Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and

Nicholas Lezard

Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed

Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer Franz Kafka woke up to find his mouth full of blood.’ (The echo of the opening line of Metamorphosis is surely deliberate.) Here, in isolation, he recuperated, or tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: ‘I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself… by digging holes,

Anne de Courcy

Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze

This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed illustrations, patterns of fabric and family photographs, interspersed with chunks of prose or aphorisms. In short, it is an expression of its author’s philosophy, threaded through rather disjointedly with the story of her life. Iris Apfel is the only woman I can think of – with the possible exceptions of Diana Vreeland and Helena Rubinstein

Harry Ritchie

Celebrating Sequoyah and his Cherokee alphabet

There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken on this planet. By the end of this century, all but 600 will have disappeared – the inevitable result of an unstoppable process as the last speakers of the world’s little languages die out, usually leaving no trace, for the vast majority are spoken only, with no written record. But even languages which have had the good fortune to be written down face their own extinction as their individual writing systems struggle to survive. Hundreds and hundreds of unique alphabets, as much as 90 per cent, face oblivion. Enter their gallant rescuer Tim Brookes, a British-born, Vermont-based writer, who is on a one-man

Paul Kildea

Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp

Some years ago, following a Christmas performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, I sat in one of the dives near the theatre with a member of the corps de ballet, the gay son of close friends. The audience had been populated largely by children and teenagers, most of whom were either smitten by the intrepid, empathetic Clara or wanted to be her. Yet the mood perceptibly shifted when, at the end of Act I, the life-sized nutcracker doll transformed into a most handsome prince, all grace and gluts. ‘Do you think in that moment,’ I asked my dancer friend, ‘that a smattering of adolescent boys, out on a family treat, notice their

Saturday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Richard Madeley, Cindy Yu, Lara Prendergast, Pen Vogler and James Delingpole

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Richard Madeley reads his diary for the week (1:01); Cindy Yu explores the growing trend for all things nostalgic in China (6:00); Lara Prendergast declares that bankers are hot again (11:26); Pen Vogler reviews Sally Coulthard’s book The Apple (17:18); and, James Delingpole argues that Joe Rogan is ‘as edgy as Banksy’ (23:24).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.  

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Adam Higginbotham: Challenger

50 min listen

Sam’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Adam Higginbotham, whose new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space describes the 1986 space shuttle disaster that took the lives of seven astronauts and, arguably, inflicted America’s greatest psychic scar since the assassination of JFK. He tells Sam about the extraordinary men and women who lost their lives that day, the astounding engineering involved in the spacecraft that America had started to take for granted, and the deep roots and long aftermath of the accident.   

Tuesday

Alexandra Coghlan

Saved from certain death at Auschwitz – by playing the cello

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to go on the journey. Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes? Whether the subject is swimming or stamp-collecting, non-fiction seems wearyingly determined to rebrand itself as memoir, our author, also

Pen Vogler

The juicy history of the apple

In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).  Give me a Norfolk Biffen over chocolate atChristmas any time What we think of as an apple today

Patrick Graney

The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president

A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in his detail of the underground union gatherings, abject poverty and family tragedy which formed Lula. He brings São Paulo’s working-class culture to life throughout, with popular car brands, pop songs and sessions of cachaça and gin rummy ever present. Lula’s upbringing was marred by hardship. Born in poverty in 1945, with a brutal, bigamist father,

Elisa Segrave

Is it wrong to try to ‘cure’ autism?

Is autism the worst thing that can happen to a person? Is ABA – Applied Behaviour Analysis – the right treatment for an autistic child? Should an autistic person get away with being rude? Do autistic individuals not feel empathy? If, as exists for unborn Downs Syndrome babies, a precise test is found to diagnose foetal autism, should the mother abort? Is it wrong, as some high-functioning autistic people claim, to try to ‘cure’ autism? Surely it is important to offer intervention to less able autistic children and adults, to help make their lives more bearable? These are some of the questions discussed in this passionate and informative memoir.   Virginia

Honor Clerk

Tales with a twist: Safe Enough and Other Stories, by Lee Child, reviewed

Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. ‘Fabergé eggs they ain’t,’ he says, in the introduction to this collection of 20 stories, but they are real gems nonetheless. With no global readership to worry about and no commercial interests involved, Child was free to have fun. And fun he has with the short story form, shooting from the hip – ‘no need’, as he says, ‘to save anything for Chapter 17’. The trademark economy of style is faultless, each cop, hitman, fixer or

Nigel Jones

How could Hitler have had so many willing henchmen?

Eight decades after the second world war ended, for how much longer will we produce massive books about Hitler and the Nazis? Richard J. Evans, the former regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the senior gardeners in this noxious orchard, having devoted a lifetime’s study to the subject. As a minor under-gardener in the same field, I believe that we now know all we need to about the Führer and the crimes of his vile regime, and, barring the unlikely discovery of something new, it is time that historians moved on. The damning facts can be briefly stated, and are cogently summed up by

Helen Barrett

Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and ‘rock’s most committed iconoclast’, as his New York Times obituary described him, for 27 years, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, aged 52. A year after that first, snot-filled seduction, the Zappas were married, a week before Gail gave birth to Moon Unit, the first of four children. Moon’s name is not a

Philip Marsden

Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it. In her previous book, Timefulness, she wrote for the general reader and with persuasive lyricism about readjusting our focus to thinking in geological time.  Compared with Mars or any of the known planets, Earth’s surface is a riot Now, in Turning to Stone, she looks back over a lifetime of teaching geology in

Maggie Fergusson

Imperfections in wood can make for the loveliest carvings

I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight. Callum Robinson would understand why this matters. A master woodcarver and cabinetmaker, plying his trade from a workshop in Scotland (location vague – ‘in a forest beside a loch nestled in the Scottish hills’), he

Brian Martin

A death foretold: The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker, reviewed

Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid, her intimate ‘catch-fart’. (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.) Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim. Clytemnestra, disdainful and contemptuous,

Christopher Bray

Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting

You must remember this… Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. ‘Give her my love,’ says Slim. ‘I’d give her my own,’ says Harry, ‘if she were wearing that.’ And in real life, as the tabloids would say, he did. We are talking of To Have and Have Not (1944), in which Harry is Humphrey Bogart and Slim is Lauren Bacall. The director, Howard Hawks, said the movie was just

Lucasta Miller

How ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ plays tricks with the mind

I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Nathan Thrall: A Day In The Life of Abed Salama

35 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Day In The Life of Abed Salama – which uses the story of a terrible bus crash in the West Bank to describe in ground-up detail the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Speaking to me from Jerusalem, Nathan tells me why he believes it’s right to call Israel an ‘apartheid state’, how the bureaucracy of the Occupied Territories made the fatal crash ‘an accident that wasn’t an accident’; and what he thinks needs to change to bring hope of an end to the conflict.