Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about the Irish

Malcolm Gladwell, the curly-haired, counter-intuitive guru of modern thought who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink, certainly has a readable style, and often a striking way of turning received notions on their head. His latest book, David and Goliath — about the inspiring advantages of perceived disadvantage — is accompanied by a much-hyped speaking tour, the blurb for which describes him as a ‘global phenomenon’. In it, among other topics, he plunges into the origin of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but the location wasn’t his first choice. He recently told the Telegraph’s literary editor, Gaby Wood, that he had wanted to write about Israel but chose Northern Ireland instead

Jasper Becker

The Empress Dowager was a moderniser, not a minx. But does China care?

For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager Cixi was the ultimate oriental sex kitten, an insatiable, manipulating dominatrix who brought the decadent Manchu empire to its knees. While all seems lost, as foreign troops burn the Summer Palace in Peking, she is to be found, thinly disguised, in the pages of Flashman and the Dragon, locked in our hero’s rugged embrace. More recently, it has suited communist historians to concur with Flashman that she was ‘a compound of five Deadly Sins — greed, gluttony, lust, pride and anger — with ruthlessness, cruelty and treachery thrown in’. In

Michael Paraskos

What a coincidence

If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In Three Brothers we are not disappointed, as Peter Ackroyd shows a deftness of touch that comes from being a real master. Here his theme is families. Or rather, it is London. Or rather, it is the use of coincidence as a plot device. In fact it is all three, but perhaps the most important is coincidence. As a literary device, coincidence is the presence of the author in the novel acting like an ancient Greek god directing events. This is apparent from the start when, in almost fairytale fashion, Ackroyd

John Preston

Queen Victoria, by Matthew Dennison – review

When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that every room and corridor in Windsor Castle should be draped in black crepe. As a result, the country’s entire stock of black crepe was exhausted in a single week. One of the key factors of Victoria’s reign for Michael Dennison is that it was — not always consciously — a ‘performance monarchy’, in which the Queen sat in carefully fashioned stage-sets at Windsor, Balmoral or Osborne being discreetly ogled by the populace. This public posturing helped gloss over Victoria’s ‘dizzying’ contradictions, and the purpose of this short biography is to

Philip Hensher

Donna Tartt can do the thrills but not the trauma

Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels. It was a genuinely popular success — chic, macabre and supremely well-constructed. Her second, The Little Friend (2002), pursued a small girl through her attempts to pin the murder of her brother on the wrong culprit. It confirmed Tartt’s gift for an intricate plot, escalating into some furiously exciting action. The handling of suspense in both

Charlotte Hobson

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen – review

The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and hustle for food, and the collapse of the planned economy had left the shops empty. Instead, we staved off hunger- pangs with cigarettes, and if edible matter came our way, we fell upon it like locusts. More often than not, it took the form of the Soviet staple, Salat Olivier — Russian salad, plastered so thickly with mayonnaise that the ingredients were unidentifiable. (I notice that even the act of typing these words makes my mouth water; a complicated rush of nostalgia, anxiety and greed.) Like most aspects of late

William Leith

Clumsy and heavy, Goliath never stood a chance

When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight with a terrifying opponent, and wins. We think of David as puny and Goliath as towering and strong — not to mention heavily armed. We see David’s victory as something that happened against all odds. The story of David and Goliath is, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, ‘a metaphor for improbable victory’. Well, that’s how we think about it, anyway. But the thing is, apparently, we’ve got it all wrong. Gladwell, one of the most influential non-fiction writers in the world, often asks his reader to take a closer look

Cressida Connolly

Breakfast with Lucian, by Geordie Greig – review

According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst in early 20th-century Vienna.  Rather, Freud’s genius lay in creating a loyalty cult around himself, collecting a group of acolytes who would ensure his reputation.  This is worth bearing in mind when considering the life of his grandson, the painter Lucian Freud, who died in 2011. Lucian was famous for his secrecy. ‘Devious and secretive. I have been described as that,’ he tells Geordie Greig, not without a certain pride. He demanded a strict omertà of his intimates. There was a great deal to be furtive about: vast gambling debts,

Wynn Wheldon

A Strong Song Tows Us, by Richard Burton – review

How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful fifty-somethings, when asked what the name Basil Bunting meant to them. It is, after all, a good name, a memorable name. I asked a younger friend, about to start his Eng. Lit. degree at Keble: ‘Nothing.’ I asked a former literary publicist: ‘No, nothing.’ I quizzed a chap from the FCO: ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Sorry.’ Perhaps not deep research, but I’d be surprised if Basil Bunting’s work was familiar to anyone not a poet or scholar of English modernism. Is this as it should be? Does he deserve a 600-page

Molly Guinness

Darling Monster, edited by John Julius Norwich – review

It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war, but we can be grateful for it because it’s a joy to read the correspondence it gave rise to. The letters in this book span the years 1939 to 1952 and take in the Blitz, Diana’s short spell as a farmer in Sussex, a trip to the Far East, when Duff was collecting intelligence on the likelihood of a Japanese invasion, the couple’s three years in the Paris embassy, and several more in their house at Chantilly, as well as a great number of journeys around Europe and North Africa.

Jane Ridley

What caused the first world war?

