Book Reviews

Recalling being taken as a teenager on repeated outings to see Chatsworth, Roy Hattersley disarmingly confesses that in those days ‘I was impressed by neither the pictures nor the furniture’. Over the past three years, while working in the Chatsworth archives on this history of its owners, the Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire, Hattersley would break off from research to roam the rooms and reacquaint himself with the house’s treasures. Yet if he is now more appreciative of its contents, he is not completely under the spell of Chatsworth’s past occupants. The ‘founding mother’ of the Devonshire dynasty was the Tudor virago known as Bess of Hardwick. Aged 20 in 1549

What do you do if you wake up to discover your colleagues implying that you have it easy? If you’re Benedict Cumberbatch, you just stick to your Star Trek script and carry on trying to destroy the world. Benedict Cumberbatch (educated at Harrow) was in the crossfire when Downton Abbey’s Rob James-Collier (Stockport working class and proud) implied that actors from public schools have it easy and suck up all the best jobs. James-Collier reckons you need a rich family behind you if you’re to survive the early years and stick it out until some decent-paying jobs come along. And James-Collier isn’t sure that rich kids make devoted actors. ‘If

Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed enquiries in to his ancestry with a modest shrug (‘I wanted a hero’s name’), who is accepted in to college, who gets a job in real estate, who marries a woman named Laura and has a daughter named Meadow. But after the failure of this marriage, it is Schroder who kidnaps Meadow and takes her

The weekend press offered some rave reviews of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography. Craig Brown, who is not given to hyperbole, compared Moore’s book to a work of art, while the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley praised Moore’s ‘multi-dimensional portrait’ of the person we know as Mrs Thatcher. There were, however, some reservations. Rawnsley, brave man that he is, criticised Moore’s usage: ‘Moore is a patrician Old Etonian and a High Tory. So another of his challenges is to make the empathetic leap necessary to get inside the head of a grammar school girl who was born over a shop in Grantham. He makes a decent stab at it, but can’t always resist

Evgeny Morozov is an iconoclast. He believes that technology, if abused or misused, has the potential to make society less free. His latest book, To Save Everything , Click Here, builds on his acclaimed polemic The Net Delusion (about which he spoke to the Spectator last year) to challenge those who suggest that technology is the solution to all of life’s problems. Morozov describes how the technology of perfection is not necessarily compatible with democratic institutions and processes that are imperfect by definition. He reveals how ‘technological fixes’, particularly when coupled with market forces, threaten to close public debate and curtail personal choice; thereby moulding individuals into an efficient, homogenised

The life of Oscar Wilde is so wearily familiar that we assume that there is nothing new to think or say about him. This book proves us wrong. Carlos Blacker – the central figure of  J. Robert Maguire’s research for more than half a century – rates, at best, a bare mention in Wilde’s many biographies. Yet, as Maguire conclusively demonstrates, he is no footnote. Blacker, a handsome man of Latin extraction, knew Wilde in the days of his London pomp, was a witness at the writer’s wedding to the long-suffering Constance Lloyd, and often saw his friend on a daily basis. Wilde’s own testimony after his fall is ample

My editor told me to read this book and write this review. Six hundred words, he said. Just like the psychiatrist Dr. Quinn instructed Charlie, the protagonist of said book, to write one thousand words a day. Therapy apparently. The big reveal is exactly why Charlie needs therapy. The suspense is meant to keep you reading. Charlie is known locally in the village of Ballyronan, Cork where he lives as a ‘gamal’ (‘a bit of God help us’). In medical speak that’s ODD. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. In practical terms it means he can’t resist reminding us how little he wants to be writing what we’re reading and what a waste