Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Marcus Berkmann

A feast for quiz-lovers: Christmas gift books

The Christmas gift book market is a fascinating thing. Things come into fashion, other things drop out, although the desire to amuse and/or make the mind boggle is pretty much constant. This year’s book that performs both tasks admirably is The History of Art in One Sentence (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by Verity Babbs, which I am assured is her real name. She is an art historian and a comedian, an unusual combination in academe and a very effective one here. Her task is to guide us through 50 art movements from the past 500 years, one sentence at a time. Each short chapter asks ten judicious questions about the movement, then

Ambra Edwards

Serenity and splendour: a choice of gardening books

This year marks the centenary of Britain’s National Pinetum at Bedgebury in Kent, originally founded to rescue the smog-ravaged collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and now part of a global conservation effort: one third of all conifer species are currently threatened with extinction. To celebrate the birthday, we have Bedgebury Florilegium by Christina Harrison and Dan Luscombe (Kew Publishing, £18), featuring 20 botanical paintings by Bedgebury’s Florilegium Society. This is a group of volunteer artists dedicated to documenting the Pinetum’s remarkable collection of more than 12,000 specimen trees. But perhaps the most beautiful book to cross my desk this year is Melbourne Hall Garden by Jodie Jones (Frances

Sara Wheeler

Faith – and why mountains move us

Sylvain Tesson’s White unfolds the story of a gruelling ski journey across the Alps during which the author aims to fulfil ‘a long-held dream of transforming travel into prayer’. Born in Paris in 1973, Tesson is a well-known adventure writer whose previous books include The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga, which won awards on both sides of the Channel and was made into a film. As a public figure associated with the far right, Tesson remains divisive in his homeland. His political views do not seem to have dented book sales or literary coverage: one wonders if the same would be true if

Roger Lewis

‘I could turn very nasty – I was an egotistical brute’, says Anthony Hopkins

It’s a good job Anthony Hopkins is only an actor, as think what he’d be like as a dictator or grand inquisitor. ‘I could turn very nasty,’ he tells us in his memoir. Doing National Service: ‘I was beginning to enjoy the fisticuffs in my life.’ Encountering a Scotsman: ‘I felt a surge of hatred and anger. I head-butted him and smashed his nose so hard I heard it crack.’ To a director who’d annoyed him: ‘Learn some manners… or I’ll change the shape of your face.’ Mickey Rourke was told: ‘Touch me like that again and I’ll smash your face right into the back of your head.’ Hopkins is

The Spectator

Books of the Year II – further recommendations from our regular reviewers

Philip Hensher I have a theory that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels are an ingenious variation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. If, in a future episode, River Cartwright ascends to his kingdom renouncing Jackson Lamb, and if Catherine tells us of Jackson/Falstaff’s death offstage, don’t be surprised. In any case, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) is a magisterially accomplished novel and Herron a master of vivid voice, showing himself in a plot of shining, machine-like efficiency. The other novel I adored was Tash Aw’s The South (4th Estate, £16.99) – a ravishingly written account of a brief, obsessive passion between two teenagers during a boiling hot Malaysian summer. The Guardian tried

Thursday

Alan Judd

The Belgian resistance finally gets its due

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the White Lady – la Dame Blanche – whose appearance was said to herald the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, the Kaiser’s dynasty. The name was adopted by a network of 1,084 Belgians who spied for MI6 against the country’s German occupiers during the first world war. According to MI6’s authorised history, this ‘became the most successful

Henry Jeffreys

Beaujolais – a refuge for impecunious wine lovers

With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine wanker’ who ran the London marathon, stopping every mile to taste a wine blind and guessing most of them right. Now we have the inevitable book; and while Gilbey isn’t an elegant prose stylist in the manner of Oz Clarke, Thirsty: 100 Great Wines and Stories (Square Peg, £20) is an enormously entertaining read. It’s

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Nat Jansz: Comet in Moominland turns 80

36 min listen

Nat Jansz joins Sam Leith to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Moomin novels. The first of these, Comet in Moominland, was revised by author Tove Jansson a decade after the original publication date. To celebrate the anniversary Sort of Books, co-run by Jansz, is publishing this revised edition for the first time in English. Jansz discusses why she finds the books so compelling, the influence of the war on author Jansson and why she feels Jansson’s ‘quest for the truth’ was written in a way that was easy for children to understand. For Jansz, the Moomin novels had a mix of light and dark which broke the mould of

Tuesday

Charlotte Stroud

Even as literate adults, we need to learn how to read

Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white rhino might feel a little smug. Anyone seeking a glimpse of this endangered reader could be forgiven for thinking that a university English department was its most likely habitat, but they would be wrong. Behind the brown office doors where academics labour, one is more likely to find the common squirrel, hoarding information and burying

Hugh Thomson

How the terrorists of the 1970s held the world to ransom

At the end of the 1970s, the Illustrated London News printed a special edition to commemorate the decade. What did it focus on? Music, from David Bowie to Bob Marley? Some of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, from The Godfather on? Political crises, such as Watergate and the end of the war in Vietnam? No, there was only one headline: ‘The 1970s: The Years of Terrorism.’ We forget – and perhaps we want to – quite how brutal and random that time could be, with plane hijackings, the Munich Olympics atrocity and bombs going off from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore, where the Japanese Red

Travis Elborough

Unhappy band of brothers: the Beach Boys’ story

Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

What drove the German housewife to vote for Hitler?

