Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Travis Elborough

Pirates and puritans

In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just occupied the Falkland Islands, fails to locate the archipelago on his world map. Eventually, his mother comes to the rescue and discovers it ‘hidden under a crumb of fruitcake’. If general awareness of the Falklands before 1982 was somewhat limited, as Townsend slyly implied, it pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the all-but-forgotten former British territory of Providence. This is a place I have to confess to never having heard of before picking up The Island that Disappeared. My ignorance is one thing and, according to Tom Feiling, common

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Will Self

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the novelist, broadcaster and serial user of arcane words Will Self. He has just published Phone, the third and final volume of the difficult but brilliant trilogy he began five years ago with the Man Booker shortlisted Umbrella. He talks to me about recurring characters, modernism, hating Tony Blair before it was fashionable, and how there’s more psychosis about than you think… You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please do subscribe on iTunes for a new podcast every Thursday.

Nicky Haslam

Immaculate conceptions

Some 30 summers ago we were staying at a famously beautiful villa outside Turin; our hostess was — indeed is — renowned for her superb taste and distilled perfection of every aspect of douceur de vivre. Each night we dined in a different sylvan setting — under inky trees, in flower-filled gardens and in 18th-century rococo salons, amid porcelain bouquets of those selfsame flowers. Another room, with candles lighting the chinoiserie panelling, is forever incised in my mind, not only for the decor but for the last course. In what appeared to be a vast rock-crystal bowl (in fact simply ice) was a fruit salad made solely of white fruit

Simon Courtauld

Towering tree of God

In his biography of Gaudí, published in 2001, Gijs van Hensbergen opined that ‘we should never try to finish the Sagrada Família, otherwise we undo the web of power that is elaborately woven into this mysterious religious spell’. But he now appears to take the view that it should, and will, be finished by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí’s death (though the sculpted decoration will take considerably longer to complete). If indeed this extraordinary building is ‘topped out’ in nine years’ time, it will have taken 144 years to build, which is a good deal less than many medieval cathedrals (Toledo’s took more than 250 years). Gaudí famously said, ‘My

Caroline Moore

Too much of everything

Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. That was 20 years ago. Early success did not, however, block Roy into neurotic silence: instead, it offered her a platform for verbally intemperate political activism. She is an impassioned campaigner against globalisation, industrialisation and all forms of the arch-enemy capitalism, and a critic of US foreign policy, Israel and the government of Sri Lanka. Her Booker prize money was donated to the campaign against the Narmada Dam project. To Indian critics who condemn her hyperbole as ‘hysterical’ she retorted: ‘I am hysterical, I’m screaming from the bloody roof tops.’

Sarah Ditum

A cursed house

Beyond the patricide and even the incest, the horror of the Oedipus myth lies in its insistence that our fates are not ours to change. And yet the story itself is far from unalterable, having been handed down in multiple variants — something that Natalie Haynes knows very well as a classics scholar. Now Haynes has written her own version of the tragedy, finding new space in the narrative by looking at it through the eyes of two characters neglected by antiquity: Oedipus’s mother/bride Jocasta and their youngest daughter Ismene. We meet Jocasta as a clever 15-year-old girl married off to old King Laius of Thebes, in what her grasping

Elisa Segrave

Brava Bella

I like Bella Pollen for her open-mindedness, self-deprecation and verve. Given her early success as a fashion designer — top client Princess Diana — her memoir is extraordinarily modest. Now in her mid-fifties, she has also published five novels — one, Hunting Unicorns, a bestseller. Unusually, this had a dead narrator, and Meet Me in the In-Between also begins with an unearthly creature — a ‘demon’ sexual predator, who won’t leave our memoirist alone. It also deals with writer’s block. Scared of psychotherapy (suggested by her second husband, Mac), Bella playfully positions her two literary agents as pretend therapists: ‘Hasn’t anyone ever suggested you might need to work through your

Ian Birrell

Every horror imaginable

The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being urged to convert to Islam with machetes pressed to their necks. They did their best to gabble words that sounded like the prayers they were being taught before one fighter noticed a captive with a swollen belly. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she insisted, spreading her hands over her belly in an instinctive reaction that only showed she was lying. The most senior of the armed men, who looked barely 20 years old, ordered her to lie down on the ground. ‘We don’t bring any Christian babies into the world here,’ he

Thursday

Peter Carty

The last great pandemic

The symptoms of the Spanish flu could be ghastly. Perhaps Laura Spinney should have chosen her title with more care because rather than becoming pale and interesting, as with tuberculosis, frequently the flu’s victims turned completely black before dying. ‘It is hard,’ one US army doctor observed, ‘to distinguish the colored men from the white.’ The pandemic is often thought of as a forgotten catastrophe. That is despite its monumental scale. The death toll, which peaked in the autumn of 1918, is variously estimated to be between 50 million and 100 million — far exceeding the 17 million fatalities of the Great War. But have we really forgotten the Spanish

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Martin Luther, Catholic dissident

In this week’s Books Podcast, we honour the five hundredth anniversary of the nailing of that business with the 95 Theses, the church door and the mad monk by discussing Martin Luther and his legacy. Was he a Protestant? Was he a monk? Was there even a church door? And what did the Reformation mean for Henry VIII and the generations of English monarchs to come? Is it, come to that, over? Answering all my dumb and ignorant questions on these subjects are two superbly intelligent and knowledgeable scholars of this vital period in European history. I’m joined by Luther’s latest biographer Peter Stanford, author of Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident; and by Peter Marshall — author of the magisterial new

