Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

‘Babble’, by Charles Saatchi

Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary success and achievement, Saatchi has kept his counsel on most subjects. He never gives interviews, he doesn’t like parties much (he doesn’t even go to his own) and I have yet to see him popping up on TV shows offering opinions about anything at all. This may be about control. When you have been in

Alan Judd

‘The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake’, by Roger Hermiston

The spy George Blake, doyen of traitors, turned 90 last year. Almost blind, he lives with his Russian wife outside Moscow on an SVR (KGB in old money) reservation.  Much has changed since 1961 when he was sentenced to 42 years in British jails — the ideology he believed in discredited, the empire he spied for dismembered — but he remains convinced he was right to betray, as this thorough and thoughtful biography shows. Born in Holland to a Dutch mother and a father of Jewish-Egyptian heritage and British nationality, he was never quite sure where he belonged. He was sure, though, that belief mattered; although attracted by Marxism, he

David Crane

‘1913: The World Beforethe Great War’, by Charles Emmerson

In May 1913 a British delegation visited the United States to discuss plans for celebrating 100 years of Anglo-American peace. At their final meeting in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the representatives of both sides had just agreed on a five-minute silence to be observed across the English-speaking world on 17 February 1915, when Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard interrupted proceedings. Did the delegates realise, he wanted to know, that there was widespread belief that Britain and America were getting together to join a war against Germany? Charles Peabody, a member of the New York committee, quietened him down.  Neither country was contemplating war, he said. Indeed, he continued, all nations

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Wisden finally merits the epithet ‘Cricket Bible’

The man who christened Wisden ‘The Cricket Bible’ had little religion. Wisden is an unprepossessing sight: a 1,500 page tome surrounded by a flame-yellow dust jacket covered in mud brown lettering. The book’s content often matches its artless appearance; thousands of statistics and scorecards that read like the turgid genealogical passages of Genesis. Abraham begat Isaac; Jack Hobbs scored 61,760 runs. A record of the chosen people is important; but it does not inspire belief. The record tells you nothing of how Abraham raised Isaac; neither do Hobbs’ stats tell you how he scored his runs. Bald facts contain little mystery, and what do those know of God who know

Tuesday

Aime Williams

Heat Lightning by Helen Hull – review

‘I had decided that I wished to write a novel about the immediate present – this was the summer of 1930 – and I had been speculating about the way people were acting and feeling,’ wrote Helen Hull of Heat Lightning in 1932. Heat Lightning follows the tumultuous Amy Norton as she returns temporarily to her family home, only to be subjected to all sorts of minor family dramas — illegitimate children, sudden deaths, hidden debts and destroyed wills (the usual problems). This book, beautifully reprinted by Persephone, is solid domestic fiction, but it replaces the acute social observation and deep psychological profundity available to the best of its genre

Monday

Austen Saunders

Falling out of love, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 – discovering poetry

How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn big with rich increase Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widowed wombs after their lord’s decease. Yet this abundant issue seemed to me But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit, For summer and his pleasures wait on thee And thou away, the very birds are mute: Or if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near. Spring is a

Friday

Jonathan Mcaloon

Interview with James Wood

James Wood is arguably the most celebrated, possibly the most impugned, and definitely the most envied, literary journalist living. By his mid twenties he was the chief book reviewer for The Guardian. From there he moved to America’s The New Republic, then, as of 2007, The New Yorker. He also teaches at Harvard. There is a tendency, therefore, for critics to spend more time reviewing the superlatives other reviewers have used about him than his books themselves. His previous collections have tilted on an axis of religious belief and philosophy: he writes that our investment and belief when we read fiction is a metaphorical substitute for religious faith because it

Thursday

Mark Mason

The British Library goes digital

If you go down to the British Library today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Because as of last weekend, it’s archiving not just every book published in the UK (its traditional role), not just every e-book published in the UK – it’s archiving every website based in the UK. In terms of what we’ve conventionally understood by the word ‘library’, it’s as big a change as there has ever been. ‘Capturing the nation’s digital memory’ – that’s the phrase the British Library themselves are using about the venture. Your first response might be: ‘the internet archives itself, doesn’t it? It’s called Google.’ But as Lucie Burgess, the library’s Head

James P-Carley

The repentant book thief of Lambeth Palace

Most of us associate ecclesiastical libraries with dusty accumulations of sermons, providing nourishment for bookworms but of no other real use. But surprising treasures — some decidedly secular — can be found in our churches, cathedrals and episcopal residences. The library at Lambeth Palace, bequeathed in 1610 by Archbishop Richard Bancroft as a clerical equivalent to Thomas Bodley’s superb foundation at Oxford, is no exception. It is also one that has survived many vicissitudes, beginning in the 1640s with a 15-year exile to Cambridge University with the abolition of the Established Church under Oliver Cromwell. Some 400 years later, this early pattern of exile and return has repeated itself in

Penelope Lively

‘The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory’, by Deborah Alun-Jones – review

The property pages of Country Life invariably feature an old rectory or two, probably graceful 18th-century, of honeyed Cotswold stone, and if you plan to move in you will need a deep pocket. This is Aga Saga country, Joanna Trollope territory. Old vicarages, old rectories, all the defrocked plant of the Church of England, are in hot demand: the estate agent’s dream. They are substantial, elegant, they propose permanence and stability and some sort of evocative past, and today they will be tricked out with central heating, en suite bathrooms and, of course, that Aga. It was not always thus. Deborah Alun-Jones’s book is a collection of essays about various

