Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Mark Mason

When Geoff Boycott was a DJ in a Sydney nightclub

Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the people who are trying to do those things. Frank Keating, late of this and several other parishes and now just late, understood that truth, which is what made him such a great sports writer. Matthew Engel explains in the introduction to this anthology that his old colleague ‘liked sportsmen and made lasting friendships with them. This would be impossible nowadays.’ Most of the pieces report on those friendships rather than on matches: by portraying sportsmen as they were off the pitch Keating revealed what made them succeed on it. So

James Walton

Those weren’t the days

If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined. Her previous novel, We Had It So Good, followed a group of students from the Oxford of the late 1960s to the present day, where they were bewildered to find themselves in the unthinkable position of being quite old. Now her new one does the same with a group of students from the York of the

David Crane

An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo

There is a very nice story of a dinner for Waterloo veterans at which Alexandre Dumas — ‘Dum-ass,’ as the Antarctic explorer Taff Evans would have him — was for some reason present. I can’t remember now the exact wording of the exchange between them, but Dumas had clearly spent so much of the evening sounding off about the battle as if he knew what he was talking about that a French general at the far end of the table could finally take no more. ‘But my dear Dumas,’ he protested, ‘it wasn’t at all like that! And remember, we were there!’ ‘Precisely, mon général,’ came back the reply. ‘You

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Spectator Debate: Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Welcome to Generation Y’s world

The Spectator’s latest debate – Stop Whining Young People: You’ve Never Had It So Good – was most disgracefully skewed in favour of the proposition. Not only did the epically relaxed moderator Toby Young flagrantly and self-confessedly side with the proposers but so too did the event sponsor, Alan Warner of Duncan Lawrie private banking. Warner recalled, in his introductory speech, how very difficult it had been as a young man coming to terms with the fact that he would never be able to afford to live, like his parents’ generation, in Chelsea. Instead, he had to venture to the exotic reaches of the Angel, Islington and had to endure

Thursday

Charlotte Mitchell

A pork-pie and Capri-Sun fuelled hike around England’s moors

‘No, no’ I said, when The Spectator’s literary editor rang up, ‘I’m sure you must be able to find someone who really wants to read another postcolonial analysis of the figure of the North African in English literature.’ But the book turned out to be about the other kind of moor, so I said yes, though not without some anxiety that it might be like Eeyore’s Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad. Luckily, William Atkins’s book, though it acknowledges that moors can be bleak, isolated and unforgiving, especially for permanent residents and those scraping a living off the land, is on the whole quite cheerful. It is a series of

Richard Davenporthines

The opéra bouffe that was the Bretton Woods conference

There ought to be a comic opera about the Bretton Woods conference — Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, with its mordant libretto by Philip Hensher, should be the model. Everything about the conference was overdone. It was held in 1944 in the gargantuan Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, which provided a preposterous background of gimcrack luxury. The arrangements were as farcically managed as the Atlanta Olympics. The boy scouts who were dragooned in to help run the conference would make a wonderfully playful chorus in the Adès-Hensher opéra bouffe. There were 400 delegates from 77 countries — to say nothing of hundreds of slavering

James Mcconnachie

A Labour MP defends the Empire – and only quotes Lenin twice

In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is —  you might expect more hand-wringing from a historian and Labour MP who has previously written a life of Engels. But despite quoting Marx half a dozen times (and Lenin, twice!) there is something about the idea of empire that excites Tristram Hunt. And this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote. It describes how — and indeed when and where — the imperial ideology shaped and reshaped itself. As such, it is a nuanced riposte to those historians of empire,

Matthew Dennison

Not quite romantic fiction, or literary fiction, or commercial fiction – but still quite good

Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath of the second world war and the present day, and two failsafe locations, Cornwall and the Norfolk coast. But From a Distance is not commercial fiction. Barker’s narrative is sparingly studded with quotations, but this is not literary fiction either. There is a strong love interest, which does not blossom into romantic fiction. Barker’s novel is a hybrid, enjoyable, ultimately heart-warming. It lacks the freshness and charm of the earlier Hens Dancing, but recalls some of its vividness and forensically detailed scrutiny of family life. In 1946, Michael, a demobilised

John Preston

The queen, the cardinal and the greatest con France ever saw

You usually know where you are with a book that promises the story ‘would violate the laws of plausibility’ if it appeared in a novel, and that’s in deep trouble. In the case of How to Ruin a Queen, however, this is a boast with a surprising amount of substance to it. You could make it up — just about — but you’d probably have a very sore head afterwards. In 1786 Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Grand Almoner of France and scion of one of the country’s leading families, went on trial accused of having stolen a 2,800-carat diamond necklace. This was serious enough, but what was far more serious

Victor Sebestyen

A Pole’s view of the Czechs. Who cares? You will

When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his editor that it was likely to fail miserably. As Mariusz Szczgieł explains, the doubts were reasonable. No one was sure if anybody in the west would be interested in what a Pole had to say about the Czechs: ‘A representative of one marginal nation writing about another marginal nation is unlikely to be a success.’ But in 2009 Gottland won the European Book Prize (a serious award; the late Tony Judt’s Postwar won it the previous year) and it has been well received throughout the continent. There must have been

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York? No problem!

Aimé Tschiffely was what I have seen in other contexts called a ‘doublehard bastard’. In the middle of the 1920s, this Swiss-born schoolteacher at the age of 30 feared that he was getting stuck in a groove and that he wanted ‘variety’. So he set out on a solo horse-ride from Buenos Aires to New York City. Tschiffely wasn’t even much of a horseman at this point. But he had the notion that the wild Criollo horses of Argentina — descendents of the Spanish horses transported to the continent by the Conquistadors in the 16th century and brought to excellence by their survival in that unforgiving environment in the centuries

Tuesday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Why do so many of our MPs feel the need to write books?

