Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Anne de Courcy

When Cartier was the girls’ best friend

The word ‘jewel’ makes the heart beat a little faster. Great jewels have always epitomised beauty, love — illicit or sanctified —romance, danger and mystery. And no one knew better how to cash in on this mystique than the firm of Cartier, for years the go-to jewellers for discreet, elegant razzle-dazzle. Its customers were kings, princes, maharajas and the whole of ‘society’. The iconic panther brooch it created for the Duchess of Windsor sold for $7 million (in 2010). When Francesca Cartier Brickell, searching for a special bottle of champagne in her Cartier grandfather’s cellar, spotted a battered leather trunk in one corner, she opened it to find bundles of

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The big burly blokes who make infinitely precise pointe shoes by hand

Pauline, Petrova or Posy? Which Fossil sister are you? Or, rather, which Fossil sister did you hope to be when you first read Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes? It has to be Posy. The third and last adopted Fossil arrives in a basket with a note — ‘This is the little daughter of a dancer’ — and tiny slippers. For any girl who has ever imagined taking the stage in pointe shoes, the Freed factory in Hackney is a dream of pink satin. Frederick Freed was a shoeman and showman. Ninety years ago, Mr Freed was the star-maker at Gamba, which only made shoes in one width. Then Mr Freed had

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

We must defend freedom of reaction

Debbie Harry, Blondie’s lead singer, has written a memoir in which she relates, in her usual deadpan, punk-rock way, the strange, horrific things that have happened to her. She had a narrow escape from Ted Bundy, the serial killer; David Bowie showed her his penis (‘adorable’, apparently) and early in her pop career she was raped by an opportunist burglar. ‘He poked around, searching for anything worth anything. He piled up the guitars and Chris’s camera. Then he untied my hands and told me to take off my pants… I can’t say I felt a lot of fear,’ writes Debbie. ‘In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than

Ian Garrick-Mason

What do we really mean by the ‘language’ of animals?

The reality of animal communication (or, more precisely, our belief in that reality) is a fact underwritten not by science but by direct experience. A dog owner knows that his dog communicates with him because he makes eye contact with it, notices its body movements, listens to its barks and whines and yips, and associates all of these actions with the contexts in which they occur and the actions that take place before and after such ‘signals’ have been sent. The owner unscientifically — but naturally and effortlessly — projects into the dog a sense of awareness and autonomy similar to the one he himself possesses. Since this projection is

Martin Gayford

It’s yellow, not green, that’s the colour of jealousy

Making attributions to Leonardo da Vinci,  the great art historian Adolfo Venturi once remarked, is like ‘picking up a red-hot iron’. Those who wish to avoid injury, he advised, should exercise great caution. Whether or not the scholars who attributed the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to the great man are now suffering from badly burnt fingers — not to mention the buyer who paid $450.3 million for it — is a question of informed opinion. On the whole, Carmen C. Bambach, the author of the monumental Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (Yale, 4 Volumes, £400) votes against. In Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings in Detail (Prestel £65), Alessandro Vezzosi, also a noted

Frances Wilson

Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?

Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list, and this second collection comes crowned in laurels: ‘She’s an unstoppable force of nature,’ says her American editor. ‘This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best,’ says Eleanor Catton. Stephen King calls her ‘required reading’, and early reviewers on the website Goodreads describe this book as ‘genius’, ‘astounding’, ‘resplendent’ and ‘epiphanic’. Because she is a woman who writes essays, Jamison has been compared with Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag, but she is the antithesis of her predecessors. A recovered alcoholic, Jamison

Adam Zamoyski

Poland was no walkover for the Reich

‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances against tanks. In this timely and authoritative book, Roger Moorhouse dispels this and other myths concocted by German and Soviet propaganda. He has trawled through an impressive quantity of unpublished Polish and German sources, as well as a wealth of eyewitness testimonies from both sides, to produce a balanced account of this much neglected yet

Sara Wheeler

The exotic Silk Road is now a highway to hell

This engaging book describes the Norwegian author’s travels round the five Central Asian Stans — a region where toponyms still make the heart beat faster: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent. Fittingly, given the means by which foreign powers have harmed the Stans, Erika Fatland begins her story with the disastrous methane spill which Soviet geologists caused in Turkmenistan in 1971. But it seems that however malign exterior forces have been, these countries are perfectly capable of — if not experts in — producing ghastly politicians themselves. Saparmurat Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi, emerges top of a hotly contested field of nutters. He declared himself a prophet, and banned dogs from Ashgabat because he

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The old monster Elton John appears charmingly self-deprecating

I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary, whether asking fans on to the stage to dance and then screaming at them not to get so close, or demanding that an employee do something about the blustery weather keeping him awake. They say you get the face you deserve after 50, and he looks every inch the bitter old busybody who divides his time between twitching the curtains and gossiping over the fence about the behaviour of those younger and prettier than himself. He has now become drearily bound into the liberal establishment — see his recent puffed-up

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Book Club podcast: The Who’s Pete Townshend on his new novel

My guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly conceived as an opera. We talk about madness and creativity, Who lyrics popping up in the fiction, how he settled on an Aristotelian plot, and the unusual way his psychic second wife sends him off to sleep.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Book Club podcast: a conversation with Clive James

Clive James is gone. What a great spirit, what a lively and curious mind, what an instinct for laughter we’ve lost. I had the chance to talk to him in 2017 at his home in Cambridge about poetry, fame, late style, discovering Browning, being silly and serious, watching box sets, facing the end, and why he wants to be buried back home in Australia. I found a Clive still curious, still engaged, and fiercely in love with life. If you didn’t hear it first time round – or if you did, and are feeling Clive’s loss – you can listen to our conversation here.

