Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

David Blackburn

The Jimmy Savile scandal and Alexander Solzhenitsyn

‘The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being… This line is not static within us; it sways to and fro over the years. Even in a heart imbued with evil, it allows a small bridgehead of good to remain. And it permits a small niche of evil to survive even in the kindest of hearts.’ These words were written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seeking to explain why The Gulag Archipelago was necessarily ambiguous. But they also fit elements of the Savile scandal, which is being prejudged in increasingly black and white terms. Charles Moore’s observation that this grim affair is a ‘dreadful warning’ about the

Emily Rhodes

Something wholesale

I suspect that few – if any – of you have heard of Bertram Books. You could be forgiven for thinking that they are a lesser-known series of P.G. Wodehouse novels, but in fact Bertram Books is a book wholesaler, a large yet overlooked part of the book industry. It strikes me as peculiar that there is this invisible middle man between publisher and bookseller, known about by everyone in the industry, but by nobody outside. No one buying a book from a bookshop would have a clue that Bertram’s has been instrumental in getting it there. Most customers assume that books come to a shop directly from the publishers

Jasper Becker

Disgusting, but not shocking

The joke doing the rounds in Beijing is that the Swedes gave the Nobel Literature prize to the wrong Chinese. It should have gone to the Communist Party’s propaganda department, for writing the enthralling fantasy about the Politburo’s wife who (supposedly) pours cyanide into the mouth of a British businessman (or spy, as most people believe). Then, in a country which happily executes people for stealing bicycles, it lets off Neil Heyward’s murderer, Gu Kailai, with a suspended death sentence. Meanwhile, her husband, Bo Xilai, who (supposedly) siphoned off billions by extorting money from private businessmen, has so far only lost his party card. That’s the problem with China: it

Marcus Berkmann

Hart-felt praise

‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may or may not come as a surprise to her readers. ‘I am nowhere close to one of them French philosophers; I basically lollop through life like an amiable hound.’ If self-knowledge tends to be hard won, Is It Just Me? (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) suggests that Hart has won it mainly by saying the wrong thing and falling over a lot. Whether you like this book, or even open it, probably depends on how much you enjoy her work on TV, although it’s unlikely you will have read even this

John Gimlette

Little house on the pampas

It’s hard to tell Argentina’s story without moments of despair. Even those who are fond of this country — like me — can struggle to identify the bright spots in its history. It’s been a tale of genocide, shrinking borders, pointless wars, hyper-inflation and vicious dictators. Even the end of the second world war brought little joy, given that Argentines had spent much of it egging on the Nazis. Part of the problem has been one of grandiose expectations. A century ago, Argentina believed itself on the brink of greatness, its fortune built on meat. Immigrants arrived in their millions, and a few — like Aristotle Onassis — became unhealthily

Charlotte Moore

Mother of sorrows

This novella tells the story of the Crucifixion from the point of view of Mary. Contrary to art historical belief she was not, we are now told, kneeling at the foot of the Cross nor cradling her son’s broken body in her arms. Instead, she left the scene early, slipping away to save her own skin, stealing to meet her needs as she fled. It’s the sort of idea Carol Ann Duffy might make a poem about, except she’d do it with humour, and without Tóibín’s faintly sententious tone. ‘Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones’; there’s a lot of that kind of thing. Mary is now

Roger Lewis

Burning his bridges

They have mostly achieved eminence, the original cast members who appeared on stage or in the film adaptation, 30 years ago, of Julian Mitchell’s homoerotic spy fable Another Country. Kenneth Branagh has his coveted knighthood, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth have won Oscars — and Rupert Everett? I’m not quite sure what has happened to Rupert Everett. He never quite caught on as a leading man, despite being strapping. He was so languid, you felt his co-stars had to organise their movements in order to nudge him awake, jostling him into coming up with a reaction. It was only when in drag as Miss Fritton, Alastair Sim’s old role in the

Byron Rogers

Now we know what happened

First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the World. Then there was H.G.Wells, who cut a swathe through the high-minded girl intellectuals of the early 20th century, a new species, before writing The Outline of History. World history and women may sound an odd pairing, but they seem to go together. For now there is Andrew Marr, who, after apologising in the papers for his misdemeanours, has written A History of the World. And when you have stopped sniggering consider this: it is a wonderful book. Forget the

Stoker Devonshire

The winning streak

Fortunately the author explained how he came to make the choices for this book in his column here (29 September), because otherwise your reviewer might have wasted words in debating the criteria for inclusion. These are the 100 of the top racehorses that Robin Oakley admires the most and which he thinks are particularly popular. I will not argue the merits of what he has included, nor suggest horses which he should have made room for, but I must comment on the way the little histories are presented, and the disappointing errors. Clearly this book is written for aficionados, employing racing jargon without much explanation — ‘jamstick’, ‘a nursery stakes’,

