Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

On the side of Goliath

According to which bit of hype you read, there’s a copy of one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers sold somewhere in the world every four seconds, or every seven, or every nine. It’s a cute statistic and (as Child wryly notes), there’s an element of Barnum & Bailey hucksterism to it. But suffice to say he sells a lot of books —around about the 100 million mark to date, in 42 languages. Reacher fans tend to binge-read the lot, and nobody (including Child) can remember the titles. The novels tell the story of a former military policeman called Jack Reacher who hitchhikes around the United States with nothing but

Colin Freeman

Courage and conviction

When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed that they were leaving it to ‘self-rule’ rather than all-out anarchy. Despite the militiamen in the streets and the mortars in the skies, this was what success looked like in Iraq they told the invited press pack. Nobody really believed them, of course; but only Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times could actually prove them wrong. Ignoring the ceremony invites, she donned an abaya and went into Basra to report unembedded, the first western correspondent to dare to do so in nearly two years. Her coverage on the 48 women

Daniel Swift

In a vale of tears

Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece is a puzzling and often terrible poem. Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, is raped by Tarquin, the son of the king of Rome. Her suffering inspires a revolution led by Brutus, and this is the beginning of the first Roman republic. It’s a rich myth of sex and politics, and Lucrece’s (or Lucretia’s) story was told by Ovid and painted by Rembrandt. Shakespeare returns to the episode in several plays, notably Cymbeline. But in the poem, written in early 1594, he apparently struggles to find the emotion and drama. Perhaps he was simply young; this was early in his career, and he is still learning.

Martin Gayford

Clouds, storms and swirling stars

The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is an artist about whom we know nothing; now let’s look at his works.’Actually, there are many important figures about whom we know nothing, or at least very little. Giovanni Bellini is a case in point. Information we don’t have about him includes when he was born, and even whether he was the younger sibling of Gentile Bellini — as is usually assumed — or in fact his uncle. The discovery a while ago of a Latin poem suggesting that in old age this artist of tranquilly thoughtful saints and Madonnas

Christopher Howse

A chain, but no barrier

On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married to the Vignemale, the highest French peak in the Pyrenees, and, wishing to spend the night with his beloved, he climbed to the 10,820ft summit and got his servants to dig a trench, bury him under earth and stones, wrapped in his sheepskin sleeping-bag, and leave him to the darkness. He survived and wrote of this night: ‘It seemed as though I had left the earth.’ Russell is one of the oddballs with whom Matthew Carr’s book teems. Another is Sabine Baring-Gould, the author of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, who in

Lewis Jones

The threat of the Black Shorts

In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a scintillating squib, published in these pages, about Trump meeting Bertie Wooster. As he later noted in a diary column, it gave him the idea of writing a new Jeeves and Wooster novel. Predictably, reassuringly, soothingly, Jeeves and the King of Clubs returns us to such idyllic haunts as Bertie’s flat in Berkeley Mansions, the Drones Club and Brinkley Court, Aunt Dahlia’s pile in Worcestershire, and to the company of the furious Sir Watkyn Bassett and his whimsical daughter Madeline, who is yet again engaged to Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of

Rose Prince

Pure and mostly simple

A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a crab, for example, or eating raw young broad beans straight from the pod. He applies the same phrase to cooking. That too is messy, but not all the recipes in his new book take ages to make. Long, I thought as I gratefully lapped up Leigh’s wisdom, applies more to the time needed to become not just a fount of knowledge but also a man of very good tastes. You could include grumpy in the title of A Long and Messy Business (Unbound, £25); but I trust the advice and

Hermione Eyre

All heart, trust and gut feeling

‘To me, he was sort of like a unicorn,’ writes Mrs Obama, looking back on her courtship days with Barack. He was affectionate, loving, secure and brainy. Very brainy. ‘He consumed volumes of political philosophy as if it were beach reading.’ He was laid back but his sense of purpose was strong. ‘Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination.’ In a languid late-night moment, she asks a penny for his thoughts. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about income inequality.’ This book takes you right back to those days when we all fell in love

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Lee Child on Reacher, revenge, and writing without a plan

“I wondered what would happen if you made Goliath the hero…” In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the thriller writer Lee Child about the latest in his phenomenally successful Jack Reacher series, Past Tense. Lee tells me why you can’t have a knight-errant in Europe any more, about writing without knowing what happens next, Reacher’s trouble with women, why he can never remember his own titles — and why liberals love reading about bad guys getting punched in the face. Plus: how he rumbled Robert Galbraith as woman.

Thursday

Suzannah Lipscomb

Tudor England’s other Bess

Bess of Hardwick — who died Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury — was a remarkable and fascinating woman. The wife of four men, builder of four houses, and by her death the second richest woman in the country, the exceptional Bess has attracted many biographers. Kate Hubbard’s new book differs from these by examining Bess’s life as a ‘builder within the context of the Elizabethan building world’. It is, consequently, part biography and part building history, considering along the way the erection of Elizabethan prodigy houses, such as Longleat, Theobalds, Wollaton (‘a monstrous building, heavy and hectic, overcrowded with ornament, overwhelmed with glass’), and, above all, Bess’s Hardwick New Hall.

