Book Reviews

Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s nowhere near as punishing as the opening pages might suggest. In the ‘editor’s introduction’ we’re told that what follows is an anthology of writings by and about the late artist Harriet Burden — known to friends as Harry — with her own contributions taken from a series of notebooks labelled by letters of the alphabet: Notebook H, on Edmund Husserl, has pages on Husserl’s idea about ‘the intersubjective constitution of objectivity’ and the consequences of such an idea on the natural sciences… Q is devoted to quantum theory and its

Blithe Spirit Gielgud Theatre If you’d asked me before this week, I’m afraid I’d have guessed Angela Lansbury had already reached the spirit world. I’ve always imagined her eternally inhabiting the mid-twentieth century, as the prim but decidedly experimental home front heroine in Bednobs and Broomsticks (1971) or the icy Cold War matriarch in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).  Yet at the age of 88 she’s alive and kicking – nigh twerking – at the Gielgud Theatre in Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward’s tale of a newly re-married widower, who inconveniently rouses the ghost of his first wife and finds himself committing “astral bigamy”. In 1941, Blithe Spirit constituted wartime escapism for Coward, so with her clipped vowels and Queen Mother

Wilfred Owen, the poet whose work epitomises the horror of the First World War for most people in modern Britain, was born in Oswestry in the Shropshire Marches, close to his Welsh ancestral homeland, one hundred and twenty-one years ago today. His brief life ended just a quarter of a century later, on November 4th 1918, when he was cut down by a German machine gun as he heroically led his men across the Sambre-Oise canal in the sort of suicidal attack that his poetry had implicitly criticised. Famously, the telegram announcing his death arrived at his parents’ home in Shrewsbury at the exact moment when the bells were ringing

For a man who claims to be apathetic about politics, Russell Brand is rather noisy. Not content with guest editing the New Statesman and getting crucified by Jeremy Paxman, all in the name of his revolutionary cause, Brand is now writing a political book. ‘People keep asking me how The Revolution will work?’ ‘We all want to bring down the government and establish a personal and global utopia, but how?’ they ask. Well, in this book, I’m going to explain it.’ I suggest the title of Das Krapital.

Kate Colquhoun sets herself a number of significant challenges in her compelling new book, Did She Kill Him? Like Kate Summerscale before her, Colquhoun mines the rich seam of legal archives to give her readers the fascinating tale of a Victorian courtroom drama: that of Florence Maybrick, accused, in 1889, of murdering her husband. Colquhoun achieves expertly all the things one could hope to expect in such a historical account. She paints a picture not only of a woman on trial, but of the complicated world of late 19th-century England. We get a sense of a woman’s changing place in the world, we see Liverpool society on display, we learn