Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton. His academic career was now interrupted for six years: nominally commissioned in the Life Guards, he plunged deep into the murky world of secret intelligence. Before that, and before he turned to Modern History, Trevor-Roper had been a brilliant classicist, winning a string of university prizes. He

Andrew Roberts

Henry Kissinger interview: ‘I don’t see the wisdom there once was’

Henry Kissinger doesn’t believe in retirement. At 91, having had a heart-valve operation three months ago, he is nonetheless publishing a book entitled World Order. As I happened to be interviewing him about it on 11 September, I asked him about his memories of 13 years ago. ‘I was in Frankfurt addressing a business group,’ he recalled in that voice of his that sounds like gravel has found its way into your car’s exhaust pipe. ‘A member of the audience had just asked a question when someone came on to the stage to say that he had an important announcement to make. I said that that may be, but I

Hilary Spurling

Literature’s least attractive power couple

This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner was initially Pam Johnson, a rising literary star, 28 years old and happily married with five novels under her belt and a fiction column on the Liverpool Post, when she singled out a novel by an obscure Civil Service scientist called C.P. Snow. He responded with a fan letter assuring her she could if she wanted ‘become quite easily the best woman writer in the world’. Snow at 35 was tubby, pop-eyed and lumbering but his effect on her was electric, ‘like a current of magic energy’. She hailed his

Alan Johnson

‘Like Superman stopping a runaway train’: when Bobby Moore tackled Jairzinho

Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than the story of how Bobby Moore only just made it to the West Ham ground for his first team debut against Manchester United. Today the players arrive from their luxury mansions insulated from the world in a Lamborghini or Maserati a few hours before kick-off to be pampered by an army of physios, clinicians, sports scientists and dieticians. Young Bobby had to catch a bus from his parents’ home in Barking to travel the three miles to Upton Park along with thousands of fans going to watch him play. Indeed

Karl Miller

Hugo Williams’s new poems confirm his national-treasure status

Around 1960, I went to work with the literary staff of The Spectator, where I was followed, in a later world, by the poet and diarist Hugo Williams. At this early stage it was possible to feel close to the family that could be inferred from his poems: a mother and a film-star father injured in the war, two brothers, a sister. He was thought, from school onward, to be a member of the jeunesse dorée. His satires could look as if they had issued from the Albany, or other Regency revival buildings. His poems were recognised from the first as elegant and intelligent. Many of them were poems that

Ferdinand Mount

Religion does not poison everything – everything poisons religion

It slips so easily off the tongue. In fact, it’s a modern mantra. ‘Religion causes all the wars.’ Karen Armstrong claims to have heard it tossed off by American psychiatrists, London taxi-drivers and pretty much everyone else. Yet it’s an odd thing to say. For a start, which wars are we talking about? Among the many causes advanced for the Great War, ranging from the train timetables on the continent to the Kaiser’s withered left arm, I have never heard religion mentioned. Same with the second world war. The worst genocides of the last century — Hitler’s murder of the Jews and Atatürk’s massacre of the Armenians (not to mention

Patrick Marnham

A salute to Georges Simenon

One hundred years ago an 11-year-old boy called Georges Simenon was getting accustomed to the presence of the German army in Liège. Together with his mother and his younger brother he had been forced to hide in the cellar of their terraced house on the island of Outremeuse to avoid the firing squads. The Belgian fortress outside the city had resisted for longer than expected and had inflicted casualties on the invading army. The Uhlan lancers were so angry that 200 of the Simenons’ neighbours were lined up and shot. Once Belgian resistance had ended, the occupation of Liège became a quieter affair. For a while Madame Simenon even took

Blair Worden

Rebellion without a cause: Peter Ackroyd’s curious Civil War

How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s book, the third of what have been announced as six volumes of his History of England, covers the period from the accession of James I in 1603 to the overthrow of his grandson James II in 1688. His priority is established by his title and by the facing portraits of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell on the front cover. He gives proportionately much more space to the conflicts of 1640–60 than to events on either side of them. When the reign of James I and the peaceful portion of Charles

A.N. Wilson

This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece

Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable feast. Even The Spectator at its best, however, could not quite rival the periodical the Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik) under the editorship of M.N. Katkov. This phenomenal editor, in the year 1866, secured serial publication of the two giants of Russian fiction. Tolstoy had been slow in giving Katkov enough material for continuous serial publication of War and Peace. To fill the gap, Katkov enlisted Dostoevsky. Readers could enjoy episodes from War and Peace in the spring numbers of the magazine. Then in May, they could start Crime and Punishment.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies

Anyone for Tennessee? At a best guess, the answer to that’s yes. There’s scarcely a moment these days when there isn’t a Williams play on somewhere in the West End or along the Great White Way. One reason for this is that he wrote such succulent roles, and I don’t mean just his steamroller leads, though for a kind of bruised or brittle actress, Blanche Dubois is as close to a female Hamlet as it gets. In A Streetcar Named Desire, there’s also the surly stud Stanley; Stella, his sex-drunk bride; and the courtly, perspiring Mitch, bewitched by Blanche’s blend of magic. Then think of The Glass Menagerie, which has

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

Let me introduce you to ‘sick chick lit’

Chick lit has its place. On long-haul flights, for example, when you’re a bit pissed and bored with the films on offer, and all you wanted is some literary fast food. I recall one flight back from Colorado where I read Bridget Jones’s Diary from start to finish with it hidden between the covers of a National Geographic in case it were assumed I was a single, lonely chocolate-head who flashed her knickers at work. Don’t get me wrong. I like that sort of woman. I’m not being snobby about crap books. It’s just that all mass-produced products created for women (excluding sanitary protection) tends to be twee or schmaltzy. The basic chick-lit plot centres

Thursday

Sofka Zinovieff

When Rachel Cusk went to Greece: would she be nice or nasty?

