Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

5 Days in May, by Andrew Adonis – review

Andrew Adonis enjoyed a week of glory in 2010. The former Lib Dem activist was asked to join Labour’s negotiating team as they tried to forge a coalition with Nick Clegg in the aftermath of 6 May general election. Adonis admits that his account of those five days is ‘vivid, partisan and angry’. And it seems strange that, as a Lib Dem defector himself, he should accuse the Lib Dems of ‘perfidy’ in their dealings with Labour. The politician in him can’t resist the opportunity to attack his former colleagues. He shoves the knife into David Laws for admiring George Osborne and for advocating ‘faster and deeper’ cuts to the

Philip Hensher

Complete Poems, by C.P. Cavafy – review

Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which shares with the poet an aesthetic of the transfixed gaze, of remote history running under everything. Robert Liddell wrote a restrained, elegant life of the poet — oddly dismissed by this translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, as ‘workmanlike.’ More hauntingly, Liddell wrote a novel, not apparently known to Mendelsohn at all, in which

Douglas Murray

“The right hero” – Douglas Murray reviews Jesse Norman’s Burke biography.

Edmund Burke is one of the most difficult thinkers to write about. His philosophy defies easy summary. His career, while noble, was not glittering. Many details that he exhausted himself over — such as the impeachment of Warren Hastings — were arcana before he was dead. And hardest of all is that Burke’s prose style is among the best in the language. Writing about Burke’s prose is like singing about Maria Callas’s voice. On each re-acquaintance with it you wonder why you don’t read Burke all the time. There was hardly a subject he tackled which he did not master, and not a register that he did not perfect. In

Wednesday

Christopher Fletcher

Taking revenge on wicked Lord Byron

This is the second article in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the first instalment here. By 1814, two years after he awoke to find himself famous, everyone wanted a piece of Byron. Some got jewellery, several got hair and a fair few got a reputation. Among the most prized of trophies, however, was a sample of verse – not printed, mind, but written out with the warm intimacy of the poet’s hand. In a letter of 23 December 1814, the novelist and society gossip Miss Emily Eden described to Lady Buckinghamshire the febrile hunts she had witnessed at

Tuesday

Fleur Macdonald

Cult fiction – Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley

There’s an attraction, certainly, in joining a cult. Not a Sheryl Sandberg working women type cult but a good old fashioned we’re all in it together wearing hemp skirts type cult. No need to chivvy the nanny, check the Blackberry or prepare for 8am meetings. Simply pack the children off to daycare (the yard) and hoe some vegetables. That’s pretty much it for the day – apart from some worship and chatting to close female friends – until it’s time for hallucinogenic weeds and sex with a man who says he loves you. Amity & Sorrow, the debut novel for new imprint Tinder Press by Peggy Riley, explores the appeal

Monday

Austen Saunders

The Glorious Revolution and small ‘c’ conservatism

From a dialogue  between a non-juring clergyman and his wife by Edward ‘Ned’ Ward Wife: Why will you prove so obstinate, my dear, And rather choose to starve, than yield to swear? Why give up all the comforts of your life, Expose to want your children and your wife; Hug your own ruin through a holy pride, Which interest calls you now to lay aside; And common safety, that prevailing plea, Justifies those who wisely do agree? Consider, therefore, and in time comply, You may, perhaps, on some mistakes rely; And then, how fatal ‘twould hereafter be, That error should beget our misery? Secure the living first you’ve long possessed, And

Friday

Walter Ellis

Dreams and Nightmares: Europe in the twentieth century

So much abuse has been heaped on the European Union in recent years that it is easy to forget that Europe and the EU are not the same thing. Geert Mak reminds us of this fact. He is one of the most celebrated journalists and commentators in the Netherlands. Mak – widely read, multi-lingual and endlessly curious – considers the whole of Europe to be his home. He has won awards for his books in Germany, as well as in his native Holland, and been inducted into the Legion d’Honneur in France. He is also, on the side, a bit of an anglophile. In 1999, with millennial fever rising, Mak

Thursday

Mark Mason

George Lowe’s Letters from Everest

I was hoping this was going to be a post featuring an interview with a writer. After reading a proof copy of George Lowe’s Letters from Everest, I had the idea of talking to him about the book. How could it not be fascinating, went the thinking, to meet the 89 year-old sole survivor of the 1953 expedition that finally conquered the world’s highest mountain? His letters home, which are being published to mark the occasion’s 60th anniversary, are wonderful. They run from February of that year, when Edmund Hillary’s team arrived in Bombay, through to June, when they were being feted for their achievement wherever they went. ‘Already unknown

Christopher Howse

The Serpent’s Promise, by Steve Jones – review

The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in the gut alone as the number of human cells in the body. There may be 10,000 distinct kinds, with a different community on the forehead from that on the sole. There are fewer kinds in the mouth or stomach than at the back of the knee, which has a more diverse population than any other part. This is surprising and interesting, and we would like to know more about this teeming personal nature reserve. The intestinal appendix, Steve Jones explains,

Jonathan Rugman

Peter Oborne is almost right about Iran’s non-existent nukes

Whether the United States is a force for global peace is not really up for debate in the self-described ‘indispensable nation’, though the question sharply divides opinion almost everywhere else. By focusing on America’s fixation with Iran, this short and angry book argues against. The book’s polemic is built on good foundations: we are often told that Iran is a rogue nuclear state, yet it does not possess nuclear weapons. As a signatory to the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear energy programme as long as it is monitored by UN inspectors. However, ten years of negotiations aimed at persuading Iran to stop have led

