Get a free copy of Douglas Murray’s new book

when you subscribe to The Spectator for just $15 for 12 weeks. No commitment – cancel any time.
SUBSCRIBE

Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Cricket’s the loser

Cricket glorifies some cheats. W.G. Grace often batted on after being clean bowled; such was the public demand to watch him. Douglas Jardine’s bodyline tactics revolutionised fast bowling: eventually making it acceptable to target the batsman rather than the wicket. Fielders “work” the ball. Batsmen stand their ground when convention asks them to walk. Cheating is part of cricket. But match fixing? The culprits live forever in infamy, and deservedly so. The cricketing authorities (the ICC) believed that match fixing had died ten years ago; but the News of the World’s sting on the Pakistan team in 2010 demolished those hopes. The sting suggested that the problem was deep. Rumours

War is not to be envied

Donald Anderson is a former US Air Force Colonel and current professor of English Literature at the US Air Force Academy. His new book, Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, is a controlled crash, like all landings. It skips and judders, the wheels skidding across the tarmac, until finally the plane is at rest. One line aphorisms such as, ‘William Burroughs was for thieving and against paraphrasing altogether,’ are followed by paragraphs which, every so often, glide into anecdotes mingling observations of war with memories of a small town upbringing in Butte, Montana. Given a setting in which rugged individualism is a generational mantle, it is not surprising

In praise of Plum

This blog post is not going to say anything original. You’ll have read it all before. Its sole purpose is to convince you that P.G. Wodehouse is the master so everyone else should give up, particularly the people who’ve tried to adapt Blandings for the telly. Blandings on TV is not all that bad. I’ve laughed at the gentler moments of farce. Some of the dialogue sparkles. The performances are good-ish. The setting has some charm. But I’m inclined to agree with everyone else who has spent brain power on it: the screen can’t do Wodehouse. My father once told me that he kept copies of The Code of the Woosters

Writing of walking

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction. Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats. Woolf notes the outside world – ‘shop-keepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds … June had drawn out every leaf on

A hero of folk

‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant the entire American capitalist establishment during the Great Depression and after. A self-taught socialist, Woody wrote more than 3,000 songs, mostly in angry protest on behalf of millions of underdogs. As the ‘Dust Bowl Balladeer’, he became the legendary folk hero who inspired Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and many others. Woody was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. When he was 15, his mother was institutionalised with Huntington’s disease, a hereditary cause of early dementia and other mental disabilities, which he eventually inherited. At 17, he moved to Pampa, a small town

A choice of recent crime novels

Many novels deal with unhappy families. But happy families are relatively rare, especially in crime fiction, which is one of the many interesting features of Erin Kelly’s third book, The Burning Air (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The MacBrides have always been close. Rowan has recently retired from the headmastership of a major public school. He is devastated by the death from cancer of his wife, Lydia, the much-loved matriarch; but his children and grandchildren console him. The clan gathers for the annual bonfire weekend at their Devon holiday home. It all goes horribly wrong when baby Edie, the youngest grandchild and apple of everyone’s eye, vanishes one evening, along with

Beautiful and damned

According to his mother, Neville Heath was ‘prone to be excitable’. He was that all right — and then some. In the space of two weeks in the summer of 1946, Heath murdered two women with such brutality that, as Sean O’Connor puts it with shuddering relish, ‘war-hardened police officers vomited on seeing them’. The public were fascinated by him. Elizabeth Taylor reworked Heath’s story into a novel, Patrick Hamilton drew on it heavily for his Gorse trilogy and Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a film about the case, but had to ditch the idea when the studio decided it would be too revolting. Heath was fascinating mainly due to

Indian giver

A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new, 16 old) are moving and hilarious, and they amount to an education. Take the term Native American, for example. Isn’t this the accepted way to refer to the author’s ethnicity? You’d have thought. Yet Sherman Alexie avoids it, referring to himself and his characters as ‘Indian’. Everything he writes is imbued with a consciousness of

Change of heart | 7 February 2013

A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return

Winning the war with wheezers

The Anfa Hotel in Casablanca has seen better days. Seventy years ago it was the grandest hotel in Morocco, good enough to house Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they met in January 1943 to devise a strategy that would win the second world war. The views remain as fine and the bedrooms as expansive, but today the carpets are unmistakably worn and the bathrooms are beginning to peel. In its own small way, the hotel illustrates the central theme of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Professor Paul Kennedy’s epochal history now more than 20 years old, that a dearth of economic resources progressively enfeebles the

