Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

John Sutherland

Being a printer was what Benjamin Franklin prided himself on most

For some readers this book will have the charm of the Antiques Roadshow. Adam Smyth, professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford, presents with caressing attention to technical detail an array of illustrious book people. They may be unfamiliar names to those who don’t know a colophon from a cauliflower, but he makes his characters wholly accessible. Smyth evidently chose the Bodley Head as his publisher for its connection with the Bodleian Library, in whose rare-books room he researches. As importantly, the Bodley Head was founded with a dedication to fine antiquarian books. The Book-Makers breathes bibliophilia. It recalls Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Unpacking

Emma Beddington

Grotesque vignettes: The Body in the Mobile Library and Other Stories, by Peter Bradshaw, reviewed

There’s a face I found myself making again and again when reading Peter Bradshaw’s short stories, and it was not pretty: top half screwed up in incredulity; lower half slack with bovine confusion. What, my expression said, just happened? What indeed? Bradshaw is best known as the Guardian’s chief cinema critic, but this isn’t his first foray into fiction. The collection comes in the wake of three novels; but he’s admitted that ‘the short story form has always obsessed me’. That fascination with the form has given him the confidence to play with it, and us, and my confusion was deftly engineered from the start. In the opening story ‘The

Thursday

Pete Williams

Pop musicians, be proud of your middle-class upbringings

Tracey Thorn’s was ‘by no means luxurious.’ Brett Anderson had a ‘small, very small’ one. Miki Berenyi’s was ‘shabby and dirty.’ The unwritten rule that the best rock music comes from the street can create a challenge for edgy post-punk musicians writing their memoirs. What if you grew up in comfortable circumstances or had a boring childhood? Downplaying the state of the house you lived in is one approach – but others are available. Take Brett Anderson’s Coal Black Mornings (2018). Anderson can reasonably claim to have come from a social position below the rest of his band, Suede. His parents were arty but they did, undeniably, live in a

Maggie Fergusson

We must never lose the treasured Orkneys

When, last summer, a group of Orcadians declared they’d like to leave the UK and join Norway, it became clear just how little most of us in the south understand Orkney. Friends who know I go there often ask me where it is (somewhere near the Hebrides?), how many Orkney islands there are, and whether they are mountainous or flat. As Peter Marshall explains at the start of this astonishing tour de force, the 70-odd Orkney islands lie just 25 miles north of Scotland, separated from the mainland by the Pentland Firth – the point, he says, at which ‘the North Sea meets the Atlantic, a place of hidden, treacherous

Boyd Tonkin

Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed

Scarlett Thomas likes islands: either literal sea-girt territories or closed enclaves where this wickedly inventive novelist practises her richly enjoyable experiments in plot and form. If her recent Oligarchy found its sour-sweet spot in a grisly girls’ boarding school, The Sleepwalkers creates another insular possession: the Greek island of ‘Kathos’, which almost resembles Samos. Here, within sight of the Turkish coast, the newlyweds Evelyn and Richard arrive as late-September storms brew to undergo their honeymoon from hell. Ever since novels such as Bright Young Things (also island-set) and PopCo, Thomas has known how to fuse an acidly satirical streak of observation with storytelling artifice that keeps her readers pleasurably unsettled

Lynn Barber

What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon were both taxonomists, born in the same year (1707), but apart from that they had little in common and never met. Buffon was French, Linnaeus Swedish. Buffon was suave, elegant, tall and handsome (Voltaire said he had ‘the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage’), whereas Linnaeus was a bumptious little man (under 5ft), who was widely regarded as uncouth. Buffon’s funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners but Linnaeus died almost forgotten, after suffering from a brain disease for 15 years. Yet the Linnaean system of taxonomy has survived much better than Buffon’s, which was hardly a system at