Wynn Wheldon

Holloway, by Robert Macfarlane – review

This is a very short book recording two visits to the hills around Chideock in Dorset.In the first Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go searching for the ‘holloway’ in which Geoffrey Household’s hero holes up in Rogue Male. A holloway (not to be found in the OED) is, in Macfarlane’s words, ‘a sunken path, a deep & shady lane’ and, according to Household, ‘a lane not marked on the map’. The second trip, made with Macfarlane’s co-authors after Deakin’s death, revisits the holloway, and the hill-fort at the top of Pilsdon Pen. After Macfarlane’s Edward Thomas-infused account follows Dan Richards’s more subjective prose poetry describing

David Crane

The Young Titan, by Michael Shelden; Churchill’s First War, by Con Coughlin – review

One evening in 1906, shortly after the election that brought Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals into power, an understandably nervous Eddie Marsh, a middle-ranking civil servant in the Colonial Office, paid a social call on the Dowager Countess of Lytton.  The previous day Marsh had gone through a tricky first meeting with the new number two in the department, and it had been a surprise to him on going into the office that morning to hear that he was wanted as his private secretary.  ‘Desperate, Marsh begged the dowager countess for guidance,’ writes Michael Shelden in his Young Titan: She had known Winston and Jennie for many years… She had also been acquainted

Oliver Rackham

The Tradescants’ Orchard, by Barry Juniper – review

Elias Ashmole, fortune-hunter, scholar and collector, bequeathed his coins, curiosities and books in 1692 to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The books were later taken over by the Bodleian Library. One of them is called The Tradescants’ Orchard, from a tenuous association with John Tradescant I, Keeper of Gardens, Vines and Silkworms to King Charles I, and his nurseryman son John II. It is edited by the historian of the world’s apples and his Oxford colleague in art history. The book consists of 64 pen-and-watercolour pictures of different varieties of plums and peaches and a few other fruits in a vivid and charmingly primitivist style —

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Beyond the Malachite Hills, by Jonathan Lawley; Last Man In, by John Hare – review

In post when the curtain came down on Britain’s African empire, there survives today a generation of colonial officers whose numbers are dwindling fast. Many were fired by an idealism already out of fashion when they chose their career. Most came to love their adopted continent. Some can write. Two of these are Jonathan Lawley and John Hare. Each has an incredible tale to tell. Here is a pair of books that, placed with a decanter of whisky on the bedside table of any Spectator reader’s guest bedroom, will have the reading-light burning late into the night. Yet they are very different stories, quite differently written. Beyond the Malachite Hills

James Walton

And the Mountain Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini – review

The American comedian Stephen Colbert once joked that when he publicly criticised the novels of Khaled Hosseini, his front garden was invaded by angry members of women’s books groups. They were carrying flaming torches in one hand and bottles of white wine in the other. It’s a joke that neatly sums up two significant facts about Hosseini’s status as a writer. First — and not to be underestimated, of course — it proves that he’s famous enough to make jokes about. But it also reminds us that his fame has been driven by ordinary book-lovers rather than literary professionals. His two previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid

Peter Parker

The Hermit in the Garden, by Gordon Campbell – review

In his 1780 essay On Modern Gardening Horace Walpole declared that of the many ornamental features then fashionable, the one ‘whose merit soonest fades’ was the hermitage. Inspired by the ancient cells of genuine religious anchorites, but largely decorative, garden hermitages had flourished in Britain during the 18th century. While some were appropriately primitive in design, others had Gothick doorways and windows filled with stained glass, floors made of pebbles or sheep’s knucklebones arranged in elaborate patterns, ceilings ornamented with pine cones, rustic furniture made from elm boles ‘distorted by fungal disease’, and inscriptions carved in stone to aid philosophical reflection. Walpole may have found it ‘almost comic to set

Jane Ridley

Perilous Question, by Antonia Fraser— review

There are times when a major drama in the House of Commons really does change the course of British history. The period 1974–79, dramatised in the play This House, was one such. The crisis over the Great Reform Bill was another. Not so long ago, every schoolboy knew that the 1832 Reform Act gave the vote to the middle classes. Nowadays, thanks to the collapse of history teaching, very few schoolboys or girls know anything about it at all. Antonia Fraser has written a compelling and timely book on this almost forgotten political battle. The story begins with the election of 1830, which was called because of the accession of

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Maggie Maggie Maggie, wanted out out out

To Chelsea to hear Charles Moore lift the lid on his Thatcher biography. While the crowd at the Cadogan Hall loved the anecdotes and insight, it was Moore’s revelation that, in later life, it ‘became her view’ that Britain should leave the EU that pricked Steerpike’s ears. Moore has expanded on this for tomorrow’s magazine: ‘I think it happened after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992’. So why did we not know this before she died? He claims that ‘advisers had persuaded her that she should not say this in public since it would have allowed her opponents to drive her to the fringes of public life.’ Not these days, though.

J P O'Malley

Interview: Jared Cohen and The New Digital Age

Jared Cohen is Director of Google Ideas, a think tank set up by Google dedicated to understanding global challenges by applying technological solutions. Cohen is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, working as a close advisor with two former Secretaries of States, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, focusing on the Middle East, South Asia and counter terrorism. Cohen has co-written, together with Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, The New Digital Age; a book that examines a number of different challenges that will arise as cyberspace drastically changes in the coming decade.

Tuesday

Aime Williams

Alienation effect

‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens