Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Mark Glanville

Tobias Jones finds in Italian football hooliganism a mirror image of Italy itself

Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s and becoming fully fledged in the 1970s. Their ritual, tribal aggression supplied an outlet for youthful male violence in the relatively peaceful second half of Europe’s most savage century. At first, the curve’s semi-circular ends,behind the goals where ultras congregated were, for all their territorial violence, politics-free, but Tobias Jones notes ‘how hard certain ultras were rubbing the lamp [of fascist revivalism]before the genie appeared’. In search of a rounded picture, Jones immersed himself in the world of the Cosenza ultras of Calabria, chiefly because they were a group that

Jenny Colgan

Edna O’Brien’s heroic tribute to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram: Girl reviewed

This novel is strikingly brave in two ways: first, in the fortitude of its writer, the redoubtable Edna O’Brien, who, aged 88, travelled twice to northern Nigeria, her bra stuffed with thousands of dollars, in order to research this story. With some irony, she ended up staying in a convent with kindly nuns who helped introduce her to its subject: the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. Second, the way, in these days of cultural appropriation, that O’Brien takes on the persona of a very young (she doesn’t know how old she is) kidnapped African girl, Maryam. But this book is at its core a misery memoir about the

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Inside the unassuming house where the Brontës’ creativity thrived

‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?’ Jane Eyre asks Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel. What is true of Brontë’s heroine is equally true of her Yorkshire home: plain in every sense of the word and yet perennially mysterious. The muted colour palette of the house reflect the rain-soaked moors surrounding it in a pleasing way. Tucked up a cobbled lane behind Haworth’s church, you would easily pass by without stopping to notice it, were you not aware of its former inhabitants. Much like Jane, Charlotte Brontë believed herself to be physically unremarkable. Even after the success of

Conrad Black

20th-century assassins – How to be a Dictator reviewed

Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier (Haiti), Ceausescu (Romania) and Mengistu (Ethiopia). As a comparative study of those individuals, it is enlightening and a good read. The title and parts of the foreword indicate that it aspires to be a guidebook of tactics for those aspiring to be dictators and to retain their status as such. There are some weaknesses in this broader ambition. These eight men were not altogether uniform in their methods of obtaining power, retaining it, or losing it, and certainly not in their abilities. Stalin,

Anthony Sattin

William Dalrymple has nailed the East India Company for what it was: ‘a supreme act of corporate violence’

A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has already had to bail out the company, the British economy has taken a hit in the fallout and parliament has now been recalled to discuss the company’s massive debts. In the committee room, the corporate directors face allegations of embezzlement, bribe-taking and corruption. This includes the handing out of £210 million of ‘presents’ over an eight-year period. The scene is depressingly familiar, so is this Lehman’s? Facebook? Some of the stars of subprime? BAE? None of the above. The year is December 1772 and the directors, in charge of what

Tibor Fischer

One insider’s view of the thorny subject of immigration

Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous to be true. I never thought I’d witness government and parliament in this country tearing themselves to tatters and becoming so irrelevant that Westminster might as well be located on the dark side of Jupiter. Perhaps the most incendiary topic lumbering about in the disintegration of our governance is immigration. No other subject manages to beget such nonsense and fury. The claims of anti-migrant, anti-immigrant sentiment are rife, despite the fact that even on the far right it is almost impossible to find anyone who is completely against the notion

Andrew Lycett

A page-turning work of well-researched history: The Mountbattens reviewed

He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he was so crooked that if he swallowed a nail, he’d shit a corkscrew. As reputations go, the turnaround has been extraordinary. Since many approaches to ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten’s life have been tried, and the personal archival material is carefully curated, Andrew Lownie has sought to throw new light through a joint biography of him and his

Sarah Ditum

A New York state of mind – Doxology reviewed

Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a baggy monster realist novel. It moves from the subculture of straight edge punk to the backrooms of political powerbroking, and surveys ground from East Harlem to rural Ethiopia. There are at least half a dozen characters who take command of the narration for a substantial chunk of the story, and many more whose consciousnesses we breeze through as cameos. Yet the overall feeling isn’t of plenty, but of precarity. From the opening sentence, it seems that time is always about to run out. ‘Unknown to all, and for as long

Ariane Bankes

The Lost Girls of World War II – a tribute

It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s ‘Lost Girls’: ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. They were courageous, living ‘without any thought for past or future’ in that bomb-blasted city, but what most touched Quennell’s heart was ‘their air of waywardness and loneliness’. He should know: he was married to one Lost Girl (Glur) while madly, frustratedly in love with another (the high-octane Barbara Skelton) who he introduced to Cyril Connolly alongside a third, Lys Lubbock, with

Simon Heffer

There’s no place quite like Excellent Essex

Those who think Essex is boring, or a human waste bin into which only the most meretricious people find themselves tipped, would require only one or two chapters of Gillian Darley’s widely researched book to tell them how wrong they are. Essex has experienced various types and degrees of civilisation since before the Romans arrived and did unspeakable things to Boadicea and her daughters, as the Queen of the Iceni chased them in her chariot up and down what is now the A12. In the last century it has seen, at least in its districts closest to London, a huge influx from the East End; it has housed great industries

