Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

In defence of Herodotus

How many writers would give their eye teeth to have a book reissued 2,500 years after their death? It certainly beats being pulped after a year or two. And who better to receive the Penguin Hardback Classic treatment than Herodotus, the fifth-century BC ‘Father of History’, he to whom historians today owe so much, whether they know it or not? This is a new translation. of a book that remains more relevant than ever. by the popular historian Tom Holland, with an introduction by the Cambridge professor Paul Cartledge, doyen of classicists, citizen of Sparta and a Herodotean to the core. The Histories is a masterpiece on the grandest scale,

Anne Applebaum

Secrets of the Kremlin

A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to Russian sovereignty. To the modern eye, the Kremlin fortress seems as if it had always been there, as if it had never changed and never will. All of which is utter nonsense, as Catherine Merridale’s fascinating history reveals: the story of this famous compound is not one of continuity, but of construction, destruction and reconstruction. Every reincarnation of the Russian state over the centuries — and there have been many — has been accompanied by a corresponding reincarnation of the Kremlin. Its history is thus a metaphorical history of Russia,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

How honest was Bernard Berenson?

When the great Jewish-American art expert Bernard Berenson died in 1959, he had acquired the status of a sort of sage. He was the relic of a prewar culture that had vanished. He was an embodiment of the idea of connoisseurship that had at once given birth to a great boom in art collecting and yet that was, by the end of his life, being superseded. When Berenson embarked on the career that would see him widely accepted as the world’s foremost authority on Old Masters, the painters of the Italian Renaissance were barely regarded in the US. He died — at 94 — in the age of Andy Warhol.

Thursday

Jane Rye

The mad, mum-fixated maiden aunt of modernism

Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as they were to the avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s New York. Much of the fascination lies in the contrast between what Linda Leavell calls Moore’s ‘maiden-aunt persona’ and her position as a ground-breaking modernist, whose highly idiosyncratic verse and technical experimentation dazzled and baffled her contemporaries. She was fragile, nervous, shy and had difficulty eating; an invitation to tea might ‘knock her up’ for days, but as editor of The Dial from 1925-1929, with ‘a paradoxical combination of self-assertion and self-effacement’ she was a powerful figure at the centre

John Preston

Curtains for kitty! How to care for cats — and how to kill them

The New Yorker has always had a peculiar affinity with cats, perhaps because they have a lot in common — an elegance, an abhorrence of sentimentality and an innate sense of superiority. The Big New Yorker Book of Cats is full of cats and owners, each holding one another at arm’s length and peering through invisible lorgnettes. Pulitzer prizewinner Susan Sheehan writes about a tabby cat called Pynchon, owned by the proprietor of a Manhattan bookshop. Pynchon, who for unspecified reasons arrived in New York ‘with no front claws’, is fond of listening to classical music on the radio and regularly attends meetings of the James Joyce Society at the

David Ekserdjian

Google Images can’t spoil the fun — here are the most gorgeous art books of the season

Good news for the festive season — the inexorable rise of the virtual image on our computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones would appear to have done nothing to diminish the flood of gorgeously produced art books being published. This year’s selection ranges in time from the third century AD to now, and reaches all over the globe. First up is Antony Eastmond’s The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom (Phaidon, £59.95, Spectator Bookshop, £49.95), which is in essence a sumptuous anthology of 267 unusually carefully chosen highlights, bookended by a short but profound introduction and an exceptionally useful glossary. The selection naturally includes all the most celebrated works in

Sebastian Payne

Hugo Rifkind’s My Week reminds me why it’s worth getting up on Saturdays

‘Nothing’s funny any more’ has become the daily mantra of this magazine’s cartoon editor, Michael Heath. Thanks to Leveson, political correctness, taste and common decency, lampooning public figures in particular has become more difficult than ever. Hugo Rifkind still has the right idea. From the despair of trying to conjure up a column for the Times’s Saturday edition, he came up with ‘My Week’, and these diaries, in which he takes aim at someone — usually in politics — who has dominated the news, are now the first thing many people turn to. This compilation brings together his best sketches in an enticing bible of satire. The merriment gained from

John Sutherland

The book that Boris should give to all seniors, along with their Freedom Passes

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a story for the older reader. One might go so far as to suggest that local authorities should give ‘seniors’ a copy free with their euphemistically named ‘Freedom Pass’ as a reminder of the longest journey they will ever take. Boris’s memento mori. Perversely, because it is short and by a writer whose name is better known than his work is read, The Death of Ivan Ilyich routinely appears on ‘Great Books’ courses for the young — to whom the story manifestly does not speak, since the young know they will never die. The narrative opens with the announcement of the death of a

Elfreda Pownall

Famous female cooks, a juicy salmon recipe from 1664 — and the only interesting thing about Mrs Beeton

In Cooking People  Sophia Waugh describes, with dash and wit, the personalities of five important women cookery writers: two Hannahs (Woolley from the 17th century and Glasse from the 18th), Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton from the 19th, and Elizabeth David from the 20th. And she illustrates their merits with recipes for the home cook that are (mostly) still usable today: Woolley’s ‘To Boyl a Salmon’ of 1664 would produce a juicy, perfectly cooked fish, despite the lack of quantities, cooking time or ingredients list. Acton, a proper cook who laboured for ten years on her book, is Waugh’s darling. David is a vivid writer but ‘upper- class, opinionated and

Philip Hensher

If only Craig Raine subjected his own work to the same critical scrutiny he applies to others’ 

It’s important not to be too immediately dismissive of poor Craig Raine. Book reviewers and editors like him, who invent rigid literary principles and then dismiss anything that fails to embody them, have been on the decline since the 1970s. It’s true that one would probably sooner go for guidance to a generous reader who tries to discover what an interesting book is seeking to do, and how it achieves it. But the principle-wielder is an endangered species, and however ill-founded the principles themselves may be, as readers we might welcome the existence of one or two. The trouble is, no one is really interested any more. The day I

