Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Dominic Cummings (who ought to know) is not impressed by Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former adviser and self-styled ‘delivery man’

In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and brought him into Downing Street. Once there Barber set up Blair’s ‘Delivery Unit’ and oversaw his attempts to reform public services. He then moved to the McKinsey consultancy where he cloned his unit for governments around the world. He has now written a book, How to Run a Government, about what he calls ‘deliverology’ — an ‘emerging science of delivery’. It is part memoir and part a ‘how to’ manual describing ‘a set of processes that enables governments to deliver ambitious goals’. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s adviser, is reported saying

Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war

Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day Normandy landings were merely a diversion. Great use was made of captured German agents in Britain who sent disinformation about invented army divisions and ships allocated to the supposedly ‘real’ landings still to come. Much less well known, though of arguably equal consequence, was a similar deception operation in the Middle East, based on an MI6 agent known as CHEESE. He came to be regarded by the Germans as their most valuable source in the region, despite the fact that the disinformation he fed them helped prevent them capturing Cairo

John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf

To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is synonymous with bogus spending on public works, insouciance in the face of mounting debt and, of course, homosexual promiscuity. It’s a virtue of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography that it makes clear how much this under-reads him. So far from being the flippant old queer calumniated by Niall Ferguson, Keynes worried himself sick about inflation and was far more alarmed by budget deficits than George Osborne seems to be. He was essentially a Nonconformist Liberal for whom faith was impossible, and who saw liberalism as something needing saving from itself. He was also,

The knives come out of the cabinet in Churchill’s wartime government

Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston Churchill as he struggled to survive, then win, a world war, while at the same time managing his fractious three-party administration at home. In this scholarly, yet grippingly readable study of the wartime coalition, Jonathan Schneer, an Anglophile American academic, reveals how much of a myth the popular legend of a political class and nation united behind their belligerent war leader truly was. Rather than the resolute, single-minded team rolling up their sleeves for the coming fight as portrayed by David Low in his famous cartoon ‘All Behind You, Winston’

A lost American classic to rival anything by Faulkner

It’s rare that granitic and iron-jawed prose is also enveloping and warm, but that’s just one of the many enticing literary paradoxes in the American writer John Ehle’s 1964 novel The Land Breakers. The work was the first of seven volumes that Ehle dubbed his ‘mountain novels’, books which today tend to get tagged as historical, a disservice that has kept Ehle a peg below some of the southern heavies (including even Faulkner) whom he sometimes manages to eclipse. There’s a twinge of something less artful when one tosses in the word ‘historical’, as though the resulting novel relies on borrowings from an earlier era rather than the author’s imagination.

Wolves in the Lake District get everyone’s pheromones going

Locate. Stalk. Encounter. Rush. Chase. The pace of Sarah Hall’s fifth novel follows the five stages of a wolf hunt as she imagines a pack of apex predators restored to the British countryside: the thrill of lean, grey flanks streaking through the bracken sending vital adrenalin coursing through an ecosystem grown sluggish. Her fiction is clearly based on the plans of Paul Lister, the heir to the MFI fortune who’s been assembling an ancient wilderness on his 23,000-acre Alladale estate in north eastern Scotland. The deciduous trees, elk and wild boar have already been slotted into place and in 2013 he announced he was conducting feasibility studies for the reintroduction

A rebellion among Rugby schoolboys proved perfect training for its ringleader in putting down a Jamaican slave-rising in later life

The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided education of a rapidly improving quality for nothing or next to nothing’, seemed to herald, as the headmaster of Winchester cautioned, the end of fee-paying. Two decades later Roy Hattersley warned the Headmasters’ Conference to have ‘no doubts about our serious intention to reduce and eventually to abolish private education in this country’.Yet David Turner is able to conclude in this well-researched, impeccably fair and refreshingly undogmatic history, that this is their golden age. He takes the unfashionable line that they are now vital contributors to the country’s economic, political

Stolen kisses and naked girls: there is much to wonder about in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland

‘A vision of innocence was not always the same as an innocent vision,’ remarks Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. He is referring to Alice’s discovery in Wonderland that ‘ “I say what I mean” is not the same as “I mean what I say”.’ Douglas-Fairhurst is a subtle expert in doubleness. His new book tells the story of Lewis Carroll, who was also an Oxford mathematician called Charles Dodgson, and Alice Liddell, whom Dodgson photographed naked when she was seven, who married and became Mrs Hargreaves though she liked to use the title Lady Hargreaves, to which she was not entitled. In 1862 Dodgson took Alice and her siblings on a boat trip

George Gissing: the last great Victorian novelist?