Clive Aslet

Old palaces for new plutocrats

Having lived in London for 35 years, I thought I knew its architectural highlights pretty well, but this book is a revelation. It shows an aspect of the city that I hardly realised existed. I had always believed that, in what must now be called the Downton years, Britain’s grandest families preferred to sacrifice their London palaces in order to hang onto their country seats. The French had their priorities the other way about, our attachment to rural life being one of the things that made us British. Devonshire House, on Piccadilly, which was demolished in the 1920s, along with so many other Georgian buidlings, symbolised this retreat from the

Molly Guinness

The whole kitchen caboodle

Pretentious, effeminate, sinister and even obscene, the fork of folktale was a sign of loose morals, silly decadence or sexual deviancy. To insist on eating with a fork was a very bad sign until the 17th century. Italians were the first to relax their stance on ‘furcifers’ (fork bearers, like the devil) when they recognised that three prongs were better than one for twirling spaghetti; but even up until the end of the 19th century British sailors were still demonstrating their manliness by eating without forks. Consider the Fork is a delightful compendium of the tools, techniques and cultures of cooking and eating. Be it a tong or a chopstick,

Wynn Wheldon

Miami vice

This is an exhilarating novel. Its general gist is that in a multicultural society so-called honour often trumps virtue, political expediency frequently wins out over inconvenient truth, and comforting illusion tends to be preferable to disagreeable reality. And assimilation is very hard, especially in Miami, where the entire story is set. The two central characters are Nestor and Magdalena, second-generation Cubans, who begin the book as a couple. Each has a difficult journey to its end, both have to combat monsters (Nestor literally) and both learn a little more about themselves and a lot more about the wider world as a consequence. Magdalena, a strikingly beautiful nurse, keen to improve

Mark Mason

Just a guy who writes songs

There is a famous piece of film — well, famous to those of us who know more about the Beatles than is possibly good for our health — where John Lennon encounters a fan who has broken into the star’s Berkshire estate. Clearly a lost soul, the fan is searching for meaning, signficance, some sort of connection with his idol. Lennon replies, very calmly and kindly: ‘I’m just a guy, man, who writes songs.’ Sadly, this book proves him right. The good stuff first. It looks beautiful: the cover is ‘Imagine’-white, the pages carefully designed to weave Hunter Davies’s commentary around both the letters themselves and their transcripts. There are

John Preston

Colossal windbags

‘Senior British diplomats really knew how to write,’ declares Matthew Parris in his introduction to The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, a collection of ambassadorial despatches about funny foreigners and filthy, far-flung climes. Well, up to a point. The pieces in this collection, a successor to Parting Shots, are often elegantly phrased and colourful, but at the same time there’s a weird sense that they were all written by the same person — someone peering down a very long nose beneath which lies an indulgently curled lip. In 1962, Sir John Russell, the then ambassador to Brazil, writes that his plane had to make an unscheduled stop in a place called Belem.

Matthew Dennison

Another bleak house on the Fens

Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and the dramatic and sensational possibilities of this encounter. Hill’s ghost stories are consciously literary creations. Beginning with The Woman in Black, she revels in the long shadow of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She makes allusions to Wilkie Collins and throughout Dolly and The Mist in the Mirror (first published in 1992, now

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ace of bureaucrats

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is a man whose name is now better known than his doings. Its syllables conjure a world-famous hotel, a prep-school, the former business class brand of Singapore airlines, a shonky packet of fags, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and Viz comic’s Raffles the Gentleman Thug. He also gave his name to a tropical flower that has the largest bloom on earth, and which gives off ‘precisely the smell of tainted beef’. Most of us will have had the vague sense that he founded modern Singapore (we’re half right about that), and a still vaguer sense that his was a life of glamour, buckle and

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Plein-air pleasures and the great indoors

Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled classical ideas about the merits of a space not so dissimilar to this in character. Best to make one’s desk in a room adjoining the bedroom, he said. That way, the writer need not leave his cell at all. In ancient Rome, even more so, nature was often considered a distraction. Both writers and artists

Steerpike Steerpike

Cash prizes

A veritable ‘who’s who’ of SW1 has been lined up to judge the inaugural Political Book Awards. Sky’s Adam Boulton, the Mail’s Simon Walters and Labour’s Chris Bryant will be joined by that nice Mary Beard. The awards are being run by Total Politics, the magazine published by Biteback Media, which, completely coincidentally, also publishes political books. Lord Ashcroft, who put up most of the cash for the Biteback venture, will sit on the judging panel. And so will a number of Biteback contributors, including Edwina Currie and Deborah Mattinson, although they will be awarding prizes in different categories from their own work. Unusually for an awards ceremony, and despite

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Anton du Beke

Stalwart of Strictly, winner of Rear of the Year 2011 and author of B is for Ballroom: Be Your Own Armchair Dancefloor Expert, dancer Anton du Beke is on this week’s Shelf Life. He tells us what he’s reading and which self help book would make him foxtrot for the hills. He tweets @TheAntonDuBeke 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods, by Hank Haney Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank, by Barbara Sinatra Steps in Time: An Autobiography, by Fred Astaire 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton 3). Has a

Monday

Fleur Macdonald

Jobs for the girls

Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn’t exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with