Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

Outliving Ozymandias

In 1842, a wealthy heiress called Sarah Losh built a church in Wreay (rhymes with ‘near’, apparently), close to Carlisle. Coupling carvings of caterpillars with turtle gargoyles and a spattering of pinecones, she was, stylistically, half a century before her time. As a female architect and builder, she was still more precocious. The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow is the true, largely forgotten story of one of nineteenth-century England’s most forward-looking architects and – paradox standing – antiquarians. Sarah and her sister Katharine inherited land from their parents when their brother transpired to be ‘slow’. Sarah, the more ambitious of the sisters, tried her hand at various pursuits, always inspired by

Monday

David Blackburn

Should literature be political?

‘Should literature be political?’ Njabulo S Ndebele asked Open Book Cape Town the other day. Ndebele, a renowned academic in South Africa, has written a précis of his speech for the Guardian. He draws a distinction between political novels, which dramatise activism, and other forms of literature that ‘politicise’ by deepening awareness. His point is often sunk by his own loquacity (‘These two books [The African Child and God’s Bits of Wood] reveal the continuations between political literature and literary politics. Both achieve transcendence through art that politicises and depoliticises all at once.’); but, that aside, he makes some very compelling proposals about the role that literature can play in

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

Richard Millet and the nihilism of multiculturalism

It’s the last day of banned book week but perhaps we should spare a thought for banned editors. An editor at Éditions Gallimard, who worked on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, recently published three essays (with another house). The first, an account of his amorous adventures in Amsterdam, and the second, ‘Ghostly Language’, are, according to the author, to be kept in mind when tackling the final essay ‘Antiracism as the Literary Terror’ and the appendage, his pièce de resistance, ‘The Literary Eulogy of Anders Breivik’. That, in sum, is why Richard Millet is – for all the wrong reasons – one of the most famous essayists in France right

J P O'Malley

Interview: James Lasdun’s art

James Lasdun published his first book of short stories The Silver Age in 1985. The debut won him The Dylan Thomas Award, and was followed by Three Evenings another book of stories. In 1998, Italian filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci, directed the film ‘Besieged’, which was an adaptation of Lasdun’s short story ‘The Siege’. In 2002 Lasdun published his first novel The Horned Man. The book earned him the New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the Economist Best Book of the Year. His second novel Seven Lies was shortlisted for the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Lasdun is also a highly acclaimed poet. His collections include A Jump

Thursday

Mark Mason

How many words are there in a day?

‘Write your own name a hundred times,’ T.H. White once commented, ‘and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one-tenth of a new novel.’ No surprise that White should display such a familiarity with the mathematics of writing; all authors do. At least the professional ones do – they have to. When your living depends on not missing deadlines, one question looms all the time: how many words are there in a day? Actually, assuming that White meant a name comprising one forename and one

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Roger Moore

A few surprising revelations from this week’s esteemed Shelf Lifer, as Roger Moore tells us which literary character he’d sleep with, what he doesn’t like doing in his spare time and who would be his author of choice during a year’s solitary confinement. His new book, Bond on Bond: The Ultimate Book on 50 Years of Bond Movies, is published by Michael O’Mara Books 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj by Anne de Courcy 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? Hotspur, The Wizard and The Rover 3). Has a book ever made you cry, and if so

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hell hath no fury…

We all know Edwina Currie as a shrill, tasteless, attention-seeking Thatcherite nuisance from Liverpool. But the private Edwina —  as revealed in her Diaries: Volume II, 1992-97 (Biteback, £20) — is thoughtful, engaging, witty, kind-hearted and, politically, very astute. Has anyone framed a neater analysis of John Major’s idiotic ‘Back to Basics’ drive than this? ‘It outlawed the one protective factor the Tory party has always relied on — hypocrisy.’ She watches senior colleagues plotting to replace him during the mid-1990s, and she sums them up with lethal concision. Michael Portillo: ‘very steely, very cool, very unpleasant’. Ken Clarke: ‘fine brain … lazy character’. John Redwood: ‘disloyalty is his only

Jonathan Rugman

A voice that haunts

One cold evening in the middle of February this year I walked into a smoke-filled room in a town called Saraqib in northern Syria to find Anthony Shadid sitting shoeless on the floor like a Bedouin and conversing in Arabic with a tall, thin school teacher, one of the leaders of the town’s revolution. A cast-iron stove, fuelled by paraffin, heated the room, and Anthony, a bearded, somewhat burly man, seemed to glow with bear-like warmth. Through the cigarette smoke I could see three notebooks proudly stacked in front of the New York Times reporter, evidently bulging with his observations. Anthony had watched rebel fighters attempt to blow up an

Philip Ziegler

A painless lesson in political history

This book is not a history, explains Ruth Winstone, who has edited this collection of excerpts from diaries published between 1921 and 2011. It is, she says, ‘an impressionist view of politically changing times’. It is, indeed, a patchwork quilt of a book, no two pieces precisely meshing with each other yet providing in total a remarkably clear and coherent portrait of 90 stressful years. It is ‘a political diary’, but Winstone admits that the definition of ‘political’ became more and more elastic as the book took shape. It is all the better for it. Some of the most enjoyable passages have only a tenuous link with the world of

Vernon Bogdanor

Still dancing around the problem

For at least 200 years, men have sought to create a world order that would ensure stability and eliminate threats to peace. But it is only in the 20th century that this ideal has been brought to fruition, first in the ill-fated League of Nations, established in 1919, which expired, almost unnoticed, after the outbreak of war in 1939, and then in the United Nations. Governing the World charts the history of the idea of international co-operation since the end of the Napoleonic wars. It is a penetrating and wide-ranging study, illuminating not just the history of internationalism but also the problems involved in realising it in the world of

