Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Mark McGinness

Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly – crusaders, chancers, spongers

Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests felled in the name of Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Freeman-Mitford than the Brontë sisters. Jessica alone produced two volumes of memoirs, Hons and Rebels (1960) and A Fine Old Conflict (1977); her collected letters (Decca, 2006) came in at a thumping 700 pages and in 2010, Irrepressible, Leslie Brody’s biography of Jessica’s years in the United States, appeared. ‘Enough already’, one can hear her American sisters cry. Yet with Churchill’s Rebels, Meredith Whitford, a South Australian author of historical novels, has brought a clear eye and a

Alan Judd

Why Jonathan Powell thinks we’ll have to negotiate with al-Qa’eda

Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about which he has written authoritatively, and since leaving office has set up his own NGO which advises on negotiations with terrorists worldwide. This book, subtitled ‘How to End Armed Conflicts’, is offered as a guide to negotiators. They should find it very useful, packed with quotes and anecdotes from negotiations with, amongst others, the Tamils, ETA, the IRA, the ANC, Columbia’s FARC and, of course, that hardiest of all perennials, Israel-Palestine. It is liberally sprinkled with good advice and wise observations — that terrorist groups often start with unrealisable demands

Cressida Connolly

If you don’t think this novel is practically perfect, I’ll send you a replacement

If there were a harvest festival to honour the bounty of the autumnal book crop, the choir would be in especially good voice this year. There is much cause for rejoicing, with work from Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters. Oddly enough in these secular days, a bookish vicar could glean a sermon from any one of three new novels — by Ian McEwan, Michel Faber and Marilynne Robinson — in each of which the Bible is central. Faber’s book is said to be a science-fiction caper in which the holy book is exported to another planet, where alien inhabitants give it

William Leith

The hell of being Michael Palin

In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. At the start of this period, he was about to become a hugely successful presenter of travel programmes. Ten years later, he was wondering if this was, in fact, what he wanted to be. ‘Should I accept that this is what I’m best suited for?’, he writes. Or should he try to do something else, like be an ‘arts presenter’ or a novelist? His own verdict: ‘I don’t know.’ Palin is obviously a man of great qualities. For instance, he’s almost always an

Philip Marsden

First ash dieback, then the world’s scariest beetle

The ash tree may lack the solidity of oak, the magnificence of beech or the ancient mystique of yew. In terms of habitat it may support fewer species of fauna, insect and fungus than other trees. It may, in this country at least, occupy a smaller cultural space than many of its woodland neighbours: according to Oliver Rackham, the combined works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Tennyson mention oak 134 times, pine 113 times and ash just 23. But with its delicate compound leaves, the pale bark and the swoop of its lower branches (likened by the writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin to the arc of a diver), ash is the

Paul Routledge

Geoffrey Boycott’s new book would be of more use to English cricketers than a regiment of shrinks

After 13 barren years Yorkshire is back at the top of county cricket, where Geoffrey Boycott believes it has a place almost of right. We took the County Championship this year, beating Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge by an innings and 152 runs. Ryan Sidebottom finished off the home side to post a splendid match performance of 9-65. He doesn’t get a mention in this book, though his father Arnie does. In a part of the world where cricket is almost a religion, this is seen as a restoration of the natural order of things. It used to be said that when the county was low in the rankings, men read

James Walton

Colm Toibin’s restraint – like his characters’ – is quietly overwhelming

In Colm Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel Brooklyn, Eilis Lacy, somewhat to her own surprise, leaves 1950s Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s own home town in County Wexford where several of his books are set) for a new life in the United States. Before that, Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, having the same friends and neighbours… that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, in Nora Webster, we meet a woman who has done all of the above — a contrast made clear in the opening pages when Eilis’s mother makes

Andrew Taylor

An unorthodox detective novel about Waitrose-country paedos

W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he claimed was similar to an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. He suggested among other things that the genre allows the addict to indulge in a fantasy in which our guilt is purged, and we are restored to a state of innocence, to the Garden of Eden. When literary novelists turn to crime fiction (as they so often do these days), the results are not always happy. Susan Hill is a welcome exception. Her Simon Serrailler novels have developed into a series whose appeal stretches beyond its genre. Why? Perhaps Auden

Alan Strachan

From Trot to Thatcher: the life of Kika Markham

In a varied career, the actress Kika Markham has regularly played real-life charcters, including, on television, Mrs Thatcher — piquant casting for a lifelong anti-capitalist — and memorably on the stage, in David Hare’s The Permanent Way. the novelist Nina Bawden, survivor of the Potters Bar rail crash in which her husband, Austen Kark died. Markham’s memoir of her life over 30 years with her actor husband Corin Redgrave focuses on the traumatic period, following his recovery from prostate cancer, when in 2005 he suffered a heart attack, causing significant memory loss until his death five years later from an aneurysm on the brain. It somewhat recalls Bawden’s own exploration

Justin Marozzi

More derring dos and don’ts from Paddy Leigh Fermor

Recent years have seen the slim but splendid Patrick Leigh Fermor oeuvre swell considerably. In 2008 came In Tearing Haste, an entertaining collection of letters to and from Deborah Devonshire, followed last year by The Broken Road, the posthumously sparkling and long-awaited completion of the ‘Great Trudge’ trilogy, which finally delivered the 18-year-old Paddy from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Now comes another volume, setting out in full for the first time one of the great moments in a life heavily laced with glamour and incident. It takes some chutzpah to kidnap a German general — and serious presence of mind to get away with it. Paddy, the Special

