Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Philip Hensher

The concluding volume of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher is – as its predecessors are – a triumph

This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair, and avoids the truth that she was partnered in this last phase with figures who conspired to frustrate policies arising from some accurate and perceptive insights. The end result is that where the first two volumes contained one episode after another of rare, unalloyed triumph, this final one inevitably tells the story of resentments building

Stephen Bayley

An unconventional biography of the visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright

Paul Hendrickson’s previous (and very fine) book was Hemingway’s Boat, published in Britain in 2012. It was a nice conceit to see the writer’s life through his singular obsession with Pilar, the boat he commissioned from a Brooklyn shipyard, which remained the steadiest companion in his choppy voyage. The enormous life of Frank Lloyd Wright — the architect who was born two years after the Civil War, and died in 1959 when Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ was a hit — offers no such straightforward device. With more than 500 completed designs, splendid eccentricities and a well-developed taste for confrontation, every single Wright building could have become a novella. He

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: how fake news took over the world

My guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of ‘post-truth politics’ in his bestselling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. His fascinating and dismaying new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, describes how Russia’s surreal new information politics turned out not to be a weird exception, but the harbinger of a worldwide phenomenon. In this new book, part travelogue, part reportage, part memoir, he travels from the Philippines to Ukraine, from Mexico to Beijing, to investigate how the internet — which we once thought would

Thursday

Sarah Ditum

Patti Smith had a bad year in 2016

In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the unexpected for Patti Smith. It starts badly at New Year: ‘Some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots.’ Then it gets worse, private tragedies and political shocks drawing Smith into a restive, twilight state: ‘The mischievous monkey, toying with the climate, toying with the coming election, toying with the mind, producing sour sleep or nothing at all.’ She tells us how she ‘skated along the fringe of a dream’ in this — well what exactly is it? Not fiction, because Smith is telling stories from

Jane Ogrady

Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality is hard to get your head around

Vibrations, chemicals and light-waves exist in the world; sounds, tastes, smells and colours only seem to. ‘Many sensations which are supposed to be qualities residing in external objects have no real existence save in us,’ said Galileo in the 17th century. ‘They reside only in the consciousness.’ But is consciousness itself, then, other than, and outside, physical things? We have known for millennia that it is in some way linked to the brain, yet, for all the advances of science, no scientific world view is able to accommodate it. How conscious states are generated by movements of brain tissue remains, in Thomas Huxley’s analogy, just as ‘unaccountable’ as that the

Alan Judd

Betrayal in Berlin – a small but important part of the Cold War story

The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56.  It was a technical and engineering triumph which yielded a vast hoard of intelligence and, crucially, guaranteed early warning of any surprise Russian attack (as was mooted by the Russian military). Yet it was betrayed to the Russians by the British spy George Blake before a single sod was dug. This well-researched and readable account tells both stories, showing how they fed into each other. High-grade information on Russian military capabilities and intentions were scarce.  One of few successful sources was an MI6 tunnel in Vienna, tapping into Russian underground communications cables. The MI6 head

Ian Thomson

A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’

No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, for example, the Confederates had managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims, exalted by the myth of a noble lost cause. The South had lost 20 per cent of its white male population to the Union armies, but that only confirmed its moral superiority over the money-grubbing Yankee. According to Susan Neiman, postwar Germans approximated the vanquished Confederacy in their inability to imagine their own defeat. Attempts were made to recompense the Jewish community, but most Germans, East and West, refused to

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Gilgamesh, Michael Schmidt’s ‘life’ of a poem

In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British Museum reading room poring over piles of books about Mesopotamia. His name was George Smith, and this was his secret passion. Then, one day, a museum attendant remarked that it was a shame no one had bothered to decipher ‘them bird tracks’ — by which he meant the weird-looking scratches in clay tablets from the newly rediscovered ancient city of Nineveh. It was at that moment that something clicked in Smith’s head. He set to it, decoding the cuneiform script to make a series of breakthroughs, culminating in one that

Alex Burghart

Oswald of Northumbria – an Anglo-Saxon saint-king of the north for our time

In Hamlet a gravedigger asks the riddle: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ Answer: ‘A grave-maker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday.’And yet they do not; this character has disturbed the bones of Yorick. ‘Doomsday’ is, of course, the archaic word for ‘judgment day’ and Hamlet is soon asking questions of the dead jester’s skull. So it is in modern times with those odd folk, archaeologists — always scrabbling around in the dirt, asking questions of the dead with their grubby fingers. Medievalists are lucky that they do, because without their digging and scraping we would have to rely

William Leith

Living on a nuclear submarine does your head in

Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear submarine, which he describes variously as ‘sleek, black and athletic looking’, and ‘this fierce black messenger of death’, and ‘this huge, black leviathan’, and ‘a killing machine’, and ‘silent as death’. The first time he sets foot on it, he tells us, ‘I was shitting it.’ This is not the last we will hear of his negative emotions, or the state of his bowels. We are in the latter part of the Cold War. Humphreys is a sailor. The submarine is HMS Resolution, part of the Polaris fleet. It is