Douglas Murray

Clive James: a tribute

Clive James died last weekend at his home, surrounded by his family, after a long illness. The poet, writer, critic and television star was one of the most remarkable, talented and insightful members of his generation. Loved by millions, he was an incomparable presence in the lives of his friends and readers right up until the end. In 2014, when he seemed very near that end, I went to see him at his home in Cambridge to talk about life, love, poetry and the proximity of death. I feared that it would be our last conversation. Thank medicine it wasn’t. But before I’d even got home, Clive had written again

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Jeremy Corbyn – the early years

The call for the comically appalling first or final paragraph of the memoir of a well-known figure was one of those challenges where we raise a glass in memory of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian novelist and patron saint of purple prose. The oft-cited example of his florid style is the opening to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford — ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ — which was used by Charles Schulz as the first line of Snoopy’s novel, and by Brian Murdoch in his winning entry below. You didn’t quite hit the spot this week and the standard was patchy. Some creditable entries were disqualified because they didn’t strike me

Thursday

Rose Prince

Make it an applefest this Christmas — the best of the year’s cookbooks

If it were not for a banker with a hangover, we would not have Eggs Benedict. Or so one of the creation stories goes. One morning in 1894 Lemuel Benedict walked in to the Waldorf Hotel, New York, feeling a bit rough. He asked the Maître D’, Oscar Tschirky, for hot buttered toast, bacon, two poached eggs and — crucially — a ‘pitcher’ of hollandaise sauce. This story is recounted in Signature Dishes that Matter (Phaidon, £35), a chronology of 200 or so inventions, from gelato (ice cream) in 1686 to Claude Bosi’s ‘duck jelly’ in 2017. Put together by seven food critics with global knowledge, this is a truly

Peter Parker

Capturing the mood of the English landscape: the genius of John Nash

‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton wrote in April 1939, ‘I would first show him a good Constable and then one or two of John Nash’s best watercolours.’ This is about as good an endorsement any painter could ask for, but Nash is more usually bracketed with, and overshadowed by, his older brother. There have been major exhibitions of Paul Nash’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010 and at Tate Britain three years ago, whereas the last truly substantial retrospective of John’s work was at the Royal Academy in 1967. Andrew Lambirth’s handsome and

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Angels and daemons: Children’s books for Christmas

Sometimes I have to admit the reason I read children’s books with pleasure is that I’m essentially puerile —and look, that’s not a bad thing if it means getting to read The Steves by Morag Hood (Pan Macmillan, £6.99), aimed at three year olds. It’s about two puffins called Steve who keenly resent the claims of the other to be Number One Steve. It is the kind of infantile playground name-calling which makes me laugh, and I reckon young children will like it too, especially Steves. Judith Kerr, the peerless, razor-sharp author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea as well as the tear-jerker My Henry has, alas, gone to

Douglas Murray

The carnage inside Charlie Hebdo: an eyewitness’s account of the attack

It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed 12 people. Philippe Lançon survived the editorial meeting that was taking place as the gunmen burst in. Published to huge acclaim in France last year, Disturbance is his account of events. It is long, perhaps too long, with numerous discursions. But who would edit such painful, painstaking testimony? On the morning of the attack, Lançon had been weighing up whether to go to Charlie or to Libération, where he also worked. He chose to go to Charlie, whose difficult, brilliant, brave team had kept producing the magazine, despite a decade

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Book Club: who was the poet Laurie Lee?

I’m joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him as a writer. Acting as medium, so to speak, is David Parker — whose 1990s interviews with Lee before his death provide the material for the new book Down In The Valley: A Writer’s Landscape — and who’s here to talk about the pleasures and difficulties of coaxing reminiscences out of this laureate of English rural life. Essential listening for anyone for whom Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning formed part of a literary education.

Thursday

Jenny Colgan

Friends forever: the inside story of the American sitcom classic

Here is a test to tell you whether you will like this book or not: when I write ‘So, no one told you life was going to be this way…’, do you secretly clap your hands four times? If so, could you be any more excited to get your hands on it? The excellent news is that, just like the show, Still Friends, which rabid fans would almost certainly buy whatever old rubbish was in it, is much, much better than it needed to be. It will appeal to anyone interested, not just in the six stars (seven if you include Marcel the monkey, which I most certainly do) but

Frank Lawton

Ben Lerner’s much hyped latest novel reads like an audit of contemporary grievances

Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in The Topeka School, while things keep returning, something has also been lost. Lerner’s third novel reunites us with Adam Gordon, the protagonist — and Lerner surrogate — of his much acclaimed debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam is a senior at Topeka High School in the late 1990s, an aspiring poet and champion debater (as was Lerner), whose parents are psychologists at the Foundation, ‘a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital’ which treats just about everyone in the book. But rather than reprising the autofiction with which Lerner has become synonymous,