Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

From cave painting to Maggi Hambling: the best Christmas art books

It’s been a memorably productive year for art books (I have published a couple myself), but certain volumes stand out. Chief among the illustrated monographs is Maggi Hambling: War Requiem & Aftermath by James Cahill (Unicorn Press, £30), a spirited examination of this wonderfully unpredictable artist. The book focuses on her recent paintings and sculptures, many on the theme of war. Art history meets forthright artistic statement, and it’s fascinating to see Cahill’s intellect in dialogue with Hambling’s visceral art. As she says: ‘Real art is the opposite of mere observation or reportage. It takes you to another place.’ Perhaps the greatest living writer on art, and thus the most

James Walton

Everything you always wanted to know about Sixties pop —and more

It might seem an odd choice, but after reading Jon Savage’s new book, I think if I had a time machine I’d now be tempted to set its controls for 13 January 1966 and the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Andy Warhol had been booked to give a speech, but instead he put on a gig by the Velvet Underground and Nico at full uncompromising blast, with a couple of Factory favourites dancing alongside them. One shrink described the evening as a ‘torture of cacophony’; another — no less disapprovingly — as an ‘eruption of the id’. A third left hurriedly, with the explanation that

Alex Clark

Erica Jong’s middle-aged dread

Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only afternoon delight you’re up to is a cup of tea and a soporific radio play. Wealthy New Yorker Vanessa Wonderman, Erica Jong’s 60-year-old narrator, isn’t there yet, but she can see it coming down Fifth Avenue with its headlights on. Her parents are slowly and painfully quitting the world; her husband Asher, 15 years her senior, is succumbing to illness and certainly not capable of elaborate bedroom antics; and her acting career has faltered in the predictable absence of decent parts for middle-aged women. Despite high-end plastic surgery (‘as mandatory

Sherard Cowpercoles

The four men who averted the Apocalypse

In March 1987, as Professor Robert Service records in his new account of the end of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow. She had been reluctant to do so, largely out of fear that such a visit would only make it easier for a credulous Reagan — as she saw him — to offer Gorbachev even more concessions. She had also been worried that it would produce nothing for British interests. Her hesitation to travel to Russia, let alone, as her advisers had urged, solicit an invitation, was perhaps surprising. She and Gorbachev had got on famously — shoes off, in front of a blazing fire — when she

Tuesday

Molly Guinness

Spectator books of the year: Molly Guinness on the inspiring Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks’s autobiography On the Move (Picador, £20) is full of surprising details —for example, the eminent neurologist was a weightlifting champion in his youth who hung out with Hells Angels. Sacks — who died in August — was an inspiring person with an extraordinary breadth of interests and enthusiasms. I also enjoyed Anne Tyler’s family portrait A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99). People have criticised Tyler for being too gentle, but actually she has the rapier wit of a true satirist. You know exactly how awful one character is because she has soft shoes and insists on calling her mother-in-law Mother Whitshank. Monsters by Emerald Fennell (Hot Key

Sunday

Jonathan Sumption

Spectator books of the year: Jonathan Sumption on a thunderous biography of Wellington

Richard Bourke’s Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, £30.95) is a monument of exact scholarship and careful reflection, by a long way the best book that we have on this profound and much misunderstood politician and philosopher. For those who want more thunder than even Burke can offer, Rory Muir’s Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814–1852 (Yale, £30) completes the author’s outstanding two-volume biography. Finally, Penguin Classics confirms its reputation for range and eclecticism with Magna Carta, with a superb commentary by David Carpenter (£10.99); and Wellington’s Military Dispatches, edited by Charles Esdaile, which is full of the great man’s laconic put-downs and provides

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Spectator books of the year: Paul Johnson on a good year for biographies

This has been a good year for biographies, especially of all-rounders. Hugh Purcell did a lot of digging to uncover the nine lives of that secretive man John Freeman. A Very Private Celebrity (Robson Press Biteback, £25) lists them as follows: pre-war advertising executive, wartime officer (Monty called him ‘the best brigade major in the Eighth Army’), postwar MP, Labour minister, Bevanite rebel, TV interviewer, top-line diplomat and ambassador in Washington, DC, media mogul and star academic at a US university — all first-class of their kind — and fascinating to read about. Richard Davenport-Hines is equally vivid in Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (Collins, £18.99).

