Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Harriet Sergeant

Banned – and booming: the strange world of Chinese golf

I was in Shanghai interviewing a Chinese film director and an actor. We were discussing government censorship. How did anyone manage in China, I lamented. The two men burst out laughing. I had not understood at all. ‘Because everything is forbidden, everything is permitted. You are free to do anything,’ they assured me. Dan Washburn in his book The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, uses golf and the business around it to pin down the paradox that is China today. Golf is his back door into understanding the last 20 years, as China has grappled with modernity and an unnerving speed of change. Corruption, rural land disputes, environmental

Andrew Taylor

Creepy, dizzying and dark: a choice of recent crime fiction

Philip Kerr is best known for his excellent Bernie Gunther series about a detective trying to survive with his integrity more or less intact in Nazi Germany. His latest novel, however, is a standalone thriller set in literary territory that might have appealed to Hitchcock. Research (Quercus, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.99) opens with the murder of the beautiful Irish wife of one of the world’s bestselling novelists in the couple’s luxurious Monaco apartment. Her husband, John Houston, has disappeared. He is the prime suspect. Houston researches and plans his thrillers but employs an ‘atelier’ of jobbing novelists to do the hard grind of writing what he describes as ‘books for

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Potato prints, paintings and the Soviet Union: the real Miss Jean Brodie

During the second world war, when not only food, but paper and artists’ materials were scarce, Peggy Angus made a virtue of necessity. Potatoes were one of the few foods not rationed, so she began cutting them in half, carving designs into the cut side and printing them onto old newspapers in repeated patterns of oak leaves, smiling suns, waves, chevrons and Welsh dragons. It was with these playful, naïve designs — which she later turned into tiles and wallpapers — that she made her name. Angus, like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, her contemporaries at the Royal College of Art, moved easily between media: potato prints, silkscreens, oil paintings,

Boris Volodarsky

The threat from Russia’s spies has only increased since the fall of Communism

‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin.  The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in fact Nikolai. ‘Nikolai Lenin’ was the party alias of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, a terrorist leader and psychopath whose ideas changed the history of the greater part of the 20th century. This era ended on 26 December 1991 with the collapse of the 74-year-old Soviet Union, founded by Lenin, who seven years after the Bolshevik revolution died of syphilis, only to be succeeded by Stalin. ‘Stalin’ was also an alias. The Soviet dictator’s real name was Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili, born into the family of a Georgian cobbler. His education, which he

Michael Paraskos

Like Birdsong – only cheerful

It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica during the first world war, and Sebastian Faulks’s similarly titled Birdsong. Whilst Faulks’s novel sits comfortably within the generally accepted narrative that the first world war was an unmitigated disaster, with lion-like Tommies led by donkey-like officers, Aslet has written what is effectively a panegyric to the officer class. Indeed, so casually heroic is every officer in the book it is almost as though Richard Attenborough’s version of Oh! What a Lovely War never existed. The Birdcage begins with the almost Wodehouse-inspired scene of the first ascent in a balloon

Roger Lewis

The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples. It is thus a tragedy that Dusty Springfield’s whole existence was blighted by her orientation, which explains ‘the silence and secrecy she extended over much of her life, and her self-loathing’. One glance at her chin should have revealed all — but the Sixties was not a fraction as liberated and swinging as people

Patrick Skene-Catling

The robber baron who ‘bought judges as other men buy food’

The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of wealth in the history of the United States, and none of them was less handicapped by moral scruples than W.A. Clark. He was up there near the pinnacle of acquisitiveness with Rockefeller but was not as legendary in popular imagination. While other pioneers were searching for gold, Clark developed copper-mining at the most opportune time, when there was a great and growing demand for copper for electrical wiring. The copper lode he discovered in Butte, Montana, produced 11 million tons and earned the town its nickname ‘The Richest Hill on

Philip Mansel

Kaiser Wilhelm’s guide to ruining a country

The role of personality in politics is the theme of this awe-inspiring biography. This is the third volume, 1,562 pages long, of John Röhl’s life of the Kaiser. It has been brilliantly translated — the labyrinth of imperial Germany navigated by many headed subdivisions in each chapter — by Sheila de Bellaigue. The fruit of what Röhl calls a ‘dark obsession’ with the Kaiser, it had its origin when, writing about Germany after the fall of Bismarck at the apogee of social and institutional history in the 1960s, he realised that he was analysing not a modern government but a court society. Personalities and dynasties were as important as classes

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Spinning Jenny

In Competition No. 2857 you were invited to take the first line of Leigh Hunt’s mini rondeau ‘Jenny Kissed me’, substitute another word for ‘kissed’ and continue for up to 16 lines. Jenny proved to be a real crowd–puller and produced a high-calibre entry. A congratulatory slap on the back all round. Those printed below earn their authors £20 each and Mae Scanlan takes £25. Jenny stunned me when we met; It had been ten years or better. She’d grown old and heavy-set — Rolls of fat beneath her sweater.   Underneath each eye a sack that You could fit a cat inside of; Frankenstein’s the likely quack that She

Olda Fitzgerald

Lenin, Hitler, Sloane Square – a Polish noble’s 20th-century Odyssey

If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be the spry and handsome 88-year-old to be seen bicycling around Sloane Square that he is today — a slight fall having proved no impediment to his progress. He came from a grand family of diplomats on his mother’s side. She, Zoia de Stoeckl, was clearly ravishingly pretty and became, aged 18, a maid of honour to the last empress of Russia. Vincent’s father derived from what he describes as ‘run-down Polish nobility’ (only 56 peasants); but the family seems to have had an astonishing ability to rise, phoenix-like, from successive