David Crane

If you want to admire Napoleon, it helps not to have met Gaddafi

Forty-odd years ago, in the early phase of the Gaddafi regime, I had the slightly mixed fortune to attend the new Benghazi University’s first degree ceremony. The university had actually been closed for months and there were no degrees to award, but that did not stop them kitting out their foreigners in a job lot of academic gowns shipped in from Poland and marching us off to sit, ringed with machine-gun-carrying guards, in a huge tent under a broiling sun to wait for the Colonel himself to arrive. Every so often the band would strike up, we’d all stand, a loudspeaker would blare out ‘Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi’ and

Monday

Julie Bindel

Why I love this feminist who hit nuns and shot Andy Warhol

Just as I was feeling frustrated about the lack of robust books on feminism I spot a real corker: Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). Solanas, for those of you who have never had the para-sexual pleasure of reading her work, was not your fun feminist. Solanas, who died in 1988 aged 52, did not write comforting screeds about how women can break through the glass ceiling or how to cope with motherhood. She railed against men, blaming them entirely for her miserable life and for the hell that women suffer under patriarchy. Solanas, as the biography brilliantly highlights, made herself

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: when prose and poetry meet (plus: verse in the manner of Revd W.A. Spooner)

The challenge to pick a well-known poem and write a short story with the same title using the poem’s opening and closing lines to begin and end the piece drew a smallish entry. Rob Stuart wasn’t alone in choosing ‘Adlestrop’ and the poems of that great storyteller in verse Robert Frost were also popular. I liked Mike Morrison’s use of the first line of Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ as a springboard into an intriguing snapshot of the lexicographer Noah Webster. Equally impressive was Josh Ekroy’s imagining of an alternative and far-from-uneventful life for Mr Bleaney. Other star performers were Max Ross, Sid Field, John O’Byrne and Ashani Lewis. The winners

Thursday

D J-Taylor

Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about killing Thatcher is funny. Honest

Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make of the ten stories collected here, for they return us to the landscape occupied by Hilary Mantel’s last great contemporary novel, Beyond Black (2005). This, for those of you unfamiliar with her pre- (or rather post-) Tudor work is a world of fraught domestic interiors, twitches on the satirical thread and, above all, stealing over the shimmering Home Counties gardens and the thronged Thames Valley shopping malls, a faint hint of the numinous. Make that a very strong hint of the numinous, for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher fairly crackles

Jesse Norman

Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision

Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him, that philosophy is a conservative one. But his personal loss has been our great collective gain. As his new book again demonstrates, over the years his has been one of the few intellectually authoritative voices in modern British conservatism. In 1980, at the outset of the Thatcher decade, Scruton wrote The Meaning of Conservatism, a book which reportedly blighted his academic career: it remains an embarrassment to the British Academy that he was not made a Fellow until 2008. Academia may be softening at last, as his various professorships at

Robert Gorelangton

I’m disappointed this director didn’t plunge the knife into Dustin Hoffman

At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from the mouth of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the play in which Rudman once directed Dustin Hoffman to great acclaim. The author is also Felicity Kendal’s other half, making him a figure of envy for much of male Middle England. A tall ‘Texan Jew’ who went to Oxford, Rudman has quite a CV. He started at the Traverse in Edinburgh, where with the approval of the theatre’s chairman Nicholas Fairbairn he put on drugs and porno plays. An award-winning stint at the Hampstead Theatre followed, then a spell

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Rowan Williams has been reading too much Wittgenstein

It used to seem rather obvious that the world was full of evidence for God. These days, theologians no longer beat this drum — but some of them still give it soft little taps from time to time. Such tapping is what Rowan Williams is drawn to, now that he’s free of the obligation to dance around homosexuals and Muslims, so to speak. In this book, adapted from his recent Gifford lectures (a famous lecture series devoted to ‘natural theology’), he ponders the philosophy of language, and suggests that there is a deep affinity between how humans make meaning and how religious language makes sense. It’s a meticulously restrained and

Tim Bouverie

What’s that I hear? Francis Fukuyama back-pedalling frantically

The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely to be thrown back at you in the future. This is the problem that Francis Fukuyama has faced ever since he published his daring and now much derided book, The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argued that history had been buried beneath the rubble of the former Berlin Wall and that the teleological process was now at an end: ‘What we may be witnessing… is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form

Paul Routledge

Boy, can Alan Johnson write

Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made a second delivery, timed impeccably for the party conference season. It charts his escape from the urban jungle of Notting Hill to Britwell council estate in Slough, via a succession of GPO sorting offices and eventually to high office in the Union of Communications Workers. Like its predecessor, Please, Mister Postman takes its title from a Beatles classic. The boy left in the care of his 16-year-old sister after their mother’s death dreamed of becoming a rock star. He played in a succession of pop groups and even recorded a

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Yotam Ottolenghi: the Saatchi brothers of vegetable PR

It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of recipes. It is a collection of recipes, as it happens, and very good ones, but it’s more the epitome of a world view, a way of life, a vision of contemporary Britain. This is a collection of the great man’s latest vegetarian recipes from the Guardian magazine — I see some of my readers slipping from me as I write — and the mag accompanied the book’s serialisation with a picture of Yotam in the guise of a Renaissance artist, or prince. But really, the recipes are secondary to the