Friday

Mark Mason

Spectator books of the year: Mark Mason discovers the royal family’s ‘Marmite strategy’

Royalty Inc. by Stephen Bates (Aurum Press, £20) is a superb account of how ‘the Firm’ (Windsors rather than Krays) became ‘Britain’s best-known brand’. Bates is a veteran royal journalist, though much of his career was on the Guardian, which wouldn’t let him use that title. He reveals that the palace’s own term for their gameplan is the ‘Marmite jar strategy’: pretend you’re a timeless and static part of the national furniture, while subtly and constantly changing to remain relevant. Simon Hughes’s Who Wants to be a Batsman? (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) brilliantly analyses this fragile creature. Nasser Hussain’s girlfriend accidentally records Neighbours over his coaching tape, Alastair Cook has

Thursday

Mary Beard

Spectator books of the year: Mary Beard on how Clive James went viral

I am unashamedly sticking to my own home territory. Cambridge has become something of a literary hotspot. Last year it was Ali Smith (How to be Both) and Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk). This year we have Clive James’s wonderful (and let’s hope not last) collection of poetry, Sentenced to Life (Picador, £14.99), including the marvellous ‘Japanese Maple’, which unusually for a poem went viral after it first appeared in the New Yorker. And then there is Ruth Scurr’s extraordinary literary reconstruction of the diary of John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto, £25), which has already been marked down as a ‘Desert Island book’.

Neel Mukherjee

August in Arizona

Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with what seems, at least retrospectively, like impeccable forward planning. In fact, time, we shall see, is what her career so far has been about. She has also heroically resisted the pressure —and there must have been a significant one, at least towards the beginning — to move on from the short form and deliver a novel, as if the short story were not an entirely different genre but just a warming-up exercise before the heavyweight training session of the novel. Cockfosters is a slender volume, all of 140 pages, each

William Cook

A stunning blend of simplicity and complexity

Reading Tintin when I was a child, in Britain in the 1970s, I always assumed Georges Remi’s creation was just a harmless bit of fun. However, when I went to Belgium I discovered, to my amazement, that over there they take him very seriously indeed (this year, a single Tintin picture sold for €2.5 million in Brussels). In Britain, the fearless reporter in the plus fours is a quaint juvenile amusement. In his native Belgium he’s seen as high art, and his creator Hergé (Georges Remi’s initials, backwards) is revered. The late Harry Thompson wrote a brilliant book about Tintin from the British perspective. It was informed and affectionate, but

Marcus Berkmann

Curiosities for Christmas

There is not, sadly, a dedicated Trivia Books section in your local Waterstones, although at this time of year there really should be. But what would we call it? Trivia sounds too trivial. Loo Books sounds too lavatorial. Books for the Man or Woman who Has Everything, Except this Book is probably closest, but might need editing. Whatever we decide to call them, there is an unusually fine crop this year, and several are historically inclined. Gimson’s Kings and Queens (Square Peg, £10.99) is subtitled Brief Lives of the Monarchs since 1066, and gives us exactly that, in Andrew Gimson’s characteristically elegant and entertaining prose. ‘There are many admirable biographies

Tim Bouverie

Rab Butler was too indecisive (and badly dressed) to be Prime Minister

‘The best prime minister we never had’ is not an epithet exclusive to Rab Butler. Widely applied to the late Denis Healey, it was also said of Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod and Roy Jenkins. (More recent candidates would include Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke.) All had arguably greater intellects than the prime ministers they ended up serving, all enjoyed significant popularity in the country and all were committed to the centre-ground of British politics. Yet while ‘The best PM we’ve never had’ is a club rather than a solitary designation, Rab Butler is pre-eminent among its members. The holder of all three great offices of state — a record shared