Susie Dent

What family life — and love — was like in East Germany

Historians still argue over whether the regime of the GDR can be called a totalitarian one. Some say that the definition reduces the difference between the Socialist Unity Party and National Socialism —that the Nazis left millions dead while the SED left millions of Stasi files. It’s a loaded question, and one that will occur frequently to the reader of Maxim Leo’s startlingly powerful Red Love, a memoir of his childhood in the GDR. But as the political theorist Hannah Arendt observed, ‘storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it’. In this case the story is real, and is not one but many, running back and forth over

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: That was the year that was

Spectator literary competition No. 2828 As the New Year hurtles towards us, it’s time for a retrospective commentary, in verse, on 2013. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 9 December (the shorter deadline is because of our seasonal production schedule). The recent competition to supply a poem for a well-known painting was inspired by the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who composed a sonnet, ‘Found’, in 1881 as a companion to an unfinished oil painting of the same title on the theme of prostitution, which is now in the Delaware Museum. You weren’t obliged to write a sonnet (a few did). Rossetti’s

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

A book that’s inspired by a movie (for a change)

Books become films every day of the week; more rarely does someone feel inspired to write a book after seeing a film. Peter Conradi’s Hot Dogs And Cocktails tells the story of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s visit to North America in the summer of 1939 and specifically the couple of days they spent at President Roosevelt’s country retreat at Hyde Park on Hudson. In the film of that name, Bill Murray played FDR with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, and the story was fleshed out with a did-they-or-didn’t-they illicit romance with his distant cousin, played by Laura Linney. For reasons of professional integrity Conradi can’t play quite

Hugh Rathcavan

The Last Knight, by Robert O’Byrne – review

I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a sequence of his unpredictable and volcanic rages drove us apart. Robert O’Byrne explains how the Knight suffered for most of his life from the illness and strong medication of manic depression. It is a tribute to him that I never knew of this medical diagnosis until much later and that, despite it, he achieved so much in his life, drawing international acclaim to Irish pictures, architecture and furniture and producing so many learned books on their quality and beauty. In fact there is a photograph in this book of the

Andrew Taylor

Have a crime-filled Christmas

Pity the poor novelist whom commercial pressures trap within a series, doomed with each volume to diminish the stock of options for the next one. It’s even harder when the series is not yours to begin with. Jill Paton Walsh has now written her fourth instalment of the Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane detective novels, created by Dorothy L. Sayers. The Late Scholar (Hodder & Stoughton, £19.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.39) is set mainly in Oxford, the location of Sayers’ own Gaudy Night. Wimsey is asked to adjudicate a bitter dispute among the fellowship of St Severin’s College, of which he is the Visitor. The Warden has vanished. The fellows

Julian Spalding

When Francis Davison made me judge — and burn — his art

In 1983, Damien Hirst saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of the collages of Francis Davison which ‘blew him away’. He spent the next two years trying to emulate them, in vain. As he discovered, although Davison’s works might look casually thrown together, they are in fact immaculately crafted orchestrations of colour, shape and tone.  In the light of this experience, Hirst’s subsequent output can be regarded as his dispiriting revenge on all genuine artistic creation. This surprising connection between modern British art’s most self-effacing aesthete and its most successful self-publicist merits analysis, not only because it’s so indicative of the state of current artistic values, but because it

Cressida Connolly

‘God has given me a new Turkish colleague called Mustapha Kunt…’

Under normal circumstances, Simon Garfield’s chatty and informative excursion into the history of letter-writing would be a book to recommend. In recent years this author has produced eloquent and witty accounts of his fascination for maps and for typefaces: To the Letter makes a nice companion piece. Part of the book is a gentle lamentation about the end of letters; a death hastened, Garfield believes, by the digital age. But mostly he tells us things: when the pillar-box was invented and that it probably wasn’t the brainchild of Anthony Trollope, as has been posited (and against whom Garfield has an intriguing grudge); that Postman Pat’s theme song no longer has

Bevis Hillier

A book on Art Deco that’s a work of art in itself — but where’s the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Oxo Tower? 

Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them — which was mine when I wrote the first little book on the subject in 1968 — was to treat the subject as a sociological, as well as artistic, phenomenon. As I wrote then, it was ‘the last of the total styles’, affecting almost everything, from letter-boxes and powder compacts to luxury liners and hotels. With that approach, one shows the dross as well as the gold, and asks such questions as ‘Why did the style become so universal?’ ‘How far did it succeed (with mass production) in coming to terms

Matthew Walther

Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor – review

‘She wrote fiction?’ Even today, with the admirable ladies at Virago nearly finished reissuing her dozen novels, Elizabeth Taylor remains mostly unknown except to fellow novelists, literary journalists, worthier publishing types, and a handful of dedicated readers. Even Nicola Beauman felt obliged to call her wonderful 2009 biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor so as to avoid confusion with the overrated actress whose debut film, National Velvet, was released only a few months prior to the publication of Taylor’s first novel. It cannot help her reputation that she had a majority of her papers burned, produced no journalism and kept her distance from literary London, writing only to friends such as

Christopher Howse

What’s notable about ‘a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife’? 

In the reminiscences of Bertie Wooster we find this: As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy. The sentence is quoted for its use of ‘meditative foot’, in the Winter 1973 issue of the learned journal Linguistic Inquiry, by Robert A. Hall in his ‘Transferred Epithet in P. G. Wodehouse’, now as well-thumbed as any article can be that is perused principally online. Stephen Fry is always citing it. Mark Forsyth, however, quotes the sentence as an example of litotes — affirming