‘It happened, therefore it can happen again,’ warned the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, explaining why witnesses to the horrors of Nazism and genocide must be listened to, and why it is important for future generations to stay vigilant against a repeat of such atrocities. The underlying assumption is that the Nazis’ rise to power and the terrible crimes that followed were preventable. We believe that German democracy need not have died; that Hitler could have been stopped from plunging much of the world into a horrific war and from eradicating the vast majority of European Jews. Yet, despite the widespread conviction that studying these events inoculates future generations against totalitarian

Sarah Ditum

Will the ‘bunny boiler’ tag continue to haunt single women?

Even if you’ve never seen Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, you’ll know what a ‘bunny boiler’ is. When Alex (Glenn Close) slaughters her lover Dan’s family pet and leaves it simmering on the stove, she invented a universal shorthand for the obsessive, unstable woman who can’t take romantic rejection. In the film, Alex is portrayed as the destroyer of domestic happiness: an embittered career woman on the wrong side of 35, who is made literally sick when she spies on the contentment shared by Dan (Michael Douglas), his wife and his daughter. Audiences loathed her. Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash, reported cries of ‘Kill the bitch!’ and ‘Punch

Ian Thomson

Zadie Smith muses on the artist-muse relationship

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us from her beloved Kilburn High Road (Afro-wig emporia, pound shops) to an appreciation of a Stormzy concert at Glastonbury. This fourth essay collection is unfailingly interesting: Smith is uniquely placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Some of the greatest essayists of the 20th century were American. (Only a wordy journal

Lynn Barber

Was Cat Stevens the inspiration for Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’?

Essentially this is a book of two halves –before and after Cat’s conversion to Islam in 1977 – and the first half is immeasurably the more engaging. He was born Steven Georgiou in 1948, the youngest of three children, to a Greek-Cypriot father and a Swedish mother, with a much older brother and sister. His parents ran a café, Moulin Rouge, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London’s West End, and the family lived above it. He went to a Catholic primary school near Drury Lane and then, having failed the 11 plus exam, to a secondary modern in the City. But he left school at 16 with only

Anne de Courcy

Paul Poiret and the fickleness of fashion

Such was Paul Poiret’s influence that he is the only couturier whose clothes are known to have caused several fatal accidents. At a time (1910-11) when fashion was loosening up he persuaded chic women into the hobble skirt, a garment so narrow round the ankles that only tiny, mincing steps were possible, with the result that several tripped over when stepping down from a pavement and one toppled from a bridge into a river where, unable to swim from the constriction around her ankles, she drowned.  In Mary E. Davis’s book, however, this dangerous garment gets only a brief mention. Instead, what we have is not so much a biography

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

A treasure chest of myths: The Poisoned King, by Katherine Rundell, reviewed

You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration,

Francesca Wade

The lonely passions of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’. Living, to Mansfield, was a challenge to be confronted head-on, a restless and active process of ‘shedding and renewing’. Her passion for life fortified her through a horrifying succession of troubles. It fed her art; it also exhausted her.  ‘Life’, in its most capacious sense, is the subject

The Spectator

Books of the Year I – chosen by our regular reviewers

Antony Beevor In Captives and Companions (Allen Lane, £35), Justin Marozzi has brought together a scholarly yet vivid history of slavery in the Islamic world in all its varied forms. Everything is covered, from the former slaves recruited by the Prophet, who achieved immense influence, to agricultural slavery, military conscription with Mamluks and Janissaries, the Barbary Coast corsairs who roamed the Mediterranean and the English Channel, and concubinage, right up to Daesh atrocities against Yazidi women. Slavery still exists in a number of countries and the dishonesty surrounding the whole subject has been clouded by the overwhelming emphasis on the Atlantic slave trade. It is a brave project, superbly researched

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Are Vermeer’s paintings really coded religious messages?

The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work. One foreign observer who did see a painting owned by a baker (probably handed over in security for a large overdue account) was incredulous at what the owner claimed was the value of a small picture by an unknown artist. After Vermeer’s death, and the sale of the collection for very little on the death