarkable and moving memoir he has captured and preserved a loving, kind, impatient woman — and perhaps, with her, all of our mothers in the sweet predictability of

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited

42 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast we’re talking about Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh’s great novel is 75 years old this week, and I’m joined by our chief critic Philip Hensher, and by the novelist’s grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press’s complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh’s career, what did it mean to the author and how did he revise it — and why have generations of readers, effectively, misread it?

Thursday

Mark Cocker

Where did birds first learn to sing?

The crisis inflicted by Covid-19 has been a source of anguish for everyone; yet we frequently hear how people are rediscovering solace in nature, especially in their gardens or in the surging renewal of life in the spring. According to Tim Burt and Des Thompson, the editors of a collection of essays about the importance of field research, this fulfilment reveals something much more profound than a distraction from lockdown.They argue that a response to the natural world is hardwired in the human psyche. Out of that fundamental reflex has evolved not just our prowess as hunters, then agriculturalists, but the entire edifice of science, whose assembled vision of the

Dominic Selwood

The Plantagenet we always forget

Watching Heston Blumenthal arrange the infernal horror that is a lamprey’s head on a plate is one thing; seeing an enthusiastic dinner guest suck the raw, bloody meat out of it is quite another — something you will never, in fact, unsee. But finding the YouTube link to this spectacle in the chatty preface to an academic book on Henry III is quite the best indicator that you are in for a colourful ride. David Carpenter has chosen his subject thoughtfully. The history of English kings and queens is a well-trodden path, yet even aficionados struggle to list three things Henry did well and three areas in which he needed

Clive Aslet

The shock of discovering your ancestors were slave traders

If I had a slave owner in my family background I’d probably keep quiet about it. Richard Atkinson, in his remarkable first book, has gone to the other extreme. Not only did he seek out as much information as he could about the activities of his Georgian forebear, also called Richard Atkinson, but he’s made them the subject of this history. Actually, he was as shocked by what he discovered as anyone. The quest started with a bundle of letters which he and his sister inherited from the wreck of a family fortune that had dwindled, by the 1970s, to a decrepit country house in Cumbria, where the brackets of

Suzi Feay

The sorrows of young Hillary: Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Question: which American president and first lady would you care to imagine having intercourse? If that provokes a shudder, be assured that the sex scenes between Yale law students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton in Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel are cringe-free — even the one involving manual stimulation that takes place in a moving car. They’re young, they’re in love, it’s adorable. For Hillary, who has ruefully accepted that a fierce intellect is a drawback when it comes to dating, the leonine charmer from Arkansas is a gift dropped from heaven. Until he isn’t. A stumbling first paragraph sounds a warning about the limitations and non-literary quality of Hillary’s first-person

Jay Elwes

Disrupting the world — from a small bedroom in Hounslow

On 6 May 2010 the eurozone crisis was tearing through the continent. Greece was bankrupt, and it looked as though Spain or Italy could be next. Markets were on edge, volatility was high — and then something very strange happened. The S&P 500, one of the US’s main stock indexes, began to crash. It went faster and further than it ever had before, losing 5 per cent of its value in four minutes. The shock spread to the Dow Jones, which hurtled downwards. Financial markets across the globe were going haywire. The oil price started to fall. Shares formerly valued at $50 were suddenly trading at 0.0001 cents while others

Julie Myerson

The best way to cope with rejection is to write about it

With more than a dozen acclaimed novels to her name, not to mention short stories, poetry, a memoir and a Booker nomination, you might think that Michèle Roberts could have counted on being published for life. But as so many ‘established’ authors know painfully well, in that ever-hungry-for-the-new world there’s no such thing as tenure. So when her latest novel elicits a lack-lustre response from her agent before being ‘sweetly’ but flatly turned down by her publisher, a stunned Roberts finds herself processing the humiliation in the only way she knows how — by writing about it. ‘My past successes counted for nothing,’ she mournfully observes: ‘There was only this

Julian Jackson

France will always have a love-hate relationship with its heroes

The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated the age of the people: ‘France cured of individuals,’ he wrote in the preface to his history. But that same Revolution created a pantheon for its grands hommes. Anyone who has spent time in France will be familiar with the names of those figures celebrated endlessly in street names: Hugo, Gambetta, Pasteur, Jaurès, Moulin and so on. Many French people might now be hard-pressed if asked who some of these heroes were. But the two names everyone knows — even if neither is actually in the Panthéon

Wednesday

Thursday

Philip Hensher

The genuine polymath is still one in a million

We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research off your own bat it meant a trip to the public library — and perhaps filling out a form for an inter-library loan. Or you could try your luck in a bookshop, new or secondhand. The whole process took a long time, and most people stayed within their professional competence or enthusiasm, frankly admitting to ignorance outside those limits. It was the

David Crane

Vain, inbred and inept: how could the Habsburgs have survived so long?

One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who produced so many complete duffers as the Habsburgs managed to play such a crucial role in world affairs. There was certainly the odd exception to the general rule, and some highly effective women; but it says a lot about a family that once controlled much of the Old and the New Worlds that at the end of this lucid and entertaining history Martyn Rady can offer up Dr Otto von Habsburg, the last ‘pretender’ to the Austrian throne and MEP for the Bavarian conservative CSU party, as the ‘best emperor

Simon Ings

Taxonomy reaches celebrity heights

Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and possibly Thailand. (The uncertainty arises because it’s often mistaken for a similar-looking species, the Heteropoda javana.) In 2008 a German collector sent photos of his unusual looking ‘pet’ to Peter Jäger, an arachnologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt. Consequently, and in common with most other living finds, David Bowie’s spider was discovered twice: once in the field, and once in the collection. Bowie’s spider is famous, but not exceptional. Jäger has discovered more than 200 species of spider in the past decade, and names them after politicians,

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Homage to Lyra McKee — the journalist I miss most

In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist and partisan hack. Somewhere along the way the fresh-faced idealists of All the President’s Men gave way to the dissociative anti-hero of Nightcrawler. Corporate-driven news values? Probably. Phone hacking? Definitely. But what grates more is the suspicion that journalism is a clique that protects its own, disdains its audience and passes off its attitudes and preferences as the neutral norm. The perception isn’t entirely wide of the mark. Lyra McKee was a one-woman union for the reputation of journalism. To her it was more than blue-tick-on-blue-tick gossip-shopping and SEO-chasing junk

Nigel Warburton

From the wrestling ring to Plato’s Cave in one easy throw

One of the delights of going to stay with my grandparents in the 1970s was that my grandmother was a fan of the wrestling on ITV’s World of Sport. My parents wouldn’t ever watch it. It was fixed — a pantomime. But my grandmother seemed oblivious. It was the only sport she followed, apart from Wimbledon. I don’t think she realised it was scripted. I was transfixed by the exaggerated antics of the ‘Dulwich Destroyer’, ‘The Man You Love to Hate’, Mick McManus, who played it for the boos and whose vulnerability (as everyone knew) was his ears (‘Not the ears, not the ears’), and by the sheer bulk of

Christopher Meyer

Where are the Henry Kissingers when we need them?

It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that I came to realise how riven by ideology the world of US foreign policy had become. For 20 years I had been moulded by the resolute pragmatism of British diplomacy. My American sabbatical threw open the door to intellectual conflict in the study and practice of international relations unlike anything I had experienced. Two great warring clans — the realists and the idealists, those who took the world as they found it and those who saw the world as they would like it to be — were at each other’s

Juliet Nicolson

A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion

Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Thanks to a serendipitous sequence of connections, including a perspicacious dealer and a fast-moving literary agent, the wonderful (and super-latively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of Eileen Alexander and fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen has been saved from oblivion. Having survived a serious car accident on the eve of the second world war with her only-just-platonic friend Gershon at the wheel, Eileen begins writing him some of wartime’s funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters as she reports on her

Adam Roberts

Victorian novels to enjoy in lockdown

It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I am here to offer some recommendations. But there’s an immediate problem. Do I gesture towards the blindingly obvious? Or do I recommend a variety of obscure and arcane titles? The former strategy is liable only to insult your intelligence — of course you already know Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are worth reading — whereas the latter runs the risk of merely putting you off and making me seem pretentious. There is, though, a third way. What did the Victorians themselves reckon were the great authors of their age? The