Book Reviews

Nate Silver, in Edinburgh to punt his new book, appears to have annoyed some Scottish nationalists today. The “polling guru” (according to all newspapers everywhere) has told the Scotsman that he thinks Alex Salmond’s merry bunch of nationalists have ‘no chance’ of prevailing in next September’s independence referendum. It is true that Scottish politics is not Mr Silver’s area of special expertise. It is also true that I am not sure his views are necessarily all that important. They do not carry top-weight in this handicap. I am not sure they merit being treated as some sort of Oracular revelation. Nevertheless the man can read a poll and since there’s been no shortage of

There is probably no other country in the democratic West where the state oversees economic activity and regulates private life as thoroughly as in Scotland. So it has come as little surprise to learn of the latest plans of the government led by Alex Salmond. By next year, he hopes that every child will have a guardian with the legal authority to ensure that they are raised in a manner prescribed by the state. Alarm has been expressed that a government with no obvious answers for Scotland’s problems of de-industrialisation is compensating for its impotence by micro-managing the family in such a glaring way.  At least the ruling Scottish National

The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them. The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins. ‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir. Having disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Henry only reinstated

The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend; having hocked his typewriter for a quart of rye, the writer Don Birnam spends his lost weekend in a New York psychiatric ward, with a fractured skull. Where did he get that? The previous night’s drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and guilt. Of course, the illusion of drink-fuelled happiness is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price to pay. Olivia Laing, in her study of six alcoholic American writers, The Trip to Echo Spring (the

One of the givens in detective fiction these days is that the sleuth should be deeply flawed. You almost expect, as you pry open the pages of the latest overnight sensation  to discover that the inspector in question is an internet troll who gets in fights at closing time and closes his eyes to the excesses of the English Defence League while somehow remaining sympathetic and miles better than his boss, who imagines that proper procedure and pins in the board are the way to solve crime. It would be stretching things, even so, to imagine that we might get behind a Berlin detective – known as a ‘bull’ –

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He first came to prominence with his debut novel The Commitments, which he self-published in Ireland in 1987. The book was then published in the UK in 1988 by William Heinemann. The two books which followed, The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), completed his Barrytown Trilogy. All three books were subsequently made into extremely successful films. In 1993 Doyle won the Booker Prize for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The book was praised for Doyle’s ability to write convincingly in the idiom of his main protagonist, Paddy Clarke: a ten-year-old boy residing in Dublin in the 1960s. Doyle’s popularity

As ever, there are some absolutely scintillating book reviews in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here is a selection: Sam Leith revels in ‘a blindly good story extremely well told’: Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America by Owen Matthews. ‘Like most if not all imperial adventures, the civilising mission (ho ho) followed the money. Ever since the first Cossack pirate found a way through the Bering Strait, fur, or ‘soft gold’, was what they were all after. The discovery that in Chinese entrepot towns the pelt of a single sea-otter would fetch the equivalent of two years’ salary for an ordinary seaman was all anyone

‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow Country, in Birds & People he embraces the planet, with the help of the wildlife photographer, David Tipling, and the ‘650 contributors from 81 countries’ to whom the book is dedicated. He begins his cultural celebration of the earth’s 200 recognised bird families with one of ‘the most primitive’, the partridge-like tinamou from South America. Tinamou are loth to fly, not surprisingly since once airborne they tend fatally to crash into things, even houses. A near relative is the completely flightless common ostrich, the largest surviving bird. The ubiquity of