Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Dirty money and political manipulation: Independence Square, by A.D. Miller, reviewed

A.D. Miller’s gripping new book is set largely during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Miller covered as a journalist. Ten years later, I reported on the aftermath of the country’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. Independence Square details the first event and prefigures the second. It is several things: a thriller, a political novel and a statement on our times. It tells the story of Simon, a disgraced British diplomat who, one day on the Tube, sees the cause (so he believes) of his downfall. She is a woman called Olesya whom he met years earlier during the Orange Revolution. From this beginning the novel unfurls, switching between 2004 and the present

Anne de Courcy

There was no fairy tale ending for the lovely Gladys Deacon

The story of how Hugo Vickers eventually tracked down the former Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough is almost as fascinating as how Gladys nailed her duke. Both were obsessions that began young, that of the 16-year-old Vickers when he read of ‘The love of Proust, the belle amie of Anatole France’, and was so taken that he wrote his first biography of her 40 years ago, and that of Gladys when at 14 she wrote (of the Duke) ‘O dear if only I was a little older I might “catch” him yet’.’ Gladys (born in 1881) was a star from the word go, extremely intelligent — her tutor called her

Thursday

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Book Club podcast: did Churchill’s cook help him win the war?

32 min listen

This week’s Book Club stars the food historian and broadcaster Annie Gray, whose new book Victory In The Kitchen excavates the life and world of Georgina Landemare – Winston Churchill’s cook. From the shifting roles of household servants, and the insane food of the Edwardian rich – everything jellied and moulded and forced through sieves – to the inventive ways that haute cuisine responded to rationing, Georgina’s is a story that gives a fascinating new insight into 20th century culture and society. Annie makes the case that without Georgina’s cooking, Churchill might never have achieved the political success he did. Hear what Andrew Roberts got wrong, how Churchill simultaneously saved

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘It was the best of pies, it was the worst of pies’: famous authors on food

Your latest challenge was to provide a passage about food written in the style of a well-known author. One of my favourite literary meals is in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Here is the novel’s protagonist, the Falstaffian Ignatius J. Reilly, sizing up a mid-afternoon snack: ‘In the boiling water the hot dogs swished and lashed like artificially coloured and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. “I shall pretend that I am in a smart restaurant and that this is the lobster pond.”’ In a large and wide-ranging entry, Douglas G. Brown’s ‘Observation on a Vegetable That Was Probably Unknown to Ogden Nash’

Saturday

Ian Sansom

His own worst critic? Clive James the poet

Clive James (1939-2019), in the much-quoted words of a New Yorker profile, was a brilliant bunch of guys. One of those guys was a poet. Alongside the celebrated columns in the Observer, and Saturday Night Clive, and the Postcard From… documentaries, and Clive James on Television, and so on and so forth, there was a lifetime’s outpouring of verse. Ian Shircore’s So Brightly at the Last is the first book-length study of James’s poetry. One sincerely hopes that it is not the last. Shircore has written books about JFK, on conspiracy theories, and a book about The Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy. A friend and an admirer of James —

Boyd Tonkin

Albanian literary icon Ismail Kadare revisits ‘home’

Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native Albania. Born, like his frenemy the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, amid the blank-faced mansions and feuding clans of the ‘stone city’ of Gjirokaster, the novelist has always framed the terror, secrecy and confusion of the regime as a family affair. The usual comparisons with Kafka and Orwell underplay the sheer, gut-twisting intimacy of politics and power in his work. It baffles outsiders who want to label Kadare either a brave dissident or a complicit stooge. Ideology be damned: this is, and always was, strictly personal. The Doll even wonders whether

Nicholas Lezard

There are more negatively-loaded words than positive ones — so what?

Negativity has a power over us. You know how it is. One bad thing can ruin your whole day, even if the day has been otherwise full of good or non-bad things. Infants react more quickly to an image of a snake than a frog, or unhappy or angry faces than happy ones. Then again, I reacted more strongly to Roy E. Baumeister’s face on the back flap of the book than I did to John Tierney’s, because Baumeister has a beard and a broad grin that suggests high self-esteem. And why not? He’s written or co-written more than a dozen books (first title, Meanings of Life) while Tierney has

Ian Thomson

Animation lends itself readily to propaganda

Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by Saudi troops in a computer-animated film of the ‘liberation’ of Iran from Ayatollah rule. Saudi Deterrent Force was a six-minute fantasy released online by anonymous video-makers in Saudi Arabia in 2017. It was viewed over 750,000 times before Iranian animators struck back with Battle of the Persian Gulf II, in which the Great Satan and perceived Saudi lackey Donald Trump is humiliated in an imagined Gulf battle led by Soleimani. Now that Soleimani is, in Pentagon-speak, a ‘vaporised non-person’, Saudi Deterrent Force acquires added interest for us as propaganda. Large

Dennis Duncan

How to organise everything — Judith Flanders’s history of finding things

In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself to the question of what, exactly, an index is. In Collison’s loosest formulation, every time we organise the world around us so that we know where to find things, we are in fact indexing. He offers a pair of illustrations that could hardly be more 1950s if they were wearing brothel creepers: When a housewife makes a separate place for everything in the kitchen she is in fact creating a living index, for not only she, but all her household, will gradually get used to the system she has created