The centenary of August 1914 is still almost a year away, but the tsunami of first-world-war books has already begun. The government tells us that 1914 must be commemorated, not celebrated, and ministers worry about British triumphalism upsetting the Germans. But the debate about Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 won’t go away. Historians are divided into those who blame Germany — John Rohl, Max Hastings — and those who point the finger at someone else, such as Serbia (Christopher Clarke) or Russia (Sean McMeekin) or even Britain (Niall Ferguson). The blame game is of course conceptually flawed. The international system in 1914 was seriously dysfunctional. The

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: provide a PS to a classic

Spectator literary competition No. 2820 Barbara Hardy’s Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts is a collection of short stories in which Professor Hardy imagines significant conversations between characters some time after their novel has ended. These postscripts enter into dialogue with the original narratives by developing suggestions in the text rather than changing the plot in any way. How about coming up with your own postscript to any well-known novel? Please email entries, of up to 150 words, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 16 October. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were invited to provide poems, in the manner of Harry Graham, questioning the

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Take 2 for Godfrey Bloom’s book

Godfrey Bloom has finally rescheduled his postponed book launch. The Ukip MEP, who resigned after his unguarded comments at the party’s recent conference, was due to launch his book A Guinea a Minute in London, but the event was cancelled when the media scrum engulfed the Ukip conference. Well, the invitations have gone out again. They state very clearly that the event is ‘Guest List Only’ and that there will be ‘no pre-launch interviews’. Rather wisely, perhaps. And, as an added precaution, the event will be held in Yorkshire. It seems that the old boy doesn’t want us hacks to come!

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Making It Happen, by Iain Martin – review

Fred Goodwin’s descent from golden boy of British banking to ‘pariah of the decade’ would be the stuff of tragedy if the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief were not such a rebarbative personality. A bully to his subordinates, obsessed with the wrong kind of detail, driven by an egoistic urge to trample his enemies, he sounds a lot like another once-prominent Scot who has recently disappeared from public view. Indeed the pair used to enjoy regular ‘cosy chats’ before it all went horribly wrong. As someone told Iain Martin: ‘Gordon and Fred are actually quite similar. Both are quite introverted individuals and that expresses itself in sometimes extremely awkward

Marcus Berkmann

Licensed to feel: The new James Bond fusses over furnishings and sprinkles talc

First, an appalling admission: I have never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Nor have I read any of anybody else’s, the number of which seems to grow with each passing year. For a civilised man of a certain age this is a shameful oversight, given that I have seen all but three of the 23 films in the cinema, many of them at the Odeon, Leicester Square within days of their opening; that I can’t put on a dinner jacket without wondering whether Sean Connery would look better in it; and that I still own a copy, on 7” vinyl, of ‘Nobody Does It Better’ by Carly Simon,

Ian Thomson

Stephen King isn’t as scary as he used to be, but ‘Doctor Sleep’ is still a cracker

Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of a Baileys Bristol Cream addiction). The 17th-century word for the sickness that follows excessive drinking — ‘crapula’ — effectively hints at the alcoholic’s sleazy kind of stupor. In his earlier years, Stephen King would drink himself daily into a wall-eyed hangover. His scariest novels — Carrie, The Stand, The Shining — were written in the 1970s when sobriety was a no-no for him. Jack Torrance, the author who goes off his rocker in The Shining, suffers the most horripilating of alcohol-tainted visions while holed up in the Overlook Hotel in

Victoria Glendinning

Anorexia, addiction, child-swapping — the Lake Poets would have alarmed social services

The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. She engaged delicately with Dorothy’s inordinate love for her younger brother William, and seemed to think her passionate attachment was romantic and sentimental rather than sexual — though there are 50 shades of grey between the one and the other, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. Katie Waldegrave, in her riveting family saga The Poets’ Daughters, is not much concerned with that anyway. Her focus is on what happened to Wordsworth’s daughter Dora, the second of his five children, and Coleridge’s youngest, Sara. There were

Peter Oborne

In it together? Matthew d’Ancona’s book on the coalition is a huge letdown, says Peter Oborne

There are two ways of being a political journalist. One is to stay on the outside and try to avoid being compromised by too much contact with politicians. This approach comes at what many regard as an impossible cost. After all, the job of a journalist is to get stories and gain insight. Story-getting can only come through access, but this too creates a problem. The politicians who supply information, atmosphere, gossip and revelation tend to demand loyalty — and protection — in return. There is no right answer. Matthew d’Ancona has always sought the status of an insider. His Sunday Telegraph column is valuable because it provides an accurate

Guido Fawkes

Guido Fawkes to Damian McBride: Who’s spinning now?

When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he called Damian McBride to try to get to the bottom of the story. The latter recounts the conversation verbatim in Power Trip, his tell-all book dedicated ‘to Gordon, the greatest man I ever met’. Brown says: ‘OK, Damian, I need your word that you will tell me the truth. If the years we’ve worked together mean anything, I need your absolute word.’ ‘Yep, of course,’ McBride replies solemnly, ‘I give you my word, I promise I’ll tell the truth.’ ‘Right,’ says Brown, ‘firstly, is there anyone else in No. 10

Peter J. Conradi

Meeting the Enemy, by Richard Van Emden; 1914, by Allan Mallinson – review

The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two books that situate the horrors of trench warfare within a much larger perspective. One argues that the war had a forgotten ‘human face’. The other that it might all have had a very different outcome. Henry James described  the 1914 plunge of civilisation into blood and darkness as ‘too tragic for any words’ — and about tragedy there is always some air of inevitability, of sailing Titanic-like towards a foredoomed catastrophe. This air of unstoppable fatality has solidified over the intervening century. During the famous 1914 Christmas truce the Tommies