The music man

When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth 800-page volume covering the decade before his death in 1976: deadly dull though these letters intrinsically are, the magnificent accompanying annotation and detailed apparatus make them richly revealing. Thus hobbled, Carpenter’s effort amounts to a broad-brush portrait and a gripping narrative, but also something of a rushed and unpolished job — unbalanced and half-digested, peppered

Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor: beyond chemistry

Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place in the Sun, however, it paired Montgomery Clift with the 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and gave us a film that still grips more than 60 years later. Director George Stevens disparaged what he called Technicolor’s ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’ quality, and monochrome is indeed more suited to the ethical grey area explored by the film: whether a man who plans a murder but can’t go through with it is as guilty as a killer. Clift and Taylor don’t have conventional

Young Romantics quiz

Byron may have been mad, bad and dangerous to know, but how’s your knowledge of the rest of the Young Romantics? Are you a connoisseur of Keats, or a specialist on Shelley? Take this light-hearted quiz to find out how much you really know about this dazzling generation of English poets. There are four possible answers to the questions below, and one of them relates to Byron, Keats or Shelley. There’s a point for every correct answer, and some bonus points to be won as well, if you can spot a few Romantic red herrings I’ve hidden in here too… Answers should be emailed to dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk. The winner will receive a

Richard III should be reburied under Leicester council’s car park

Anyone who watched last night’s Channel 4 Documentary Richard III: The King Under the Car Park will need no reminding that members of the Richard III Society tend to be delusional fantasists rather than serious historians. Although we should doubtless be grateful to the Society for funding the dig that discovered the monarch’s bones, that very fact tends to slant the coverage of Richard’s resurrection. There has been much talk about ‘re-writing history’ and countering ‘Tudor propaganda’; but the inconvenient truth (for Ricardians) is that the late king’s spine was indeed twisted by scoliosis and one of his shoulders was noticeably higher than the other. Those particular pieces of Tudor

Childishly scientific

2.30pm, Tuesday, the bookshop of the Natural History Museum. Horrible Science: Blood, Bones and Body Bits is being leafed through by one of its typical readers. In other words he’s 45, six-foot-three and has a full beard. One of the greatest joys of parenthood is the excuse it gives you to abandon ‘proper’, grown-up science books, and get stuck into those aimed at your child. I’m at the museum with my 3-year-old son, who has just shrieked ecstatically at the huge dinosaur in the main hall, and is now eagerly sizing up a T-rex sticker book. One of his Christmas presents was Big Questions from Little People Answered by Some

Reading Richard III

The confirmation that bones found beneath a Leicester car park are ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ those of Richard III has launched a deluge of familiar puns. ‘A hearse! A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse!’ say numerous wags on Twitter. I wonder if Richard III would be remembered so widely today were it not for Shakespeare. The character of the play, who speaks some of the most famous lines in English, is descended from the portrait drawn by Sir Thomas More in an uncompleted history written at various points throughout the 1510s. Many historians argue that More wrote the book to please the Tudors. This is, it is said, why he drew on the work of Polydore Vergil,

Discovering poetry: John Dryden, Jacobite superstar

From Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Arms and the man I sing who forced by fate And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate Expelled and exiled left the Trojan shore. Long labours both by sea and land he bore And in the doubtful war; before he won The Latian realm and built the destined town, His banished Gods restored to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line: From whence the race of Alban Fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome.     O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate, What goddess was provoked, and whence her hate, For what offence the Queen of Heaven began To persecute so

Interview with a writer: John Ashbery

John Ashbery is recognized as one of the most eminent American poets of the twentieth-century. He also been called America’s greatest living poet today. Ashbery published his first book of poems Some Trees in 1956; it earned him the Yale Younger Poets Prize: a competition that was judged by W.H. Auden at the time. He has picked up many literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. At 85, he shows no signs of putting down his pen. He has recently published a collection of poems entitled Quick Question. Although the majority of critics have recognized his talent, many

Engagement in Libya was and remains the right answer

In 2008, I packed my bags to head off to Tripoli, where I began my current vocation of advocating for Western diplomatic, economic, cultural, and humanitarian engagement in Libya. Ethan Chorin was my inspiration. He was the US Foreign Service Officer who wrote the Department of Commerce’s commercial guide, which helps American companies operate in Libya. He also wrote a chapter in Dirk Vandewalle’s definitive compendium Libya Since 1969: Qadhafi’s Revolution Revisited, which brilliantly puts forth the case for the inevitable impact that American business presence would have on promoting political freedom in Libya. Freedom has since come to Libya and the role of the internet and foreign diplomatic and commercial engagement