Amanda Craig

A novel of terror and hope on the Mexican-American border

Lydia and Luca are hiding in the shower room of their home while 16 members of her family are murdered. Lydia’s husband, a journalist, wrote about the latest drugs cartel in Acapulco and now, to stay alive, the mother and small son must disappear to America. Instead of the middle-class life Lydia has enjoyed as a bookshop owner, she and Luca must become one of those nameless, desperate migrants against whom President Trump vows to build his wall. This portrait of the deepening societal breakdown in Mexico gives a human face to an acute contemporary crisis So begins Jeanine Cummins’s third novel, and if you think this is another Roma-style

Mark Cocker

In the high Himalayas

In my twenties I once visited a lonely spot among the western Himalayas called Zhuldok in the Suru valley. Politically it is part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, but geographically, ethnically and culturally the region is bound to the Tibetan plateau and its former Buddhist theocracy centred on Lhasa. I remember one compelling moment, with the twin peaks of Nun Kun looming above us to 7,000 metres, when we watched two wolves on the far shore of a torrent of glacial meltwater. Those predators lolloped at easy pace through the autumn colour of that immense Himalayan landscape and for one of the few occasions in my life

Houman Barekat

Bawdy, it’s not — Strange Antics: A cultural history of seduction

Anyone reading Clement Knox’s history of seduction for salacious entertainment is likely to be disappointed: it contains no mention of oysters or Barry White records, and only a very light sprinkling of bawdiness. Strange Antics is a serious and sober tome about libertinism and its consequences, thank you very much. Readers expecting ‘history’, in the conventional sense, will likewise be frustrated: though it dips into legal and political history, this book is principally composed of literary biography and criticism, as Knox draws on the lives of various cultural historical figures and several canonical novels to explore his theme — a format that has lately become something of a go-to for

Anna Aslanyan

Gothic horror, German-style

Many of our favourite folk tales have lost much of their original Gothic horror in later versions. By contrast, Daniel Kehlmann’s retelling of the legend of Ulenspiegel, moved to the 17th century, is full of nightmares. Worse than imaginary fears awaiting travellers in the forest are real ones: hunger, cold, war, plague, torture ‘more refined and dreadful than anything the great painters of the inferno had dreamed’. These descriptions invite comparisons with Charles de Coster’s famous 1867 novel; but if in the latter the hero fights for freedom, here he juggles many things, sometimes literally. Tyll the folklore character becomes an itinerant entertainer and court jester able to provoke and

Norman Lebrecht

Prepare to be amazed: the story of Birmingham’s Symphony Orchestra

Those who conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra may not be aware that musicians fill in a form after they leave marking them out of ten, sometimes with an acerbic comment on their performance. Industrial democracy is alive and well in the West Midlands, along with a Red Robbo urge to biff the bosses, as Richard Bratby’s centennial history of the CBSO entertainingly reveals. Democracy can foster great leaders and, in this sphere, the CBSO is the envy of the world. Three of its last four chief conductors, chosen by the players, have gone on to the highest peaks — Simon Rattle to the Berlin Philharmonic, Andris Nelsons to

Christopher Priest

Was Dresden a war crime?

The literature of second world war bombing campaigns is surprisingly extensive. The books written in Britain largely focus on the night sorties by RAF Bomber Command, but the equally destructive second world war campaigns by the US 8th Air Force (daylight raids on Germany) and the Luftwaffe (the Netherlands, the Blitz on the UK) are covered too. There is little or no equivalent literature from Germany, although in recent years there have been several deeply researched books by German authors about the destruction of their cities. The RAF books take all forms. There are authoritative personal histories (pilots, air chiefs, politicians), as well as vernacular accounts (WAAFs, ground crew, rear

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: The Joy of Waterboiling and Noah Gets Naked

Your latest challenge was to submit an extract from one of the following books: Noah Gets Naked: Bible Stories They Didn’t Teach You at Sunday School; Ending the War on Artisan Cheese; The Joy of Waterboiling; Versailles: The View from Sweden. These genuine titles have all been contenders for the annual Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, an award invented in 1978 by Bruce Robinson and Trevor Bounford to relieve the tedium of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Joy of Waterboiling — a German-language guide to cooking meals in a kettle — scooped the gong in 2018 and proved to be top choice with competitors too, followed

Saturday

Diana Hendry

Does questioning women about their sex lives constitute harassment?

Alert to the combination of a controversial issue and a brilliant writer, Serpent’s Tail have bought This is a Pleasure, first published as a short story in the New Yorker, and issued it as a very short hardback novella — 15,000 words, large print, lipstick kisses on the cover. Already described by the Guardian as ‘an incendiary volume’, the book is a response to, and questioning of, the #MeToo movement. Quin Saunders, the longtime head of a respected publishing imprint, is accused of harassment by the many women who work or write for him, is ultimately stripped of his career, boycotted and humiliated. He’s the Harvey Weinstein of the publishing

Anthony Sattin

Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao

Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes. Like punters to the other red light districts, we tend to stick to what we know we like, to our own kind. We travel vicariously with voices that are familiar, or at least intelligible, whose behaviour we can understand, whose narrators we believe we can know. That belief allows them to take us to places we have never seen. How, then, can we follow a foreign author’s account of travelling to, or living in, a place we don’t know? I thought this would be an interesting problem while reading Sanmao’s

Christopher Priest

How did the infamous Josef Mengele escape punishment?

The atrocities of the concentration camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau are now universally known, but it is still almost beyond belief that Auschwitz could exist in modern Europe. The history of the camp is a comparatively recent one: construction began in April 1940, less than 80 years ago, and the first victims died there, or were killed, not long after. Some of the people who were transported to the camp managed somehow to survive the war and a few of them are still alive today. Perhaps we shy away from knowing too much about what they suffered because the totality of awfulness is beyond description and the world is still contemplating that.