Minoo Dinshaw

A thoroughly modern medieval romance

The novelist and essayist James Meek’s confident new medieval romance is conducted in brief passages separated out by three icons, a rose, a sickle and a quill, emblematic of the three estates of the realm. The nobility play at courtly love; the commons can only evade their bondage by war service; and the clergy are in charge of chronicling and calendars. It’s 1348 and, as the Black Death mutates from fake news to imminent apocalypse, the novel’s liturgical title gets more and more ironical. The commons strand recalls in its stubborn Saxonicity of vocabulary (‘Some gnof had got her with child’) the ‘shadow-tongue’ employed by Paul Kingsnorth in The Wake,

Philip Hensher

No one held Susan Sontag in higher esteem than she did: Her Life reviewed

Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist asks what is so funny and is told: ‘You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that couch over the years and talked about Susan Sontag.’ Benjamin Moser’s very substantial life of the cultural critic and writer is capable of detached bemusement at its subject’s unstoppable advance. She took herself extremely seriously. (‘On 3 October, the Nobel Prize was awarded to J.M. Coetzee. The award depressed Susan.’) The surprising thing is that

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: what makes dictators vulnerable

This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. My guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book – expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao – considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what unites and what divides the regimes of dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu. I asked him about how these dictators were able to exert control, and what made them vulnerable; about how communists differed (or didn’t) from fascists; about whether dictatorship in the age of the internet would be different from the 20th-century sort; about the

Thursday

Oliver Balch

It takes a former drug dealer to explain the global narcotics scene

In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’, the solution was simple: first, send in goons to beat up the smack dealers; second, round up the city’s addicts, chain them to radiators, and force them to go cold turkey. The policy, unsurprisingly, failed. For one, Russia’s fourth largest city has swapped its preferred kick: today, it’s spice that is mostly getting Yekaterinburg’s residents smashed. At the same time, the city still counts enough heroine users for their needle-sharing habits to have sparked an official HIV emergency.Still, none of this stopped Roizman — an art collector, champion rally driver

Emily Hill Emily Hill

Carry on up the Zambezi

I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who can’t write, isn’t Alexandra Fuller heaped up in perilous piles so near the till it’s impossible to evade her? This is like one of the most alluring Svetlana Alexievich testimonies, as if it had wandered out of the USSR and got lost in central Africa by way of a hospital in Budapest. It’s packed with exquisite jokes, quotes and details — such as when a doctor appears and ‘his gauzy green scrubs puffed out in great billows, the surgical-garb equivalent of Princess Di’s wedding dress’. Fuller started out trying to

Daniel Swift

The Dambusters raid was great theatre — but almost entirely pointless

The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved the dog, and its name was used as a codeword during the bombing raid which made Gibson famous, upon the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany in May 1943. The 1955 movie The Dam Busters retells the story of the raid in thrilling melodrama, and inevitably includes repeated mentions of the troubling name. Nowadays, when the film is broadcast, it either features a warning about offensive language or is shown in an edited version, with the dog’s name changed to ‘Trigger’. The raid on the German dams is an old

Allan Mallinson

In praise of Thomas Graham, unsung hero of the Peninsular War

Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but in 1793 Thomas Graham was 45. The son of a Perthshire laird and of a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, and having inherited a good fortune, in 1774, he had married the beautiful Mary Cathcart, daughter of Baron Cathcart and of Jane Hamilton, herself the daughter of Lord Archibald Hamilton, all scions of Scots whiggery. It was evidently a love match. On the same day, Mary’s elder sister, Jane, had wed too. Their father wrote: ‘Jane has married, to please herself, John, Duke of Atholl, a peer of the

Marcus Berkmann

The elegance and humour of Neville Cardus

As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can that be? He was, in his lifetime, the doyen of cricket writers, mainly because he effectively invented the form. Before he started writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1919, cricket journalists reported the score and little else. And what little else, you could probably have done without. As Duncan Hamilton says in his biography: Before Cardus, there were cricket writers who still called the ball ‘the crimson rambler’, referred to the wicketkeeper as ‘the custodian of the gauntlets’ and saw the ball speed ‘across the greensward’, as though the vocabulary

Jeff Noon

Crazy nannies and missing children: the latest crime fiction reviewed

Madeline Stevens’s debut thriller, Devotion (Faber, £12.99), might more appropriately have been titled ‘Desire’. It’s a riff on that old standby: the crazy nanny story. Except, in this case, both the nanny and the mother of the children are equal contestants in the madness stakes. Ella is poor and adrift in the city. It seems like a golden opportunity when she’s hired to look after the offspring of the rich and very beguiling Lonnie and James. Cue temptation. Ella is soon obsessing over Lonnie, trying on her clothes, rifling through her personal hygiene products. Does she love her employer, or does she want to kill her? This is a New

Clare Mulley

How Britain conned the US into entering the war

In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more watchful man’, sailed from Liverpool to New York on the MV Britannic. Once separated from its protective convoy, ‘this elegant, ageing liner was on its own’, Henry Hemming writes, noting that the same was true of Britain and ‘salvation for both lay in the New World’. Shortly after America entered the second world war in December 1941, a plane left for Britain carrying just a handful of passengers. Stephenson was among them. Over the intervening 18 months he had become Britain’s extraordinarily effective ‘Man in New York’. Not only did