Violet Hudson

A work of art in more ways than one

Neil Hegarty’s new novel, The Jewel, is a mass of contradictions. It’s about an art heist, but it’s not fun. It’s a love story,  but it’s not romantic. And it features a woman’s wasted life, but it’s not without salvation. The overarching plot follows three characters. John, a ‘seedy’ artist-cum-art-forger-cum-art-thief, has been commissioned to steal an important work (‘The Jewel’ of the title) from a newly re-opened gallery in Dublin. As he prepares for the job, he reflects on his life, from his lonely, suburban childhood by the Thames, scouting for washed-up dogs on the foreshore, to his early twenties at art school, living in a bedsit smelling of gas

Hilary Spurling

Three remarkable sisters at the heart of 20th-century Chinese politics

In their lifetime, and afterwards, the Soong sisters from Shanghai seemed like figures from a Chinese fairy tale. There were three of them: ‘One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country.’ They came from a family of prosperous Methodist converts and, for almost 100 years, one or other of them presided at or near the centre of power in China. The middle sister, Chingling, married Sun Yatsen, the founding Father of the Republic, transferring her allegiance after his death to the small group of bandits, led by Mao Zedong, who formed the nucleus of the Chinese Communist party. To this day Chingling enjoys something like mythical status

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: the sisters who founded modern China

In this week’s Spectator Books podcast my guest is Jung Chang — whose latest book is the gripping story of three sisters whose political differences put the Mitford even the Johnson clans in perspective. In Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, Jung narrates the lives of the Soong Girls — one of whom was married to Chiang Kai-shek, another of whom became one of the richest women in the world and helped run Chiang’s government; and the other one of whom (the widow of the founding father of modern China, Sun Yatsen) threw her lot in with Chiang’s deadly enemy and eventual usurper, Mao Zedong. Every family has its little ups

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: monstrous short stories

Your latest challenge, inspired by Joan Didion’s wonderful essay of that title, was to write a short story with the last line ‘I can’t get that monster out of my mind’. Another notable American female essayist, Susan Sontag, has come in for a bit of stick in these pages over the past few weeks, and she popped up again, in Hugh King’s short story: ‘Susan Sontag, naked, terrifying, had come to him in the night, pinned him down with hawser-like arms, and demanded to know his views on post-structuralism.’ Other memorable ‘monsters’ included Beowulf, the Minotaur and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The winners earn £25 each. Frank Upton It seemed that I

Thursday

Kajsa Norman

Why have the Swedes been incapable of finding Olof Palme’s murderer?

Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28 February 1986, Palme was walking home from the cinema with his wife when an unknown assailant stepped out from the shadows and shot him. We mourned not just the man, but the death of the nation that Palme personified — a safe place where nobody, not even the prime minister, needed protection. As though to emphasise the inconceivability of the event, the murder investigation became a textbook study of police incompetence. Frustrated by the lack of progress, countless ordinary citizens began to conduct their own inquiries, fuelled by various conspiracy

James Evans

A ménage à trois that worked: Ivan Turgenev and the Viardots

If we still bemoan a world of mass tourism, the mid 19th century, Orlando Figes reminds us, is where it began. Aristocrats were accustomed in youth to prolonged, libidinous grand tours through the Continent (the gap years of their day). For the masses, though, this was the start. ‘During the autumn months,’ grumbled one British newspaper, ‘the whole of Europe seems to be in a state of perpetual motion.’ Not only rich people were involved; so, heaven forfend, were the ‘lower classes’. The English were particularly at fault. Lonely on their island, enjoying surplus income and time, they ‘swarmed’ everywhere. ‘There is no lemon tree,’ one continental objected, ‘without an

Nicci Gerrard

A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read

In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir of France since the war: each year of the author’s life is evoked in a collage of memories, images and historical fragments. Apart from a handful of photographs, in which Ernaux is the dispassionately observed ‘she’, the self is erased and in its place an ambiguous ‘we’ narrates the flow of years and the slippage of time. In I Remain in Darkness, the ‘I’ is everywhere, yet it is still a treacherous word. In this work of shocking honesty and intimacy, Ernaux bears witness to her mother’s final years of

Michael Blastland

Is the judiciary really so bad at judging character?

When I had a cough last week, my son Joe,  who has autism, shouted at me and covered his ears. I didn’t mean to cough but, to Joe, so what? His autism means he doesn’t get other people’s intentions. People like him are sometimes said to lack a ‘theory of mind’ — lacking the idea that Dad or anyone else even has a mind, possessed of its own thoughts and intentions. This complicates his life infinitely. And that alerts us to a commonplace miracle: the contrast with the rest of us. Often we can see inside other people’s heads. We’re prolific theorisers about what they’re thinking. What’s more, we’re often

Lucasta Miller

Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?

Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz. In The Music of Time, his new study of poetry in the 20th century, John Burnside makes a rather more modest claim: that to write a poem at all is an act of hope. By any standards, Burnside’s own career seems cause for hope in poetry’s capacity to transform at least one individual life. Born in 1955, into a working-class family in Dunfermline, he did not start publishing until he was in his thirties, following an addiction-fuelled breakdown and a subsequent attempt at a commuter-belt

Philip Hensher

Satire misfire

Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has written one about a beetle that is transformed into a man. He’s not the first writer to have thought of doing this, but he might be the first one who thought it was a good idea. Readers will remember that in Randall Jarrell’s classic comedy of a creative writing faculty, Pictures from an Institution, the heroine has a student called Sylvia Moomaw (‘I had remembered her name but had forgotten her’). One day, she hands in a story ‘about a bug that turns into a man…it’s influenced by Kafka’. The