Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Selina Hastings

The nervous passenger who became one of our great travel writers

Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to explore new territories, her experiences recounted in a sophisticated style that Jan Morris in her introduction refers to as ‘a kind of apotheosised reportage’. Bedford’s first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, describing an expedition to Mexico, was to become a classic of travel literature, and the essays in Pleasures and Landscapes show many of the same exceptional qualities. Over three decades, from 1948 to 1978, Bedford journeyed through Italy, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Portugal and Yugoslavia. Vivid, acutely observed and intensely personal, her accounts of these voyages of discovery provide

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

A gangster called Capitalism and its vanquisher The Common Good

Once upon a time, a powerful unkillable beast menaced the nation. It had to be tamed. It could only be tamed by a robust ethos of the common good. This gradually emerged: a new democratic spirit was born! But soon critics popped up, complaining about aspects of the new order, calling it stifling, limiting, pompous and dated. They gained power: the fools uncaged the beast! For three decades it has trampled all over public life, declaring the profit motive to be the only realism; it has unbalanced industry, empowered reckless bankers, and forced public services to dance to its commercial tunes; it has utterly subverted the left, which dared not

Matthew Dennison

You’ll never look at dried pasta in the same way again

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding — or exposes them to feelings and events which place them in extraordinary positions and offer them opportunities to behave remarkably while remaining apparently run of the mill. Swift revels in the trappings of Pooterishness while denying his protagonists Mr Pooter’s silliness. His vision may be contrived but it never patronises. The experience of these

James Walton

A tribute to the King – or a compendium of journalistic bad habits?

With Elvis has Left the Building, the longstanding editor of GQ has inexplicably written a book that could serve as a handy, if perhaps overly comprehensive, compendium of bad journalistic habits: from the over-arching flaw of failing to decide what you want to say to such specifics as the excessive use of the phrase ‘American dream’ and wildly random scene-setting. (In the lengthy section on 1977, the year of Presley’s death, we learn that ‘five days before Luciano Pavarotti made his first appearance on American television, the rings of Uranus were discovered’.) Admittedly, for the fairly niche audience of readers interested in Elvis but entirely ignorant of the circumstances and

Amanda Herries

A paean to the British passion for our very own ‘castles’

‘Phlogiston’ is an interesting, if obsolete, word. Of Greek origin, it referred to the ‘fire-making’ quality thought to be present in, among other things, the ashes gathered by London dustmen. In the mid-18th century these ashes were mixed with earth and even ‘excrements taken out of the necessary houses’ to create the vast numbers of bricks needed for the explosion of house-building taking place at the time in London and elsewhere. The dramatic rise in building is pivotal to this densely detailed observation of the British obsession with their ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ which, we’re told, Robert Southey describes as particularly English and untranslatable. The first third of this trivia-packed and

Victor Sebestyen

It’s not just Putin who misses the Soviet empire. President Bush did, too

Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to Tashkent, Christmas Day 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR and the Red Flag was lowered from the Kremlin, remains a day to celebrate. With nearly a quarter of a century’s hindsight it still seems astonishing that a great superpower and, with it, an entirely different way of looking at the world

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

The soundtracked novel that won’t sit still

The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning breezeblock The Luminaries. But Hensher has always been a writer with a wandering, curious eye (on its most exhilarating display in 2011’s King of the Badgers), and The Emperor Waltz is a novel that, despite its superficial restraints, won’t sit still. It begins in Weimar during the period of hyperinflation, a time

Tristram Hunt

Caught between Marx and a monster

‘Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her as she spoke of the miseries of the dockers’ homes, pleasant to see her point her black-gloved finger at the oppression, and pleasant to hear the hearty cheer with which her speech was given.’ So Labour MP Robert Cunninghame Graham described Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, giving a speech to 100,000 demonstrators in Hyde Park at the height of the 1889 dock strike. ‘Brilliant, devoted and beautiful,’ agreed the trade union leader Ben Tillett. ‘During our great strike she worked unceasingly — a vivid and vital personality, with great force

Cressida Connolly

The cruellest present you could give a hated old in-law

It takes a special sort of talent to be able to make drawings of your own 97-year-old mother on her deathbed funny. The person with that gift is Roz Chast. Subscribers to the New Yorker will already be familiar with her marvellous cartoons, which often feature elderly and over-neurotic parents shouting dire imprecations to their rather dazed and mild-looking adult offspring. Their warnings tend to concern such mortal perils as crossing the road, running to answer the telephone or touching the handrail on public transport (the germs!). The subjects are from Brooklyn, but the appeal is universal: visiting a friend in Athens the other day, I saw a Chast cartoon

Molly Guinness

Lillian Hellman lied her way through life

Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’ wasn’t far off. Navigating through the hall of mirrors that Hellman left behind, trying to sort fact from self-aggrandising fiction, seems to have worked Dorothy Gallagher into a fury. Perhaps this book is her revenge. One of America’s most successful playwrights, Hellman had her first Broadway hit before she was 30. She was a close friend of Dorothy Parker and her long-term lover was Dashiell Hammett. Ardently left-wing, she was summoned before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee to answer questions about her

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

A coming of age novel? Or an age of coming novel?

