Book Reviews Archives

Thursday

4 Dec 2014

What makes mankind behave so atrociously? Ian Buruma and Joanna Bourke investigate

The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature, one of the murderer’s descendants has his arm ripped from its socket by a young warrior who celebrates his gruesome victory by drinking himself blotto; the next day, our hero wakes up (not hungover, apparently) and kills his opponent’s mother. Not my cup of tea, Beowulf, or, perhaps, yours. But this is what literature was like until the 18th century or so, when the stakes were lowered and people began writing about inheritances, bishoprics and low-key adultery. Ian Buruma is interested in the other, older kind of story because, as

Mike Parker

An alternative map of Britain: caves, canals, megaliths and ley lines

Picture the map of Britain. Its strangely cadaverous shape, blobs of population and routes between them seem as familiar as our own faces; there is only one definitive map, surely? Not according to Joanne Parker, whose Britannia Obscura aims to tease out less corporeal cartography. Hers are not quite ‘maps of the mind’, for they exist as truly as a crisp new Ordnance Survey, but they are largely out of sight: above us, below us or otherwise in the shadows. Each of her five chapters takes on a different map: of our cave and canal networks, overhead air routes and patterns of megalithic remains. These four are clearly real enough;

Ruth Scurr

Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print. Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien

Nicholas Lezard

What Hanif Kureishi learned from being robbed by his accountant

Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs: ‘Long before this, though, and long before I learned that the insane, these days, might disguise themselves as money experts, I had heard that no one had met a sane accountant.’ To which an accountant might reply: ‘I have never met a sane writer. ‘(I am certainly in no position to wag the finger when it comes to this.) Hanif Kureishi, though, has cause for his observation, and his grievance. In the spring of 2012, his accountant, whom he calls here Jeff Chandler, managed to con him out of around

William Leith

Your immune system’s war isn’t Saving Private Ryan — it’s Homeland

Before I read this book, I imagined the immune system as a defensive force, like the Germans on the beaches at Normandy on June 6 1944. When you’re young and vital, your immune system is the Germans in the early morning — scanning the horizon for movement, with plenty of ammunition in reserve. But life is a process of attrition; as you get older, you become like the Germans later that afternoon — your machine guns get jammed up, and then you use rifles, and pistols, and eventually bayonets, until the invaders finally destroy you — just like the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. That’s what I used

Andrew McKie

Not a barrel of laughs: a history of hogsheads, kegs and puncheons

Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their surname is Cooper. If it doesn’t have the wide appeal of the latest Lee Child or Jamie Oliver, though, there is plenty in it of interest, and not just for the many fans of wine and whiskey. Since the unexpected commercial success of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, there have been a number of attempts to dare to be dull, approaching apparently unpromising subjects with the attitude that anything becomes interesting if you look at it closely enough. It can be surprisingly successful; though I probably didn’t need to read the second

Justin Marozzi

Mecca: from shrine to shopping mall

Mecca is the greatest paradox of the Islamic world. Home to the Kaaba, a pagan-era cube of black granite said to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, it is the lodestar to which 1.6 billion Muslims direct their five daily prayers. Mecca is the single point on the planet around which Muslims revolve — quite literally for those able to perform the once gruelling, now simply expensive, pilgrimage or haj. Yet the prodigious, world-illuminating gifts of Islamic civilisation in the arts and sciences, from architecture to astronomy, physics to philosophy, came not from Mecca but from cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul. Where those metro-polises

Friday

28 Nov 2014

Andrew Taylor

Forget genre: P.D. James wrote novels that are worth reading and re-reading

P.D. James was the Queen Mother of crime fiction. Her career as a writer stretched over half a century, and her death at the age of 94 deprives the country of an author who was cherished in person as well as for her books. She was probably best known for her crisply-written and elegantly plotted series about the poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh. Among other things, however, she was also an occasional contributor to the Spectator, which sometimes showed an unexpected side to her. An early diary piece recalls her attempt to learn to drive in Dublin in the 1980s. The caretaker at her block of flats took one look at her

Thursday

27 Nov 2014

Pd James

P.D. James (1920 – 2014) on Jane Austen and the joys of great-grandparenting

P.D. James died today at the age of 94. She was a great friend of The Spectator. Here is her diary from 27 January 2010: Our protracted family Christmas with my elder daughter, Clare, came to an end when her son, with his Australian wife and two children, returned to Melbourne. The visit has been a great success, particularly so for Clare, whose idea of a perfect Christmas is to have four generations round the table. The snow was a bonus since neither great-grandchild had ever before seen snow. The first glimpse of a totally white England spread out beneath them as the plane descended to Heathrow was a wonder, and

Rose Prince

A mouth-watering selection: 2014’s best eight cookery books

The people behind the people are the ones to watch for, and we have all been waiting for a book by Anna Jones. Who? Well, if you are a fan of Jamie Oliver, you will have read a lot of Jones. For seven years she worked as his ‘stylist, writer and food creative,’ which means, we guess, that she was behind the curtain busily pulling levers for the great wizard. He has written the foreword to his protégée’s first book, and says he’s is ‘super proud’. But so he should be, for A Modern Way to Eat (Fourth Estate £25, Spectator Bookshop, £20) is a beautiful and inspiring one, and

Christopher Bray

Composer, conductor, author, pianist, lecturer — was there anything Leonard Bernstein couldn’t do?

