Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Philip Hensher

A family at war

The Quest for Corvo started something rather peculiar in biography. A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic — described as ‘an experiment’ — set out the biographer’s search for his subject, and not just the results. This was justified in the case of an elusive and unusual figure like the ‘Baron’ Corvo. Nowadays, many biographies are written like this, and we have to hear about the author tramping from archive to library to study. Can it really be justified in the case of a 20th-century duke, whose papers are in the order in which he left them? I may be lacking in curiosity about the scholarly life, but I’m just not thrilled by

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Judy Finnigan

Judy Finnigan tells us which Dane she’d take on holiday, which book she found in her mother’s bedside drawer and which book had better be on Richard Madeley’s reading list. Eloise by Judy Finnigan is published by Sphere. She tweets @judyfinnigan. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I’m currently re-reading American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld. 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. I found it in my mother’s bedside drawer. 3). Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? The Time Traveller’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. Do not judge this wonderful novel by the

Daisy Dunn

Review: The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach

During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be considered legitimate. In 1941 Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. How high is too high? This question plagued the defence of an Italian man named Fabrizio Collini some sixty years later. Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case is based upon that historical trial. Collini, who has lived in Germany since the 1950s, enters the luxury hotel suite of a man named Hans Meyer. They are near the Brandenburg Gate. He

Monday

Steven Mcgregor

Thornton Wilder’s theatrics in The Cabala

I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After a night time drive under the arms of blue mossed oaks we made it to Emory University and took our seats and the curtain rose on a Victorian living room. Cautiously, with a canine playfulness, from out behind a sofa, tromped a dinosaur. I kept thinking of this moment as I read Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala.  Originally published in 1926 before he became a renowned playwright, Wilder attempted the same tricks here. He interjects Keats, Virgil, and even incarnate

Friday

J P O'Malley

Cult status: an interview with Mike McCormack

Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. McCormack has published two novels: Crowe’s Requiem, and Notes From a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. Forensic Songs, his latest collection of short stories, fuses traditional social realism with elements of science fiction, and the detective genre. While some stories here follow the path of straightforward naturalism; analyzing the difficult relationships within families; or the alienation of emigration, others probe issues

Clarissa Tan

Last chance for the Shiva Naipaul Prize 2012

Hilary Mantel recently won her second Booker Prize, having clinched two Bookers in a row, the latest for the second book of a planned trilogy – surely a first. As we never tire of mentioning here at the Spectator, Hilary was the inaugural winner of our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, back in 1987. Her stunning essay, on living a strange, segregated life in Saudi Arabia, can be found here. The Shiva Naipaul prize, named after the late great Trinidadian author and brother of VS Naipaul, celebrates travel writing but not in the conventional sense. It is awarded every year to an essay that gives the most acute and profound observation

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.