Alex Colville

Lost cities in the sands

The main attraction in the Kenyan port of Mombasa is Fort Jesus, a vast, ochre-coloured bastion overlooking the Indian Ocean. Dominating a dusty skyline of palm trees, minarets and tower blocks, it was erected during the opening cannonade of European empire. In 1505 a Portuguese armada sacked and torched Mombasa, shortly after its ‘discovery’ by Vasco da Gama. The fort stamped the city as theirs. The coming of the Portuguese is sometimes considered the beginning of African history — a story not about Africa itself, but about bemused Europeans exploring and taming a ‘dark’ continent. And if we look at Africa before 1505, we find a world as blank as

Jane Ridley

The best-kept secret

In the winter of 1820–1 a 29-year old woman named Anne Lister went to stay with some female friends who lived nearby. This was a visit between gentry families of the sort that Jane Austen describes in her novels. But there the resemblance ends. By the end of her stay Anne had flirted with four women and gone to bed with three of them. She then wrote a letter to another woman, swearing undying love. We know about Lister’s sex life from the lengthy daily diaries that she kept. She devised a clever code in which she described her sexual encounters in remorseless detail. The German writer Angela Steidele has

Ian Garrick-Mason

Ruling the waves | 22 November 2018

The sea — that wine-dark whale road, to mix Homeric and Anglo-Saxon evocations of it — has always held a special place in the human psyche. A site of both great peril and great opportunity, it has influenced our languages and our cultures, just as it has our economic systems and the contours of our many histories. A presence experienced almost as universally as the sun and the soil, the sea is one of human civilisation’s shared foundations. Andrew Lambert, an eminent naval historian, is a strong believer in the power of the sea to shape the destiny of nations. In Seapower States he looks in detail at five historical

Ian Sansom

A world in a grain of sand

You will doubtless recall the model villages of your childhood holidays: the cold rain beating down upon you as you wander, confused, from the 1:15 scale Stonehenge to the 1:18 Houses of Parliament to the 1:32 scale model railway, before sneaking your foil-wrapped sandwiches into the tea shop to share a pot of tea. Or maybe that was just me and the Queen, who famously visited Bekonscot model village in Beaconsfield as a child back in the 1930s, clearly the perfect day out for any monarch-to-be, to be able to survey a ticky-tacky kingdom made entirely of resin, foamboard and nostalgia for a past that even then had never really

Marcus Berkmann

Top of the Christmas lists

The ‘gift books’ are out again, piled high in Waterstones, books that have only one reason to exist: to be given to people who don’t want them on Christmas Day. Having written one or two myself, I have seen the look on the faces of potential purchasers as they pick one up and leaf idly through its well-crafted pages. The look that says: whose Yuletide can we ruin with this? As ever, happily, there are a few genuinely decent books in among all the drivel and nonsense and tired jokes about Brexit and Donald Trump. The Spectator’s own Mark Mason is a long-serving truffler of trivial facts, which he often

Jonathan Steinberg

Life, death and everything in between

The most striking and difficult aspect of this novel is its incredible scale. How can a reviewer best discuss an enterprise containing a vast survey of life in Germany, Britain and the United States and the transformations of these societies from the end of the 19th century to the 1980s? Two volumes cover the experience of age and youth, the rise of the Nazis in Mecklenburg, the second world war, life and death in a small German town, the evolution of East German communities and the emergence of a Soviet state after the war. The New York Times appears in more or less every chapter, as the conveyer of the

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The madness of Charles III

Republicans hate to admit it, but the stability brought by the long reign of that most careful of monarchs Elizabeth II has helped Britain manage the decline from empire to middle-ranking power surprisingly well. As the Treason Act of 1351 is no longer in force, and to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the sovereign no longer carries the death penalty, I can state the obvious. Her Majesty is 92. She is entering her last days as Brexit threatens the peace in Ireland and the union with Scotland, and divides England and Wales into hostile camps. A vigorous PR campaign is underway to persuade us that now is not the

Peter Parker

Messing about on the river

The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and once declared: ‘Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.’ It is Dennison’s contention that for Grahame the clock stopped even earlier. ‘I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner,’ he quotes him writing in 1907: I

Philip Hensher

Man of mystery and mysticism

Nobody has ever quite known what to do with the German-language novelist Hermann Hesse. Born in 1877 and living until 1962, he rather deliberately refused to experience most of the traumatic events of his culture. His tiny home town was Calw, in the Black Forest, and he lived mostly in backwaters, and latterly for decades in Switzerland. He only visited Berlin once, and hated it. His work strenuously avoided making any comment on the larger events of the time, insisting on a kind of neutrality. Some readers took him for a mystic Nazi; others for an enemy of German culture; others still for a communist. He was a substantial bestseller

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Franz Kafka goes phishing

The latest challenge was to submit a scam letter ghostwritten by a well-known author, living or dead. Falling for a scam is costly and tedious (and more easily done than you might think), but the comedian James Veitch found a silver lining when he decided to en-gage with his persecutors: the ensuing correspondence — lengthy, labyrinthine and often hilarious — went on to form the basis of a popular TED talk and book. It was a tricky assignment, judging by the smallish postbag, but you made some clever choices of author whose prose style lent itself well to the art of phishing: poor spelling (Molesworth via Geoffrey Willans); apparently outlandish