On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a performance of Mahler’s Third. The next night he went to see Jimi Hendrix play Madison Square Gardens. And there you have him. Was Bernstein a fragile romantic or a firebrand rocker? Was he the spiritual visionary who gave us Chichester Psalms or the tin-pan-alley tunesmith behind West Side Story? Bernstein went to his grave claiming it was possible to be all these things and more — insisting that you could be a political activist and a concert pianist, a conductor of the challengingly atonal and a writer of the melodically

Andy Miller

A brief, witty look at the coming of the e-book

Paul Fournel is a novelist, former publisher and French cultural attaché in London, and the provisionally definitive secretary and president of the select literary collective known as Oulipo, whose fellows have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Members of Oulipo remain members after their deaths. In this respect, it is the French literary equivalent of the Hotel California, a comparison I suspect its followers would neither welcome nor necessarily understand. But playful and defiant obscurantism is all part of Oulipo’s raison d’être. Dear Reader is set in the world of publishing and tells the tale of a middle-aged editor, Robert Dubois, struggling to adapt to the rise of

Ian Thomson

Death wears bling: the glory of London’s Caribbean funerals

Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic white Doric columns and gold-encrusted ‘caskets’ are like a poor man’s dream of heaven. The dwindling belief in an afterlife — the consolation that we might ever join our loved ones — has taken much of the old-time religion out of the West Indian funeral. Wealthier Jamaicans may lavish up to US $30,000 on a Cadillac hearse. Now even death wears bling. Fortunately, mortuary tradition survives in the Neo-African ‘Nine Night’ ceremony, where for nine nights the body remains in the deceased person’s home or ‘dead yard’ and hymn-singing mourners

Michael Bywater

The book that made me (almost) believe in bitcoin

Bitcoins are digital money ‘mined’ from satanically difficult mathematical problems. Madness, obviously. But five years ago, while the rest of us were saying ‘Huh. Geeks. Money in cyberspace’, or ‘Y’what?’ a young doctor I know bought a few quids’ worth for fun. Sold it later for £800. Now she’s out on a hillside in the driving rain with her hawk. Bitcoin paid for the hawk. As for cyberspace, that’s where all money is anyway. Bitcoins simply take it a step further. It might be the first step on one of the most important journeys in economic history. It’s a strange, compelling tale, and three things lie at its heart. First,

Jane Ridley

Move over Downton: Margot and the Asquiths’ marital soap opera

You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War Diary was published only a few months ago: surely we have had enough about this woman, extraordinary though she was. Anne de Courcy’s new book shows that this is not the case at all. Instead of using Margot’s voluminous diaries to illustrate the politics of the Asquith government, as most writers have done, she writes the story from Margot’s point of view. The result is a gripping read. When the rising Liberal politician Herbert Henry Asquith married Margot Tennant in 1894 he was a 42-year-old widower and she was 30.

Lee Langley

Women in the various hells of Algiers

On the surface Harraga is the story of two ill-matched women colliding dramatically, with life-changing consequences. What emerges, in throwaway fragments, is a picture of Algeria’s chequered past and present; a history of conquest and occupation. It’s a sugar-coated pill with a burning, bitter core. Boualem Sansal is an Algerian writer recently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels have been translated into 18 languages and won international awards. In his own country, his books are banned. Before becoming a writer at the age of 50, he enjoyed an enviable life as general director of Algeria’s ministry of industry and restructuring, until open criticism of the regime cost

Melanie McDonagh

The best children’s books of 2014

If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case. My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for children. There are some wonderful illustrators out there, contemporary ones, for all ages, and the scandalous thing is, they are usually limited to the age range, 0–7. If you want to remind yourself what we’re missing, make for the House of Illustration in London’s King’s Cross; that should do it. Or try Chris Beetles’s annual,

Charlotte Moore

Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst

Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology and the link between Darwinism and psychoanalytic theory. She was a pioneer of play therapy for children, and the first hospitalised psychiatric patient to progress to practising psycho-analysis. She worked with, among others, Freud, Jung and Piaget; she was regarded as Freud’s standard-bearer. Yet she is remembered, if at all, as Jung’s mistress, a hysteric with a taste for spanking; David Cronenburg’s film A Dangerous Method, with Keira Knightley as Spielrein, has provided the only readily available version of her. John Launer’s aim is ‘to promote her recognition as one

Dorian Lynskey

Jerry Lee Lewis: interrogating ‘The Killer’

‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the fullest, and I had a good time doin’ it. And I ain’t never wanted to be no teddy bear.’ Jerry Lee Lewis is still recording and performing at the age of 79, but his legend rests on what he did in the couple of years after he turned 21. In 1957, ‘Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ made him a $10,000-a-night sensation who sold more tickets than Elvis or Sinatra. Sam Phillips of Sun Records called him ‘the most talented man I ever worked with,

Michael Beloff

How did English football get so ugly?

Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool FC in the club’s halcyon days of the1960s and 1970s, once said: ‘Football isn’t just a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that.’ But as David Goldblatt shows in this penetrating study, it was a sport then in apparently terminal decline.The deaths in the next decade of so many fans at Bradford from fire, and at Hillsborough from suffocation, exposed both its obsolete infrastructure and and anachronistic governance. It had few friends in high places and no ready access to funds. In 1963 the maximum wage of £100 per week had been abolished.The next year the High Court ruled that