D. J. Taylor

Boats, goats and landslides

J.L. Carr’s classic novel How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975) contains a character named Arthur Fangfoss. Mr Fangfoss is a rural tyrant who, when standing for the local council, limits his election address to a pithy eight words: ‘If elected, I will keep down the rates.’ No such brevity, alas, attends the 2017 manifestos of the UK’s three main political parties. The shortest of them — the Lib Dems’ Your Chance to Change Britain’s Future — weighs in at over 80 pages, while Labour’s For the Many, Not the Few extends to a well-nigh novella-length 23,000 words. The Conservatives’ Forward, Together is not that much shorter and

Jane Ridley

Forty years of comfort-eating

In 2015 a pair of linen drawers belonging to Queen Victoria sold at auction for over £12,000. In old age Queen Victoria swathed herself in wraps and loose gowns which artfully concealed her figure, and her official photographers were ordered to photoshop her outline. But these knickers with their 45” waistband make plain that the 5’-queen was borderline obese. Annie Gray has written a culinary biography of Queen Victoria which tells us what she ate. Breakfast was a hearty meal, often featuring lamb chops. For dinner Victoria ate rich French food, and her menus were always written in French. No plain Mrs Beeton-style cooking for the queen. Dinner began with

Michael Auslin

The war in the shadows

I once spent an evening, back in the mid-1980s, with William Colby, the legendary spy and director of the CIA. I was an undergraduate at the time, and the CIA’s Iran–Contra debacle was in the news. Lured by the agency’s mystique, I was eager to ask him about the fabled Phoenix programme he directed — a top secret initiative to target and eliminate Viet Cong who had infiltrated South Vietnamese villages, often conducted by Americans who had crossed over some invisible line, leaving behind them the normal life that comprised my world. To my disappointment, Colby demystified Phoenix. He was very proud of the programme, and while he never said

Alex Burghart

Perfect, gentle Knight

I once asked Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, what she did to relax. Nailing me to the wall with her no-nonsense look, she said: ‘I keep sheep.’ A similar association with the animal kingdom resounds through Henry Hemming’s excellent new life of Maxwell Knight, the famous spymaster and possible archetype for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’. Knight’s family and friends observed that, at an early age, he had a particular way with animals that allowed him to bring them under his spell. As a young man he kept a menagerie in his small London flat consisting of a bulldog, a bear and a baboon. Following his retirement, he dedicated himself

Suzi Feay

A gruesome retelling

‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B. Yeats in his sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’, seeing in this avian rape the germ of the Trojan war. Leda gave birth to Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the one renowned as the casus belli, the other the most infamous agent of the aftermath. Another Irish writer now takes up the story, without the magnificent cloak of myth. House of Names is a portrait of a brutal, disenchanted world of political tyranny, slaughter and revenge. In the first section, ‘Clytemnestra’, Agamemnon’s queen is an imposing but still sympathetic

John McEwen

Home from the hill

As well as being a leading architectural historian Mary Miers is an editor at Country Life. For her latest book she has mined the magazine’s unmatchable picture library and the photographs are by Country Life regulars Simon Jauncey, who lives in Highland Perthshire, and the late Paul Barker, who sadly died before publication. His memory is duly saluted. Crucially the author is a Highlander by birth and domicile. Every week she commutes between London and her Black Isle home and she summers on South Uist. She knows the Highlands and Islands, or the Gàidhealtachd, from top to bottom: from Balmoral and the Highland balls of the Northern Meeting to crofters’

Peter Bradshaw

Moments of absurdity

The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially for The Santaland Diaries, his uproarious account of earning part-time cash as a department store Christmas elf. Now he is bringing out an edited version of his personal diaries. It’s the first volume of two, taking us from his days as a broke student, stoner and young gay man in North Carolina and Chicago, through to the years of literary fame and success in New York and Paris as the new century dawns — a distinction worn lightly. Fans, semi-fans and non-fans (I am midway between the first two categories)

William Leith

Cold comfort | 25 May 2017

All animals, Scott Carney tells us, seek comfort. But human beings are a bit different. We don’t need to spend much time actively seeking it. He’s right: it’s all around us — in your nice warm house, your air-conditioned car, your shoes, your bed, the temperate shopping mall you visit. Here in the affluent west, we eat comfort food in comfortable chairs, and then we recline on cushions, tweaking our dimmer switches and thermostats and adjusting the brightness on our screens. Good for us, you might think. We can ‘control and fine-tune our environment so thoroughly that many of us can live in what amounts to a perpetual state of

Jonathan Mirsky

The ruin of a ruin

In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, tortured and beheaded by Isis two years ago when they destroyed the remains of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important ancient cities. Their victim was its director of antiquities. In an icy fury, Paul Veyne, a French expert on Palmyra, has dedicated this comprehensive, passionate, but concise book to the memory of the murdered Syrian scholar. In it he relates thousands of years of Palmyra’s history, describing those who lived there and pausing only briefly to underline what monsters Isis were to smash the site. You

Stuart Kelly

Homer Simpson in a chasuble

This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time — not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop. Patricia Lockwood is a poet — dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ — who, after unexpected and costly medical bills, was forced to move, with her husband, back to her parents’ home. Her mother is more than mildly neurotic, fretting over things like children jumping out of windows in imitation of Superman. Her father is a bad player of the electric guitar, an enthusiast for guns and hunting, a veteran