Kate Chisholm

Scrawled outpourings of love and defiance

To come across dates and names carved into a choirstall or ancient tree is to experience a momentary frisson, a startled connection with the past. Yet this practice of making ‘unauthorised’ personal graphic statements in public spaces is often thought of as antisocial, something to be erased immediately. Unless of course they are by Banksy, whose spray-painted outpourings cost local councils a great deal to clean off before they came to be regarded as valid documents, articulating the thoughts and imaginings of the disaffected. In her ingenious new book Writing on the Wall, the art historian Madeleine Pelling has chosen to use these often transitory pieces of historical evidence as

Alexandra Coghlan

Harping on the music of our ancestors

It’s one thing to sit in a comfortable armchair and see the world in a grain of sand. It’s quite another to hear it in a muddy shard of bone, a spool of wire or even an oddly shaped hole in the ground; to go searching for its voice on the sea bed, deep in the ice, beneath deserts, woods and cities. Music archaeology, Graeme Lawson wryly explains, is often the study of ‘small and largely unexceptional fragments’: objects ‘we might easily have kicked out of the way’. And yet the magic, he demonstrates, is all the greater when these fragments begin to connect, slowly coalescing into sounds and stories

Allan Mallinson

Eighty years on, the planning of Operation Neptune remains awesome

In December last year, the last surviving D-Day veteran of my old regiment, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, died peacefully in his care home. On 6 June 1944, 20-year-old Trooper Lawrence Burn had been the gunner in a specially adapted Sherman tank which, along with others of the regiment, had driven down the ramps of their landing craft 5,000 yards off Sword Beach and swum for almost an hour through the high swell to land a few minutes ahead of the assaulting infantry in order to suppress the defenders’ fire. Years later, Burn was still in awe of the scale and execution of the Normandy landings: ‘I don’t know who planned

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

English civil law has become a luxury good beyond the reach of most of us

In March 2020, Charlotte Leslie, a former Conservative MP, and widely regarded as a thoughtful, friendly woman, had her life turned upside down. The threat of professional and financial ruin hit her, and stayed with her until a few months ago, solely because she had offended a wealthy man. Leslie was the director of the Conservative Middle East Council. Mohamed Amersi, a businessman worth hundreds of millions of pounds, appeared from nowhere and announced that he wanted to become the council’s chairman. Leslie politely showed him the door. The next thing she knew, Amersi had set up a rival Middle East organisation to liaise between the Conservative party and the

Dylan Neri

Are we finally beginning to understand gravity?

The question of why things fall has puzzled our species since we crawled out from the darkness of our primitive ignorance. Aristotle was the first to offer a serious theory. He proposed that each of the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) had a natural place to which it innately wanted to return. Fire and air rise because their place is in the heavens, whereas earth and water return to the Earth. Aristotelian philosophy had such a profound impact on human thought that this view prevailed for nearly 2,000 years. Only with the Renaissance and the ideas of Kepler and Galileo was it finally challenged; and only by standing on

Frances Wilson

There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria

The hypochondriac is the butt of jokes. Even his butt is the butt of jokes. A story doing the  rounds in the 16th and 17th centuries concerned a Parisian glassmaker who, believing himself to be also made of glass, fastened a cushion to his buttocks in case they broke when he sat down. His anxiety was mocked by a character in a play called Lingua, Or the Combat of the Tongue: ‘I am a Urinal, I dare not stirre,/ For fear of cracking in the Bottome.’ The aim of A Body Made of Glass is to take hypochondria, or ‘illness anxiety disorder’, seriously. But in a moment of levity, Caroline

Emily Rhodes

London’s dark underbelly: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed

‘The Cally’s named after an orphanage for kids from Scotland or some shit. Didn’t we learn that in school?’ So says Big Pharma (real name Devan Swaby), drill rapper from the Cally Active gang – one of the many characters populating Andrew O’Hagan’s vast and riveting Caledonian Road. The novel opens with a 59-strong cast list, representative of contemporary London society. At the heart of this web, spanning aristocracy, gangs and trafficked migrants via an oligarch and the middle-classes, are the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn and his student and hacker protégé Milo Mangasha. As with the Cally and its links far beyond the capital, so O’Hagan demonstrates that his

