Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Lynn Shepherd

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

Tuesday

Nigel Jones

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

Mark Mason

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

Monday

David Blackburn

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,

Austen Saunders

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

Friday

J P O'Malley

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

Thursday

Jason Pack

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

Emily Rhodes

A tale of HS2 cities

The route was unveiled this week for phase two of HS2 — and those who got hot under the collar about phase one (London to Birmingham) are furious again, on the same economic or environmental grounds. But perhaps they might rediscover some of the joy of a fast train if they read a little Dickens. In 1851, when Britain’s railways were being developed on rather a larger scale than today, Dickens wrote a short article about his trip from London to Paris by what was then considered to be high-speed rail. ‘A Flight’, as he called it, fizzes with excitement: ‘Here we are — no, I mean there we were,

Mark Mason

Down to a T

There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate, £14.99), concern the Traveller community. The first is that while most people have only just got used to the fact that Traveller now has a capital ‘T’, the reviews must avoid those other words you’re not supposed to have in your head any more, though everyone does. Yes, even Guardian journalists and BBC editors; I once heard one of the latter breed say, after everyone had discussed a radio drama about Travellers using the ‘correct’ terminology: ‘Oh, you mean the pikey play?’ The second problem is that the reviews feel

John Sutherland

Up

One of the reprinted reviews which make up the bulk of this book opens: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Eton.’ How would it sound, I mused, if I began a review: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Colchester Grammar School.’ It would lack, I feel, that enviable tone of Etonian ‘assurance’. True, a less self-assured person than James Wood might have slipped his educational credentials in parenthetically — in the style of David Cameron’s casual remark that he is ‘reasonably well off’. And Eton, one notes in passing, has produced many more prime ministers than great literary

John Gimlette

Gaza stripped bare

Imagine a piece of land: sandy, roughly rectangular, and about the size of the Isle of Wight. It is surrounded on three sides by desert and hostile neighbours, and on the fourth by the sea. Although almost 1.7 million live in this space, nothing except essentials is allowed in or out. It’s under blockade. By sea, even its fishing boats are sprayed with sewage or gunfire and, around its land border, there’s a ‘free-fire zone’ a kilometre wide. Meanwhile, its buildings have been so enthusiastically shelled that, sometimes, whole ceilings just suddenly give way. Although this dystopia isn’t part of anywhere else, it’s not — officially — a country either.

D. J. Taylor

Playing Possum

The contending versions of T.S. Eliot on display in the latest bumper instalment of his collected letters are practically legion. To begin with there is the hieratic, if not downright priestly, Eliot, soberly petitioning  Father D’Arcy, the correspondence columns  of the Church Times, or studious clergymen who may be flattered into taking charge of his pet project for a library of 17th-century theological classics. Next there is the sedulous Elizabethan scholar gravely conferring with Professor Grierson over textual complications in Marlowe, and circulating the results around the Cambridge combination rooms. Then comes a third Eliot, the deferential protégé of elderly men-of-letters such as Charles Whibley or J.M. Robertson, who had

Jonathan Mirsky

Going under

As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is old. Alvarez’s outer and inner selves, in the first five or six years of this ten-year journal, rejoice with the ecstasy of swimming almost daily in water preferably just a few degrees above freezing, feeling the zing when he climbs out pink as a lobster and banters with the lifeguards. But then, slowly and horrifyingly,

Jasper Becker

China’s second coming

It’s a new version of the Yellow Peril. The Chinese are taking over the world, starting with the nasty bits, like Burma, Sudan and Iran, which we are boycotting for all kinds of high-minded reasons. Two Spanish journalists, Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo, have returned from an exhausting trip round the globe to tell us how it’s being done. After carrying out 500 interviews, the authors seem outraged by the corruption and environmental devastation they witness, but also awed by the sheer guts and industry that individual Chinese show in doing business where so many others fail. The authors believe that something is going on in the global economy

Robert Salisbury

A woman of substance | 31 January 2013

Hermione Ranfurly wrote two books. One was called The Ugly One. The other, the first, was called To War with Whitaker. Its success came as a surprise to her, but to none of her legion of friends. It chronicled her war. Recently married to Dan, a Northern Irish peer whose father had lost almost everything, mostly on the green baize, she determined to pursue him, his horses and his yeomanry regiment to the Middle East, no matter that the army, the War Office and official Whitehall expressly forbade such camp following. She eventually reached Cairo and secured a job in SOE. She had already demonstrated her determination by getting there.

Jane Ridley

Secrets and ties

It is a truth universally acknowledged that secrets are toxic and break up families. Today we look back smugly on the bad old days of the stiff upper lip when skeletons were kept firmly locked in their cupboards. We think we know better. The English, once famous for their secretiveness and reserve, have become addicted to confessional culture. Celebs expose their childhood scars in misery memoirs, and transparency is hailed as the greatest good. In this timely book, American historian Deborah Cohen challenges our complacency. The history of secrets and their relation to the family turns out to be far more complex and vastly more interesting than might be imagined.

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

What’s love got to do with it? | 30 January 2013

In her Times column on Monday (£), Libby Purves valiantly attempted to fit together two things that were obviously on her mind. Discussing Pride and Prejudice, which is 200 years old this week, in relation to the modern permutations of marriage was sure to be a delicate operation. Purves argued that the book’s appeal lies in both its wit and the intellectual and emotional foreplay between Elizabeth and Darcy. What might seem ‘subversive’ for modern sensibilities, Purves suggests, is the fluttering of Elizabeth’s heart when she sees the size of Darcy’s pile. Nowadays, she argues, marriage is about ‘love’, of course. It doesn’t matter about class, wealth or gender. That

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies wins Costa Book of the Year

Hilary Mantel has won the Costa Book Award of the Year for Bring up the Bodies. It saw off contenders: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner (the children’s book winner), The Innocents by Francesca Segal (the first novel award), The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (the poetry prize) and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot (winner of the best biography award, and the first graphic work to win a Costa prize). Mantel collected the prize fund of £30,000. Mantel’s win means that she has also secured a ‘literary treble’: Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award and Costa Book of the Year.

David Blackburn

Google maps North Korea

Google has mapped North Korea. The Washington Post has useful selection of before and after images. Compare the images for North Korea with a map of the county in which you live and you will get a sense of North Korea’s poverty. Britain is debating the merits of cutting the rail journey time between London and Brum by 10 minutes; North Korea has only the most basic road infrastructure. Small wonder, then, that the North Korean economy is so parlous that the Kims have accommodated a nascent form of capitalism in order to stave off mass starvation; an important point among many made by Victor Cha in The Impossible State, published last

David Blackburn

Abraham Lincoln ‘somehow’ became the great redeemer

Abraham Lincoln, in Walt Whitman’s celebrated phrase, contained multitudes. M.E. Synon showed yesterday quite how many there might have been. There is evidence of prejudice, callousness and corruption. Yet there is also the 13th amendment (1865): the basis, whatever the wider context of its adoption, of Lincoln’s right to be called the Great Emancipator. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a film of a book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a blockbuster that paints a little more of the good Lincoln than the bad, but which accepts Lincoln’s complexity freely by describing a determined politician at work. Daniel Day-Lewis’s often mesmerising, twinkling Lincoln is not wholly