At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon is the image that comes to mind) Caitlin Moran is to be bravo’d till the sacred cows come home for bringing her super-brightness to bear on this most vital of subjects. Like the rest of the western world and its stepdaughters, I loved How To Be a Woman and was excited to see what she would come up with next; when I heard it would be a novel, I was a little underwhelmed, having read her previous attempt at Young Adult fiction, The Chronicles of Narmo. When I realised in

John Martin-Robinson

From Edwardian idyll to meetings with Nehru: the life of Lady Ursula D’Asbo

This is the Real Thing, an evocative account of English upper-class life throughout the 20th century. It begins amidst the Edwardian feudal splendours of Belvoir Castle, where Ursula d’Abo spent much of her childhood with her beloved grandfather ‘Appi’. At the coronation of George VI she was a maid of honour to the Queen. During the second world war she worked with 2,000 women making bullets. Postwar life was hardly less varied and amazing, with an other-worldly stay in princely India, and meetings with Nehru. Married life at West Wratting Park and Kensington Square, two beautiful Georgian houses she restored, was followed in her widowhood by five years with Paul

Aaron Ross

What are the Chinese up to in Africa?

Few subjects generate as much angst, or puzzlement, among Western policymakers in Africa as China’s presence on the continent. In his new book, China’s Second Continent, the American journalist Howard French recalls meeting US officials in Mali to sound them out on the matter. Instead, he finds himself barraged by questions. ‘It would really be useful for us to know what the Chinese are up to,’ one American official tells him. ‘So far we’ve been limited to speaking with them through translators. We’ve got very little idea about any of this.’ Grasping the range and scale of China’s activities in Africa is indeed a tall order. Commercial deals are cloaked

Robert Chandler

Doctor Zhivago’s long, dark shadow

For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the early 1950s, when Zhivago was nearing completion. Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, into an assimilated and highly cultured Jewish family. His father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist; among the family’s friends were Leo Tolstoy, Sergey Rachmaninov and Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak wanted first to be a composer, then a philosopher

Wednesday

Mark Mason

A novel for men who don’t read novels

Are you the sort of man – or is your man the sort of man – who’s always meaning to read more novels but never gets round to it? Proper novels, I mean, rather than your John Grisham/Andy McNab stuff. Well the book you’ve been waiting for is soon to be published: A Man Called Ove by the Swedish writer Fredrik Backman. Ove (pronounced ‘Oover’) was born on Backman’s blog, whose readers then demanded he write a novel about the character. Backman obliged, the result sold like hot smorgastartas in his native land and now it’s going to conquer the world. The reason it’s the perfect book for weaning men

Monday

Julie Bindel

Summer sucks

Who could possibly choose hay fever, insect bites and heat rash over an open fire, cashmere blanket and hot chocolate laced with brandy? Although I love the bright early mornings and blue sky I can’t bear the heat and all that comes with it. Give me winter over summer any day. But to admit my dislike for the most popular season will bring forth accusations of total madness and misery. The images conjured up by a mention of summer are, for most people, cold beer, ice-cream, gentle boat trips, evenings in the garden twirling the stem of a frosty glass of bone-dry wine, dipping into an outdoor swimming pool and

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

The book that turned me into Rod Liddle

We all have what Andy Miller calls a ‘List of Betterment’: 50 or so books that, if read, would surely make us a better person – book clubs, gulp that Pino down, and discuss. Granted, it’s tough being a bastard if your nose is always in a book. And from The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life, a memoir of 12 months spent working through a List of Betterment, it’s difficult to picture Andy Miller ever being a bastard. He’s a thoroughly amiable sort. The reasons he decided to take drastic action with said list are simple. He explains: ‘We have been working parents for

Thursday

William Leith

Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of

A.N. Wilson

A divine guide to Dante

Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But,  like Dante himself, at large in the frightening wood, you need a companion for the journey, and it is difficult to imagine one more enlightening than Prue Shaw. The Emeritus Reader in Italian at the University of London, she has been lighting up the genius of Dante for us all her professional life, especially his politics. But this book is just as accessible to a general reader as it would be a source of wonder and envy to scholars. It is mainly concerned with the Comedy, but it expounds much of Dante’s other

Andrew Taylor

Maigret’s new clothes – this month’s best new crime novel, published 1931

The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the French by Sam Taylor; MacLehose, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16). More than two million copies have already been sold. Its author, Jöel Dicker, is apparently ‘Switzerland’s coolest export since Roger Federer’.The novel, which is billed as a literary thriller, has been garlanded with ecstatic reviews and prizes on the continent. It’s the story of a young, successful but blocked writer who tries to re-energise his muse by visiting Harry Quebert, the Great American Novelist who put him on the road to fame. Harry lives in a beachside house in Maine. Unfortunately,