Rachel Seiffert

Adrift on the Canadian frontier: The Voyageur, by Paul Carlucci, reviewed

At the core of Paul Carlucci’s debut novel is a protracted medical experiment conducted by one human on another. Set on the Canadian frontier of the 1830s and inspired by historical record, the book takes the strange case of Dr William Beaumont’s tests on Alexis St Martin’s digestive system and spins a marvellously dark yarn around them, exploring the uses and abuses of an innocent. Alex is the innocent in question – the voyageur of the title. Our journey with him starts in raw boyhood, finding him living at the back of a Quebec harbour storehouse. His mother is dead, his beloved petit frère also. His grief-stricken father has sailed

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Dorian Lynskey: Everything Must Go

40 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Dorian Lynskey. In his new book Everything Must Go, Dorian looks at the way humans have imagined the end of the world from the Book of Revelations to the present day. He tells me how old fears find new forms, why Dr Strangelove divides critics, and why there’s always a few people who anticipate global annihilation with something that looks like longing.

Thursday

Adam Begley

In the grip of apocalypse angst

You have to love a book about the end of the world in which the first two references are to Saul Bellow’s Herzog and the HBO series The White Lotus, a high/low combo that preps us for authorial omniscience. In the next few paragraphs we get Marc Maron, Sally Rooney and Frank Kermode. Buckle up, kids, a cultural whirlwind is coming! The day of judgment is at hand, and the all-knowing Dorian Lynskey, who seems to have doomscrolled through every card catalogue on the planet, is just the person to provide live commentary. A capacious cultural history of ‘apocalyptic angst’, his Everything Must Go will make you happy to be

Patrick Marnham

Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang

Telling the story of Sir Roger Casement’s life is a challenge for any biographer. In the land of his birth, he is remembered as a national hero. His remains lie in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin beside the graves of Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. He is there because he was hanged in Pentonville Prison in August 1916 as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. The awkward fact that Casement had become opposed to the Rising and had tried to prevent it does not fit either the heroic Irish narrative of his life or the official English account of the wartime traitor who died on the gallows.

Mike Jakeman

The secret of success in Formula 1

Formula 1 is having a moment. Its global popularity is soaring off the back of a wildly successful Netflix docuseries, Drive to Survive, and the launch of glitzy races in Miami and Las Vegas. It is even drawing attention away from other sports. The most significant move of European football’s January transfer window was Lewis Hamilton’s announcement that he is off to Ferrari next year. A pivot towards entertainment has created a new generation of fans. But will it come at the expense of the racing itself? The Formula, by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg of the Wall Street Journal, immediately establishes that Formula 1 is all about rules. It

Sara Wheeler

‘Now I have been made whole’: Lucy Sante’s experience of transition

Lucy Sante concludes her thoughtful and occasionally poetic memoir with the words: ‘Now I have been made whole.’ Before transitioning at the age of 66 she had lived her life as a deeply divided man. This is an affecting book that could help move the trans debate forward from its currently undignified state of abuse and polarity. Sante interweaves the story of the first 18 months of her transition with that of the first three decades of her biography. Her parents emigrated to New Jersey from Belgium, initially when she was four (there were subsequent toings and froings). She writes a lot about her identity as a working-class Walloon, an

Rose George

The rat as hero

Behold rat. Behold the magnificent, clever creature as it runs from the bin you have just opened or disappears into the nearest bush. Behold rat as it is cut open or drugged or injected to improve your health in the name of science, as many millions of its peers have been. Behold rat – though you may find that tricky, because the old adage that you are never more than six feet away from a rat is comprehensively skewered in this wonderful, charming book. Wonderful? Charming? Rats? Yes. Even Joe Shute, a man scared of the creatures, bravely takes two four-inch baby rats into his house and slowly grows to