Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Mark Cocker

Man’s fraught relationship with nature extends back to prehistory

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers? The extreme heat of the Sun at its core makes it the place least hospitable to life – yet it is equally the source of the whole process. Perhaps the greatest of all associated questions is whether humans are subsumed within, or inexorably separated from,

Ian Sansom

From tragedy to mockery: Munichs, by David Peace, reviewed

If you have been to a football match in the past few years you will doubtless be familiar with what the Crown Prosecution Service defines as ‘tragedy-related abuse’. It is when supporters, David Peace writes, sing, chant or gesture offensive messages about disasters or accidents involving players or fans – including references to the Hillsborough Disaster, Munich Air Crash, Bradford Fire, the Leeds fans killed in Istanbul or the death of Emiliano Sala in a plane crash. The word ‘Munichs’, for example, is sometimes used as a term of abuse for Manchester United fans, and it’s not unknown for the opposition at Old Trafford to extend their arms, like little

Sean Mcglynn

The mystique of Henry V remains as powerful as ever

A rare portrait of King Henry V of England painted in the early 16th century shows him in profile. This unusual angle may have served two purposes. One was as a rather outdated emulation of Italian profile portraiture, with its blunt references to the might of imperial Rome; the other was to hide a disfiguring scar from a dangerous wound suffered at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. Henry was only 16 at the time of the battle, and it was a brutal way to earn his spurs. An arrow had penetrated his cheek six inches and lodged at the back of his skull. He was lucky to have survived

Michael Arditti

The tedium of covering ‘the greatest trial in history’

Three-and-a-half miles south-west of Nuremberg in the small town of Stein stands the Schloss Faber-Castell, a 19th-century neo-Renaissance castle built for a dynasty of pencil manufacturers. In October 1945 it became home to hundreds of reporters who were covering the trial of 21 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher and Albert Speer, with Martin Bormann being tried in absentia. Alfred Döblin offered a first-hand account of the courtroom in which he never set foot Prominent among the reporters were internationally celebrated writers such as John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Elsa Triolet, Erika Mann and Erich Kästner, as well as the future German chancellor

Seán M. Williams

Observing nature observed: the art of Caspar David Friedrich

Imagine wandering through Germany. You might picture blustery Baltic seascapes, seen from island retreats such as Rügen. Or you might be hiking in the central Harz mountains, peering down at clouds that drift into green pastures and blend into brownish rock. Perhaps you’re standing at the country’s eastern edge, gazing at moonlight that gleams through gaps in the forests and ravines of sandstone highlands. What we sketch in our minds probably follows the contours of the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, Germany’s Romantic artist-in-chief. And these stock images have been reproduced in many a tourist guide. They’re now on display again, in full colour and new frames – literally and

Boyd Tonkin

An outcast among outcasts: Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld, reviewed

‘Nothing escape’s the wolf’s fangs,’ thinks the narrator of Katerina. Through an outlandish sequence of chances and choices, somehow its author did just that. Aharon Appelfeld, a child of assimilated parents, lived in the old Jewish heartland of Bukovina. In 1940, short-lived Soviet occupation gave way to Nazi control. His mother was murdered and his father disappeared. Young Aharon escaped the Czernowitz ghetto and survived as a wild child in the forests, sheltered by a village prostitute, then as the ‘slave’ of a Ukrainian bandit gang. When the Red Army arrived he cooked for them before, via a peril-strewn route through Italy, he migrated to Mandate Palestine. In newborn Israel

Helen Brown

The power of mushrooms to kill or cure

Weird, stinky and occasionally deadly: not everyone can make heart room for mushrooms. But Richard Fortey, a palaeontologist who recently retired from his post at the Natural History Museum after more than three decades’ service, has always found ‘pleasure and perplexity’ in the ‘alien’ world of fungi. In his lovably nerdish 2021 memoir A Curious Boy, Fortey credited the Observer’s Guide to Common Fungi with setting him on the path to a passionate life scientific. As the uncoordinated son of a sporty father (a champion fly fisherman who owned several fishing shops), the young naturalist got his teenage kicks stalking riverbanks and studying the strange organisms he found there. In

Marion Turner

The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with

In 1448, Margaret Paston, a wife and mother in her twenties, wrote to her husband John urgently requesting more weapons: she needed crossbows, poleaxes, windlasses and jacks. In John’s absence, a local lord was trying to take over Gresham, their property in Norfolk, and was mounting a violent siege of the manor house. Margaret was leading the defence. She was multi-tasking, however. In the same letter she also asks John to send some almonds and sugar, as well as woollen cloth for gowns for their young sons and broadcloth for a hood for herself. The missive survives as part of the Paston letters, the largest extant set of medieval correspondence

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

With Simon Raymonde

28 min listen

Musician Simon Raymonde is perhaps best known as part of the Scottish band the Cocteau Twins, but he has found further success as the co-founder of Bella Union Records. Bella Union produce music by Father John Misty, the Fleet Foxes, and Beach House, amongst others. His memoir In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me is released on the 12 September 2024. On this episode of Table Talk, Simon tells Olivia Potts and Lara Prendergast about the influence of Jewish food as he was growing up, life on tour, how he spends his time in his new home of Brighton, and his love of the restaurant chain Dishoom.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ian Thomson, Andrew Watts, Sam Leith, Helen Barrett and Catriona Olding

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Ian Thomson reflects on his childhood home following the death of his sister (1:20); Andrew Watts argues that the public see MPs as accountable for everything though they’re responsible for little (7:40); Sam Leith reveals the surprising problem of poetical copyright (13:47); Helen Barrett reviews Will Noble’s book Croydonopolis and explores the reputation of a place with unfulfilled potential (19:48); and, Catriona Olding ponders moving on from loss to love (26:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Simon Parkin

Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad

Even before the 872-day long siege ended, both survivors and onlookers had already begun to refer to Leningrad – formerly and currently known as St Petersburg – as a city of heroes. Tales of bravery and self-sacrifice were enshrined in memorials, histories and memoirs, which between 1945 and 1991 were published in the Soviet Union at an average rate of one per day. But heroism is, of course, only a partial description of life within the starving city where theft, murder, betrayal and a million smaller acts of self-interest were just as prevalent as acts of valour. The idea that Leningrad was a city of heroes was in part a

Alan Judd

The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce

‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (1899-1991) was a legend in his own lifetime within MI6. Born in Odessa to an Austrian countess and a British trader representing Vickers, his cosmopolitan upbringing endowed him with English, Russian, German, Turkish, French and Polish. His real first name was Wilfred, Biffy being acquired through youthful handiness with his fists. Biffy played an important role in smuggling the Polish copy of the Enigma cipher machine to London Education and family connections made him intimate with prominent Levantine trading families such as the Whittalls, Keuns and La Fontaines. Members of each served with him in MI6 and two into modern times. Early in the first world war he

Emily Rhodes

A necklace for the Empress Josephine: The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier, reviewed

The latest book from Tracy Chevalier, author of 11 novels, including the bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, tells the captivating story of Orsola Rosso, whom we first encounter in 1486 as a young girl on Murano, the glassmakers’ island in the Venetian lagoon. Within a few pages, her father, the maestro at the family’s workshop, is dramatically killed by a shard of glass flying ‘like a hot dart straight into his neck’. Orsola’s lazy, impetuous brother Marco, less skilful than their father, must take over, but orders soon begin to dwindle. How will Orsola help her family recover and prosper? Glassmaking is traditionally a male concern, but the girl

Mathew Lyons

We’ll never know what treasures the Tudor Reformation robbed us of

In 1693, quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales. The scales themselves held a girl’s face and a globe of the Earth. The sculpture was donated to the Ashmolean, but experts there were baffled by it. Could it represent the goddess Astrea, one of them wondered. In fact, it represented the Archangel Michael, one of the most significant figures in the medieval church. Among other things, it will be

Mia Levitin

More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell. It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But Will Self is no stranger to outrageousness Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve

Helen Barrett

Never pour scorn on Croydon

‘So f-ing Croydon,’ was the worst insult David Bowie could think of to describe a person or thing that revolted him. ‘Less of a place, more of a punchline,’ was a recent swipe by Sue Perkins, the Croydon-born comedian who grew up at the tail end of the town’s golden era of rampant employment, ambitious cultural venues and well-endowed private schools. London’s outermost, southernmost, most populous borough is an easy target for condescension: too brash, yet too poor; too try-hard, yet too lethargic; too ambitious, yet not ambitious enough. As the Croydonian author John Grindrod has written, locals are accustomed to Croydon’s ‘very existence – our existence – provoking outrage’.

Bryan Appleyard

A world history of morality is maddeningly optimistic

The memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi will be with me for some time. Though wounded, he survived the Hiroshima atom bomb and returned to his home town, Nagasaki. Three days later, he survived another nuclear attack. He died in 2010, aged 93. This fat, complex, good-natured and intriguing book is full of such memorable material. Hanno Sauer is a German philosopher with an all-encompassing mind and a capacity to entertain. His arguments are sometimes clogged and improbable and I don’t find his primary thesis – basically that things can only get better – credible, but then I feel the same about most philosophers. The thesis is based on Sauer’s belief that

David Abulafia

Why are the sailors who first braved the Atlantic so often ignored?

It is easy to assume that there is not much to be said about the history of the Atlantic before 12 October 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas. In 2005, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn published a little book entitled Atlantic History: Concept and Contours which said absolutely nothing about what happened before Columbus, whom he barely mentioned. Atlantic history meant for Bailyn, and the growing mass of Atlantic historians, the story of modern contacts between the four continents that face the Atlantic, especially the nefarious slave trade linking Africa to the Americas. Earlier centuries were seen as the fishing-ground of fantasists, who looked for ancient Egyptians or Irish

Roger Lewis

What prompted Vivien Leigh’s dark journey into madness?

‘Vivien was barking mad from the word go,’ Laurence Olivier reflected in later life, and Lyndsy Spence’s biography would fully concur with the summing-up. At best, the actress was ‘suspended in a dream world’, unable to separate herself from the classic characters she played – Scarlett O’Hara, with her dark hair and flashing eyes, or Blanche DuBois (‘she is a tragic figure and I understand her’). At her worst, Leigh was, in her own words, ‘a thing, an amoeba, at the bottom of the sea’. Where Madness Lies is a sympathetic description of Leigh’s ‘perturbing nature’; an analysis of her numerous breakdowns, when she was in the grip of manic-depressive

Boyd Tonkin

Nordic dream or nightmare?: The Mark, by Frida Isberg, reviewed

Imagine a society, a high-minded psychologist tells his curmudgeonly father, ‘in which people are like cars. They have to go in for inspection once a year’ in order to assess their emotional fitness for the shared highway of life. As for the ‘psychopathic percentage’ whose ‘moral disorders’ lead them to fail this spiritual MoT, never fear: state-funded therapy will get them on the road again. And should they refuse? Surely, as we learn later in The Mark, everyone longs to stand ‘on the right side of history’. The Nordic dream of close-knit, high-trust, mutually supportive welfare societies has always had its internal critics: mavericks, naysayers and backsliders, who prize autonomy