Cressida Connolly

Urbs in rure

When people express nostalgia for the glory days of British television, it doesn’t take long for them to propose the 1966 BBC play Cathy Come Home as among the pinnacles of broadcasting. Not only a fine piece of drama, it also brought the plight of the homeless to the viewing public. And Jeremy Sandford, who wrote Cathy Come Home, didn’t stop there. Finding himself the owner of a large house in Shropshire, he invited various homeless people to take up residence. It would be nice to relate that these indigents responded with gratitude, courtesy and warmth. Nice, but not true. Terrible arguments broke out, hostile takeover bids were launched, areas

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The stuff of dreams

‘As I was writing this book and trying to discover what it was about .…’ With his very first words, David Thomson pulls out the carpet from under himself, drapes it over his head, and runs towards the nearest wall. For what he’s admitting in this opening sentence is that, when he began work on this 578-page history of cinema, he had no idea what he was going to say. And man you have to be good to pull that off. We live in an age of relativism, in which (arguably) assertions are often spliced with (this is only my opinion) apologetic parentheses. Yet books of this kind ought to

Lewis Jones

A dark family past

Like the Dombeys, Pitts, Amises et al, les Dumas are famously père et fils, but there was of course also a grand-père, Thomas-Alexandre, or ‘Alex’ the first, who was a wildly romantic figure, a gallant and tragic hero, and the defining influence on his son’s life and work. In his memoirs, of which he devotes more than 200 pages to his father’s life, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo, (Dumas père) remembers how, one night in 1806, when he was not yet four, he was woken with news of his father’s death: ‘taken by God’. He asked where God lived: heaven. Soon afterwards his mother found him with

Emily Read

The naked body in the pool

Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted novel has, at first sight, all the ingredients of a standard villa holiday-from-Hell story, or indeed film. But this creepy and unsettling tale has more layers to it than most. Two couples, famous poet Joe Jacobs and his foreign correspondent wife Isabel and their friends, fat Mitchell and tall Laura, share a villa outside Nice for a sweltering summer in 1994. Joe and Isabel’s 14-year-old daughter Nina is the uncomfortable and bored observer of the grown-ups’ bickering, and of rapidly surfacing misery. Mitchell is in a permanent rage, which takes the form of shooting and trapping any animal he can lay his hands on — it turns

Jonathan Mirsky

‘Ill luck was my faithful attendant’

Here is the melancholy story of Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of President Abraham Lincoln, who was shot next to her on 12 April 1865 as they were watching a play. He died three days later. The book has a single theme with two strands: was Mrs. Lincoln insane before as well as after her husband’s murder? And in subsequent years was she treated with continuous and sympathetic care by her son, Robert, or was he a greedy monster who ensured that his mother was declared insane so that he could get his hands on her substantial estate? Jason Emerson, a journalist and specialist on the Lincoln family, has examined every

Norman Stone

Blackmail, bribery and bullying

You can always tease Hungarians if you say that they have more Nobel Prize-winners than the Japanese, and that that really remarkable statistic is the abnormally high percentage of non-Jews among them, namely 17½. In 1900 Jews made up about 25 per cent of the Budapest population, and once abroad they hit the world with great force, whether in Hollywood or in nuclear physics (the memoirs of Arthur Koestler are a testimony to their drive and adaptability, as well as to their sense of humour). There is a black story involved, just the same: their role in the Communist takeover between 1945 and 1948. Anne Applebaum does not evade this

Tuesday

Jerry Hayes

The loneliness of Edwina Currie

Edwina Currie is very much an acquired taste and I am very happy that I acquired it in 1983 when we were both first elected to Parliament. Sassy, saucy, fiendishly bright, burning with drive and ambition, yet with a heart, she was head and shoulders above most of her male contemporaries and they hated her for it. People forget just how far Cameron has detoxified the Conservative party. Women, gays (only tolerated in the research department), blacks and Asians had a very steep if not impossible mountain to climb just to get on the candidates list, let alone have a chance of obtaining a winnable seat. Currie tells one tale

Monday

Austen Saunders

William Shakespeare and the pursuit of human happiness

‘Under the greenwood tree’ from As You Like It AMIENS: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lies with me, And turn his merry note Uno the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. Who doth ambition shun, And loves to live i’th’ sun, Seeking the food he eats, And pleased with what he gets ALL: Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. In As You Like It, a French duke has been usurped by his brother. He lives now in exile with his followers in the Forest of

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview – Patrick Hennessey, Kandak: Fighting with the Afghans

“It always struck me that it was a much easier war to support the closer you got to it,” says Patrick Hennessey of the war in Afghanistan. Hennessey, who served in Helmand with the Grenadier Guards in 2007, continues: “It was so obvious that we were making the country better and that we were broadly supported by the locals, certainly in a way that we weren’t in Iraq in 2006. I know that most Guardsmen preferred Afghanistan to Iraq in that respect because they felt they were doing something tangible and positive and that it was being appreciated by the people in the country, if not necessarily the people at

Thursday

Nigel Jones

Let’s not be beastly to the Germans

The question of how Europe stumbled into the horrific abyss of  the First World War, the catastrophe which The Economist once called ‘the greatest tragedy in human history’ is obviously of much more than purely academic interest. (Though it is chiefly academics who have been arguing about it ever since). As we approach the centenary of the conflict’s outbreak, one of them, Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, has written a magnificently detailed study of the diplomatic dance that led the continent up to and over the edge. The Sleepwalkers should be required reading for politicians and decision-makers fumblingly steering the world in our own age, an epoch perhaps