Christopher Booker

‘The Age of Global Warming’, by Rupert Darwall – review

We scarcely need our fifth freezing winter in a row to remind us of the probability that future generations may look back on the panic over global warming which suddenly gripped the world in the late 1980s as one of the oddest scientific and political aberrations in history. Why did such an unprecedented scare blow up when it did, thanks to a moderate rise of just 0.5 degrees C in global temperatures, when earlier in the 20th century a similar temperature rise between 1910 and 1940 had been accepted as perfectly natural: as simply another phase in the general warming trend which had begun 200 years earlier, after four centuries

Michael Howard

‘The British Dream’, by David Goodhart – review

David Goodhart’s new book, The British Dream, is an important study of postwar immigration into the UK, its successes and failures. He explores the tension between growing diversity and national solidarity and examines the meaning and significance of national identity. In his introduction he quotes a conversation he had over dinner at an Oxford college in the spring of 2011. He told his neighbour that he intended to write a book arguing that liberals should be less sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale immigration. His neighbour, described as one of the country’s most senior civil servants, said: ‘I disagree. When I was at the Treasury I

Selina Hastings

‘The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder’, by Andrew Rose – review

In April 1917 Edward, Prince of Wales, at a luncheon at the Crillon Hotel in Paris, had the misfortune to meet the very sexy and utterly loathsome Marguerite Alibert. A successful demimondaine, Marguerite could be amusing company, sophisticated in manner and extremely chic. Expert in bed, she was also expert at manipulating men and parting them from very large sums of money; and as all her lovers soon discovered, when crossed she proved spoilt, vindictive and possessed of a terrifying temper. The Prince fell for her at once and began an affair which lasted just over a year. Although he was nearly 23, Edward was young for his age and

Sara Maitland

‘Silence: A Christian History’, by Diarmaid MacCulloch – review

This is a specialist book for non-specialist readers — by which I mean in part that it is made highly accessible to anyone seriously interested by excellent and lively writing rather than by any dumbing down. It may be an odd thing to say about a history of the intersection of platonic philosophy and Christian and Judaic spiritual theologies, but actually it is great fun. A good read. Nonetheless it is also odd and unexpected. One of the oddities is the curious balance of silence and confessional in the authorial voice. It is a sign of the times, I think, when a book of this substance tells the reader more

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘Levels of Life’, by Julian Barnes – review

‘You put together two things that have not been put together before and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.’ In this slim book Julian Barnes puts not two but three things together: nonfiction, fiction and memoir. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The first section is an elegant and breezy account of the early days of ballooning and the development of aerial photography. Here are the adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the photographer Félix Tournachon (otherwise known as Nadar): ‘The enthusiastic English amateur, the most famous actress of her era, making a celebrity flight, and the professional balloonist’. Barnes’s second section is a fictional or,

Nicky Haslam

‘Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty’, by Michèle Fitoussi – review

In New York, in the 1960s, in a sleek, silvery elevator, I rose from the marble halls of Helena Rubinstein’s gleaming emporium up towards the top floor office of a new friend who worked for that legendary beautician. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the lift stopped, the doors slid open and a tiny, squat figure with oily, inky hair scraped back and livid carmine cheeks above violently purple tweed capes stabbed with a jagged, surreal brooch, stood peering up at what I hoped was my youthful, English-rose complexion. A short, intense scrutiny. Then, imperiously: ‘Oy vey! But I sink ve can help. Tell Patrick he needs gif you our XXX recipe. Now, out

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005-2008’, by Lawrence Goldman – review

Where else would you possibly find George Painter, Jackie Pallo and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in immediate successive proximity? The incunabulist of the British Museum who emerged from scholarly obscurity with his biography of Proust, the curly-blond wrestler in kinky trunks, and the son of an Edinburgh-Italian confectioner who became an avant-garde sculptor, have nothing whatever in common except that they died within the same four-year period, and they have all been accounted British worthies, deserving places in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In September 2004, I wrote here about the astonishing new Oxford DNB, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison and published in 50 magnificent volumes

Jeremy Treglown

‘Saul Bellow’s Heart’, by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow, a retired child psychotherapist in his late sixties, is the eldest of the novelist Saul Bellow’s offspring. Bellow Sr (pictured above in 1984), as we already knew from his part-autobiographical fictions and a readable, well-sourced critical biography by James Atlas published in 2000, was a fairly dutiful, not unaffectionate father but didn’t see affection as an impediment to truthfulness and always put his writing before anything else. He claimed that he had never heard of ‘an honest working man’ on either side of his Lithuanian Jewish family: ‘My forefathers were Talmudists. My maternal grandfather had 12 children and never worked a day in his life.’ Bellow himself toiled

Brian Sewell

‘Lost, Stolen or Shredded’, by Rick Gekoski – review

Below the title of this book, engendering immediate distrust, lies the legend ‘Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature.’ ‘Story’ is such a weasel word, implying a tale as much as truth; a fiction that when turned into a narrative develops into the fact that every schoolboy knows; or a real event embroidered with fictitious detail to amuse; even a ripping yarn — as proves to be the case with the first of the essays in this book. ‘Has anyone seen the Mona Lisa?’ Rick Gekoski asks, weaving Picasso into the warp and weft of her temporary absence from the Louvre in 1911-13; Picasso, by then notorious and wealthy,

Wednesday

Steven Mcgregor

Fobbit by David Abrams – review

Fobbit, by David Abrams, is an attempt at describing a wartime tour from different perspectives, including soldiers and support personnel. Chapter by chapter our viewpoint rotates within this cast of characters.  Indeed, for every three infantrymen, five soldiers are required in forward deployed locations to cook, care for wounded, file paperwork, et cetera. Abrams himself performed such a support role as a public affairs officer deployed to Baghdad in 2005. Spending most of his time on Forward Operating Bases or FOBs, Abrams was one of many Fobbits, a kind of GWOT technocrat, fighting the war from behind a desk. Two characters feature in the narrative, the Fobbit Staff Sergeant Chance