Tim Martin

The atheist delusion

Dan Rhodes apparently had trouble finding a publisher for this short novel, and it’s possible to envisage a certain amount of sorrowful head-shaking in legal departments at its theme. In the dead of winter, accompanied by his long-suffering ‘male secretary’ Smee, a ‘thrice-married evolutionary biologist’ named Richard Dawkins gets stranded in rural England while en route to address the All Bottoms Women’s Institute on the topic of the non-existence of God. This elderly, irascible scientist is taken in by the local vicar and his wife, and forced to contend with various local problems, from religious disputes — ‘Your silly books are just collections of fairy stories; you might as well

Ursula Buchan

Top tips for gardeners — from stroking seedlings to stacking logs

I spent the summer of 1976 working as a trainee gardener at the Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium. My employer was charming and kind, but I could not suppress a prickle of shame-faced irritation every time she mentioned a former student called Susan Dickinson. Whenever I leant on my hoe for a moment in the pelting heat, I was reminded how accomplished and hardworking this horticultural superheroine had been. For the past 25 years, Sue Dickinson has been head gardener at Eythrope in Buckinghamshire, owned by Lord Rothschild, and she is widely acknowledged to be the finest gardener in the country. I need never have wasted finite energy on envy. The

Lilian Pizzichini

In the grip of yellow fever

In late Victorian south London a ‘lower-middle-class’ boy, Arthur Ward, is lingering over his copy of The Arabian Nights. The book falls open at a colour illustration of Scheherazade, mysteriously pictured with a white peacock. Twenty years later, she materialises as Kâramanèh, the dazzling female sidekick of Fu Manchu. Young Arthur, who by now had reinvented himself as Sax Rohmer, was the author of the Fu Manchu novels, and Arthur had faded so far into the background that it seems even Sax Rohmer forgot him. He conjured his pen name from the Saxon, ‘Sax’ for ‘blade’ and ‘rohmer’ which means ‘roamer’. He was in essence the original bladerunner. In this

Ian Thomson

Shock and awe in Coventry, 14 November 1940

On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like an eclipse of the sun as clouds of cinders, lit red by the blaze, floated down over the great West Midlands city. Coventry seemed to have been hit by a meteorite. The mile-high roar of magnesium incendiary flames created a firestorm in which over 554 people died and twice as many were wounded. Life as Coventrians had known it, lived it and loved it, came to an end that Thursday night. Hitler’s first Blitz on an English city had taken the inhabitants by complete surprise. In the space of 11

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Samuel Palmer: from long-haired mystic to High Church Tory

In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows with uncanny significance; for Palmer, as for Tolstoy’s Lieven, the bowed forms of the peasants at the harvest are shadows of divinity. Palmer aged like a Romantic poet too. The long-haired mystic became a High Church Tory: like Coleridge, but without the drinking. ‘The Past for Poets, the Present for Pigs,’ was Palmer’s opinion of England after the Reform Act. But did the poetry of Palmer’s seven-year sojourn in the ‘Valley of Vision’ at Shoreham, Kent also decline into prosaic commerce and pastoral nostalgia? In Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the

Alan West

The deeper secrets of Britain’s submarines

The Silent Deep is a compelling and fascinating exposé of a service that for too long has had to remain in the shadows. Peter Hennessy and James Jinks are to be congratulated on producing what must be the definitive work on the Royal Naval Submarine Service from 1945 to the present day. In his inimitable way, Hennessy has gained unprecedented access all the way from able seaman to Prime Minister and been made privy to details that until recently were shrouded in secrecy. His admiration and affection for the submarine service, his relish in being considered an honorary submariner, is clear; not least when he follows the make-or-break ‘Perisher’ course

The Spectator

A further selection of books of the year — the best and most overrated of 2015

Daniel Hahn   I suspect many people won’t bother to read Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder (Bloomsbury, £12.99) because it’s a children’s book. Don’t be one of those people. You’d be depriving yourself of a ferociously paced, brilliantly imagined piece of gorgeous, immersive storytelling — and really, why would you want to do that? Set in Russia a century ago, it’s the story of a girl and her friends (some of whom are wolves) forced to be brave, and to right some great wrongs. We began 2015 with the introduction to another bright new talent, following the publication of The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello, £12.99), superbly translated by Deborah