Last year in Athens, rumours raced about Rachel Cusk’s creative writing classes at the British Council. Some of the (mostly Athenian) pupils revered her for her intelligence and pitiless honesty, while others reviled her for her ‘colonial attitude’ and an apparent antipathy towards Greeks. One might suspect Greeks of tending towards intense emotional reactions, but the phlegmatic British have had no less divided opinions about Cusk’s books. The author of seven novels, she was amongst Granta’s best young writers in 2003, yet her memoirs about the horrors of having babies (A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother) and about the break-up of her ten-year marriage (Aftermath) provoked outrage as well

Christopher Howse

Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking photographs’. One of the most successful of these is a black and white image of male and female figures: ‘Gruesome and gaunt, they look like extras from an early piece of zombie cinema.’ They are, it soon becomes clear, oddments saved by firemen from a blaze at Madame Tussauds in 1925. Madame Tussaud, the author reminds us, ‘would ‘tiptoe through the piles of corpses behind the guillotine to discover the most illustrious of the heads, and would promptly make casts of them, her hands bathed in their blood’. Each little

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How dare this author trash one of the great screenwriters of the 20th century?

Should one say ‘vicious circle’ or ‘vicious cycle’? That’s a question that just goes round and round inside my head. In the case of the American novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, he has always abhorred reviewers (‘whores and failures’, in his eyes), and the reviewers have returned the compliment. When he was paid $400,000 for the script of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, it was the highest price ever for a screenplay, and the pundits were quick to pan it. The public differed, and the film was a smash hit (the script, of course, is a masterpiece). But it’s interesting to consider why Goldman has always been

Alexander Starritt

Margaret Atwood settles her accounts with this new short story collection

Margaret Atwood is in the first rank of literary fame and her trophy cabinet is handsomely stocked; yet she has never fully shaken off the suspicion that her politics have spoiled her writing. Despite the practised prose, delicate observation and steady-handed drip-feed of plot, there sometimes rises off the page a teacherly spirit that grabs you by the lapels and says, ‘Now listen here’. Gender relations, climate change; Atwood would probably say these subjects are more important than whether the direction of a book isn’t just a bit too obvious. And maybe she’s right. But it bodes well for the reader that in Stone Mattress, her new collection of ‘tales’,

James Walton

Howard Jacobson’s J convinced me that I’d just read a masterpiece

At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard Jacobson. It’s set in a future Britain where some sort of apocalypse — known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’ — has taken place several decades ago. It also contains virtually no jokes. Yet, from within this unfamiliar framework, some familiar concerns soon emerge. In 2010, The Finkler Question was hailed as the first comic novel to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. But the book darkened considerably towards the end, with Jacobson unsmilingly warning his readers — and especially any fellow Jews who regard such

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914

Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous Kinky (1992). What made that book so captivating was the young narrator’s sweet, naïve total acceptance of the chaotically nomadic existence her hippy mother brought her to in Morocco. The first-person voice was enchantingly concise, always noticing colours, as little girls do (‘the red and green town’), and unquestioningly stating the facts: ‘Bea and I waited at the Polio school while Mum looked for somewhere else to live.’ Freud’s latest novel, Mr Mac and Me, is also written in the first person through the eyes of a child: a 12-year-old

Sean Mcglynn

Britain’s own game of thrones

Thank goodness for Game of Thrones. I think. Apparently it is inspired by the Wars of the Roses, drawing inspiration from the bloody, ruthless machinations of England’s power-brokers at the waning of the Middle Ages. Anyway, plenty of readers and watchers of George R.R. Martin’s work think that it is; what with that and BBC television’s recent The White Queen and She-Wolves series and (spot the marketing opportunity) the Shakespearean trilogy of, ahem, The Hollow Crown, undergraduates are queuing up for courses on this period of history. As I teach one, that has to be a good thing. Chuck ‘the Tudors’ into the title of your book and you’re on

Michael Bywater

A flashlight into the cellar of the lawless ‘dark net’

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the world wide web, and I wonder whether its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, would still have given it away had he known where it would be now. Had he foreseen Google and Facebook and Twitter, the conquest of web porn and the normalisation among teen-agers of misogyny and sodomy, the endless harvesting and mining of data, the surveillance, the cruelty and vulgarity and invasive crassness, the commercialisation of everything — would he still have said, ‘Have it for free, in the common good’? That’s a question that only he can answer. But the great fascination of the web lies in the near-asymptotic rate at

John Akeroyd

Bees make magic: an inspirational case for biodiversity

The importance of biodiversity, a handy concept that embraces diversity of eco-systems, species, genes and molecules, has been promoted for over three decades. Yet much life on Earth still faces unsustainable loss or extinction, perhaps because, as an otherwise upbeat Dave Goulson notes in A Buzz in the Meadow, ‘at a global level, conservation efforts so far have been a dismal failure’. A bumblebee specialist with an extensive interest in the natural world, Goulson presents an inspirational case for awareness and appreciation of the teeming diversity of living things that exists even in our gardens or the local park. In this discursive account of the insects in a French meadow,