It sometimes feels like there is a never-ending flood of books written by politicians delivered to the Spectator offices. Almost every week a new one – or the invitation to a book launch of a new one – comes through the door. As I type, for example, I can see Fraser’s invitation to the launch of Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire (which Hunt was promoting on yesterday morning’s Start the Week), and a copy of Kwasi Kwarteng’s War and Gold on the bookshelf beside me. But what I want to know is, how do all these MPs have the time to write books, when they ought to be

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Nadine Dorries’s book is a surprise bestseller

Nadine Dorries’s novel, Four Streets, may have been unilaterally panned by the critics, with the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse labelling it the ‘the worst novel I’ve read in 10 years’, but Nadine’s first official journey into fiction has been a runaway success. It spent the last 43 days in the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon, before shooting up to number one for a week, seeing off stiff competition from that other Tory scribe Lord Archer. Four Streets is selling at a much reduced rate of 59 pence; so it’s going to take a while for publishers Head of Zeus to make up the £18,000 Nadine has declared as an advance

Jonathan Keates

How to survive the rain-sodden Welsh Marches

The Welsh Marches, gloriously unvisited amid their wooded hills and swift-flowing streams, have remained mysteriously off-limits to the sort of novelist eager for territorial rights to a particular landscape or locality. Apart from Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill and Mary Webb’s torrid 1920s sagas of heartache and claustrophobia in field and farmhouse, fiction has mostly steered clear of Wye, Teme and Clun and their adjacent mountains. Along comes Laura Beatty, however, not to trouble this haunting remoteness but to use it, with subtle obliquity, as a grid for mapping the emotional lives of her twin heroines, women divided by nearly four centuries. Each is an incomer to the Marches,

John Akeroyd

Read this book and you’ll see why our meadows are so precious

This book is a portrait of one man’s meadow. Our now almost vanished meadowland, with its tapestry of wildflowers, abundant wildlife and rich human history, has long attracted English writers. Modern meadow books are usually copiously illustrated in colour to reach the coffee-table market, but John Lewis-Stempel bravely relies on lively elegant prose. His thoughtful, discursive, often humorous and always enjoyable narrative conveys a vital message, for one cannot overemphasise how important are these last ancient meadows. They are a cultural heritage and vital store of biodiversity, not least the genetic variation of grasses, clovers and other forage plants. A store of leaves, seeds and invertebrate ‘mini-beasts’, they are a

Mark Mason

When the English cricket team toured Nazi Germany – and got smashed

Why have the Germans never been any good at cricket? This entertaining account of the MCC’s 1937 tour to the Fatherland gives some clues. Any country po-faced enough to have a ‘Society for the Encouragement of Playing Ball’ will struggle from the start. Certainly the Germans back then seemed to understand neither cricket’s equipment (‘why so much luggage?’ asked one reporter of the tourists) nor its terminology — later, during the war, letters home from British PoWs about games at their camp were censored because ‘OMWR&A’ was thought to be code. It actually stood for ‘overs, maidens, wickets, runs and average’. At the darker end of this book’s territory, Dan

Ben Hamilton

If you prefer banal symbols freighted with meaning to plot, Nicola Barker is your woman

Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest novel. It’s 1984 and we are in Pett Level, Hastings, a marginal location even by Barker’s standards (previous novels have been set in Luton, Ashford, and the Isle of Sheppey), and a well-travelled man named Franklin D. Huff is investigating a series of events that took place there many years earlier. The events themselves are nebulous. Something about miracles, romantic affairs, and a saintly child deformed by thalidomide. Before Huff can find any answers, though, countryside serenity is replaced by the quirks of Barker’s reckless imagination. As is usual with

John Preston

There’s so much mystery around Charles Portis that we’re not even clear whether he’s alive

The American writer, Charles Portis, has had what some novelists — the more purist ones — might regard as an ideal life. While his books have seldom been big-sellers, his fans sink to their knees at the mention of his name. In the mid 1980s, two bookshop employees in New York were so smitten with Portis’s then out-of-print novel, The Dog of the South, that they bought up all 183 hardback copies on the market and put them in their bookshop window. The books sold out in days. Contacted in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he writes in an office behind a bar called Cash McCool’s, Portis said

Jane Ridley

The Paris of Napoleon III was one big brothel – which is why the future Edward VII loved it

Stephen Clarke lives in Paris and writes book with titles such as 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. Dirty Bertie is a book in the same line — a comic history which manages to combine his brand of jaunty, bawdy humour (not mine, I confess) with being genuinely informative about French history. Clarke claims that there is a gap in the biography of King Edward VII. Biographers have not said nearly enough about Bertie’s jaunts to Paris. He is absolutely right about this. To Bertie’s British biographers Paris is a collection of clichés about grandes horizontales and a few well-worn anecdotes. There’s a story about the courtesan La Barucci, for

Clare Mulley

Reliving the most famous last stand of the French Resistance

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance in the second world war, there is an awful inevitability to this book. Tragedy looms like the great plateau itself, overshadowing the individual stories of the people who lived, fought and died in these mountains. The strategic and tactical failings that led to their defeat run like strata through the history: a lack of clarity in Allied communications; failure to deliver sufficient heavy weapons or reinforcements; the mistaken use of a guerrilla army as a fixed, defensive force and, above all, the tendency to let diplomacy and politics trump military