George Gissing’s The Whirlpool was originally published in 1897. In this shortened version of the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition, D.J. Taylor argues that its author is ‘the last great Victorian novelist.’ In the early summer of 1896, hard at work on the manuscript of what was to become The Whirlpool, George Gissing struck up a connection with the Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill. A natural solitary, wary of unburdening himself even to the friendliest male associate, Gissing seems to have decided that Zangwill, author of the best-selling Children of the Ghetto, was a suitable repository for his confidence. The fascinated account that Zangwill gave to his friend Montagu Elder of

Spectator competition: female chauvinist pigs on men behaving badly (plus: when Damon Runyon met John Bunyan…)

There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig — daddy is portrayed as a hopeless bumbling idiot while Mummy Pig is the embodiment of good sense — and the literary critic Harold Bloom argues that there is ‘a strong element’ of misandry in Shakespeare (whereas misogyny, he says, is hard to find). The latest challenge invited you to climb aboard the bandwagon and compose an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author. In a small but accomplished entry, Sergio Michael Petro, Frank

Ray Davies: part of Swinging Sixties London — and apart from it too

As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since the term ‘Swinging London’ was first used by a newspaper to describe ‘the most exciting city in the world … all vibrating with youth’. Those smashing times may not have lasted long but the vibrations carry on to the present day. Happily, many of the protagonists are still with us — David Bailey, Mary Quant — and so is Ray Davies CBE, part of the swinging city scene but apart from it too. The Kinks were a superb proto-rock group but they were also, in the words of George Melly,

All in the name of science: three young naturalists go on an Amazonian killing-spree

John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the Incas, published in 1970 when he was 35 — a work of vivid, monumental scholarship that is still unsurpassed. His love for the peoples of the Amazon produced a remarkable historical trilogy: Red Gold (1978), Amazon Frontier (1987) and Die If You Must (2004), which together cover the years from 1560 to the end of the 20th century. They are big, magisterial, powerful works, perhaps driven by one intense memory… In 1961 with his friends from Oxford, Richard Mason and Kit Lambert, he mounted an expedition to map the course

Stuck at K: we know very little about vitamins except that they’re good for us (in small quantities)

Before I read this book about vitamins, I thought I knew what it would be like. It would be vaguely reassuring. It would tell me that I was consuming the right vitamins, but perhaps in the wrong quantities. Medically speaking, I expected it to point me in a certain direction. There would be chapters about scurvy and beriberi, and how these diseases can easily be cured, now we know about vitamins. There would be stuff on cancer. For a while, I would eat a lot of carrots. Well, I was partly right. Catherine Price, a fastidious reporter, has given us the stories of scurvy and beriberi, and how these scourges

The Irish Times: read by the smug denizens of Dublin 4 and responsible for the Celtic Tiger property bubble

The most successful newspapers have a distinct personality of their own with which their readers connect. In Britain, the Daily Mail and the Guardian are perhaps the best examplars of that. In Ireland, the decent, if slightly smug, denizens of Dublin 4 know exactly where they are with the Irish Times, and that it will connect with them and reflect their values. Sometimes a newspaper’s personality even defies its actual content, and change encompasses an unexpected continuity. The Guardian moved seamlessly from being the organ of non-conformist opponents of horse-racing to the first newspaper in Britain to print the word ‘cunt’. And yet the personality remains intact — priggishness being

Monstrous, beautiful, damaged people make for tiresome company in Polly Samson’s The Kindness

Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a mother who wants to mother him even more than they do. Part of his appealing vulnerability is that he has no father; another part is that he has a potentially fatal allergy to wasps. One hot summer day he is saved from anaphylactic shock by Karl, a medical student who is researching sperm motility. They become friends. Julian provides samples for Karl’s research, and — well, what Karl notices under the microscope provides the basis for the plot. You can see it coming, as the actress said to the bishop.

Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often inconceivable to the modern reader. Seneca, however, that rich, compromised sophisticate of the first century AD, is instantly kin, his voice weary with consumerism, his problems definitively first-world. ‘Being poor is not having too little,’ he observed. ‘It is wanting more.’ Those in need might disagree. But from where Seneca was sitting, in his personal banqueting suite with 500 ivory-legged tables (all matching, no less — matching furniture in Rome was considered staggeringly smart, due to the lack of means of mechanical reproduction) he was able to cultivate the elegant

British colonialism is once again under attack in Aatish Taseer’s sprawling Indian epic

Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of Delhi. The city’s bright bazaars and bald communal gardens, among them ‘the occasional tomb of a forgotten medieval official’, are ‘stitched together with the radial sprawl of Lutyens’s city’. Taseer acknowledges the landscape’s beauty, but buried in his description, with its reference to the British architect who designed much of Delhi during the empire, is the painful and stifling legacy of history. For Taseer, it is an atmosphere that infects Delhi — simultaneously a ‘submerged necropolis’ and a city where ‘the dense cold air, sulphurous and full of particles, closes

Symbolism and a man called U: more avant-garde fiction from Tom McCarthy

In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction, comparing it favourably to Joseph O’Neill’s lush Netherland, which she deprecated as incarnating the worst delusions of realism. Funny how rapidly Smith’s distinction has disintegrated: McCarthy’s latest, Satin Island, bears an uncanny similarity to O’Neill’s recent novel The Dog. Both are narrated by an affectless young male professional known only by a single initial (X in the case of O’Neill, U in McCarthy’s); and both dramatise the moral and intellectual contortions imposed by commercial environments on people whose sympathies are with the left. U is a corporate anthropologist — such