Susie Dent

Main villain: the aftermath of war

Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their rides of suspense give a good thrill, but it’s rarely a comfortable one. If it’s cosy detection we’re after, we usually look to the past, as Dylan Thomas clearly did: ‘Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.’  Rennie Airth, with his series of John Madden mysteries, provides a middle way, and one that in many ways feels altogether nobler. The Reckoning is the fourth of Madden’s cases. It sees our man in retirement from

Augusta Pownall

The British countryside in prints and paper-cuts

The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest collection of British art outside the UK. An impressive collection it is too, largely bequeathed by Paul Mellon of the American banking dynasty. He holidayed in England as a child before the first world war and, having developed a taste for ‘dappled tan cows in soft green fields’, began acquiring British works on natural history as a young man. In this book, Elisabeth R. Fairman, a curator of rare books at Yale, has gathered images, largely from the collection, of all that the British countryside has to offer, recorded by artists and naturalists from the 16th century to the present day.

Philip Ziegler

Daring? No. Well written? Yes

This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an excellent biography of the Victorian newspaperman W.T. Stead. How best to follow this? No attractive subject for another full-scale biography suggested itself. Why not therefore fill in time by writing long essays on four worthies from the generation that followed Stead? And so we have: ‘A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics: Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Dean Inge, Lord Reith and Sir Arthur Bryant.’ The only trouble is that the reassessment is not particularly daring and the characters hardly at all eccentric. Joynson-Hicks — ‘Jix’ as he was usually referred

Tom Switzer

The many lives of Richard Nixon

Winston Churchill once said of politics that it’s ‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics — many times.’ Perhaps no one personified this dictum better than Richard Milhous Nixon. From his election to Congress in 1946 to his resignation from the presidency in 1974, Nixon had been written off time and again. After each setback, though, ‘Tricky Dicky’ was incredibly formidable on the rebound. Even after Watergate, the disgraced former president transformed himself into a bestselling author and something of an international elder statesman. But it was Nixon’s remarkable recovery from two devastating defeats in the early

Paul Binding

Tip-toeing through Sri Lanka

‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator of all the stories in Noontide Toll. Kilinochchi was the operational centre of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) until the Sri Lankan army’s entry in January 2009. Now the town offers amenities like the Spice Garden Inn, with glass-walled cafeteria and reception desk overflowing with coconut flowers and bougainvillea. Yet its assistant manager, Miss Saraswati, belies such luxurious blandness. A rat suddenly appears in the café; immediately she hurls a bottle, breaking the creature’s skull without destroying the implement. ‘I stared at Miss Saraswati. “You learn to do

Charles Glass

John Wayne, accidental cowboy

I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen to think that’s true about Vietnam, but even if it isn’t as clear as all that, that’s what you have to do to make a picture. It’s all right, because we’re in the business of selling tickets. It’s the same thing as the Indians. Maybe we shouldn’t have destroyed all those Indians, I don’t know, but when you’re making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys. — Mike Wayne, producer of The Green Berets, starring his father, John Wayne The words above appeared in a 1968 issue of Esquire

Mark Fisher

How good an artist is Edmund de Waal?

For Edmund de Waal a ceramic pot has a ‘real life’ that goes beyond functionalism.This handsome book (designed by Atelier Dyakova) at the mid-point of his career, raises the question: ‘How good an artist is he?’ It is discursive, comprising essays by A.S. Byatt and Alexandra Munroe, short stories by Colm Tóibín and Peter Carey, an elegant photographic essay by Toby Glanville, a look at de Waal’s life to date by Emma Crichton-Miller and a piece by the man himself. ‘I am a potter who writes,’ de Waal said in a 2000 article in the Ceramic Review, although since then his book The Hare with Amber Eyes has carried his

Philip Hensher

The age of the starving artist

What remains of art is art, of course; and what chiefly interests us is the creative talents of a painter or a sculptor. What we forget is that the work of art wouldn’t be there without some kind of engagement with the brutal forces of money. James Hamilton’s riveting book is a richly detailed study of how, in Britain in the 19th century, artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money. ‘The business of art, when seen in the perspective of the time, does not always reflect the course of art history as

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: craft a voter-repelling party political broadcast (plus James Joyce and co. give Phil Neville a masterclass in football commentary)

Unkind comparisons were drawn, after his commentary debut, between Phil Neville’s style and a speak-your-weight machine. One Twitter user speculated, when the England physio was stretchered off injured, that it was because he’d ‘slipped into a coma when a live feed of Neville’s commentary was played into his earpiece’. The latest challenge, in which competitors were invited give poor Phil a few pointers courtesy of a well-known writer, produced some lively and stimulating punditry. G.M. Davis offered the World Cup Dan Brown-style: ‘After a secret convocation in March 2002 Fifa proclaimed that the 2014 World Cup would be held in South America. Half-signifying the sacramental status of the tournament, Brazil

Thursday

John Preston

The author’s father didn’t want you to read this book. It’s hard to understand why

There were several times when reading A Dog’s Life that I felt as if I’d fallen into a time warp. It starts with a quote on the cover from Hugh Massingberd: Holroyd is ‘a brilliant writer blessed with perfect pitch’. Nothing wrong with that, except that Hugh, alas, is no longer in a position to review books, having died seven years ago. The book itself, a novel closely based on Holroyd’s own family, was written in the late 1950s but never published in the UK after his father took violent exception to the way he’d been portrayed. He also warned that publication could well kill Holroyd’s elderly aunt. Under the