Book Reviews

Mistakes will sometimes happen even in the best-run places. Pictured with this post, by way of proof, is a 1947 Penguin paperback of Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads, with the author’s name misspelt on the spine. It’s still common to talk of ‘typographical errors’, or typos, but back in 1947 there really was such a thing: it meant a mistake made by compositors at the printer, rather than by editors or designers. Probably this was one; certainly that is what someone will have tried to tell Allen Lane. These days any mistakes are definitely our fault – in the case of the printed Spectator, indeed, they are usually my fault,

Walk into a coffee shop on any high street today and you’re confronted by an amazing array of caffeine-connected choices: flat white, red eye and doppio to name a few. We’ve become coffee connoisseurs with our own particular preferences for skinny or full fat, dry or wet. Yet the words we use to describe our favourite latte or cappuccino are fairly recent. We’ve only started to use them in the last five years or so as we’ve embraced the coffee culture of Australia and New Zealand (flat white), New York (red eye) and Italy (doppio). New trends demand new words and these global linguistic influences have quickly percolated into our

Author of classic children’s novel Carrie’s War and the Booker shortlisted Circles of Deceit, Nina Bawden has died today aged 87. Apart from writing over forty novels for adults and children, she campaigned for justice in one of her last books after the 2002 Potter’s Bar railway crash took the life of her second husband Austen Kark. Interspersed with love letters, Dear Austen tells of ‘the lamentable failure of all governments since 1945 to take proper responsibility for the country’s rail infrastructure’ and it was her attempt to do what she could ‘to put that negligence right’. Read an extract here. Bawden also read The Spectator on occasion. In January 1986 she wrote into the

On the 5th of August Mary Robinson delivered the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town. It should have been an occasion when the former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner looked back on South Africa’s achievements since the end of apartheid. Yet her speech will probably be remembered for just one sentence: ‘…the ANC’s moral authority has been eroded, tainted by allegations of corruption; a temporary betrayal of its history.’ From an old friend of the ruling party this was damning indeed, but is she right to refer to corruption as a ‘temporary betrayal?’ The ANC’s history is more complex and more difficult than supporters like Mrs Robinson

The fanfaronade for Ian McEwan’s latest book Sweet Tooth, a seventies spy novel tantalisingly based on his own life and featuring a cameo from Martin Amis, has begun ahead of its publication date tomorrow. Two puff interviews (one in the Guardian and a slightly sexier one in the Daily Mail) with McEwan managed to include everything we already know about him. The first review in the Financial Times promises a ‘rich and enjoyable’ read. Wonderful. Given we’ll be hearing quite enough about the book (which wasn’t–gasp–nominated for the Booker Prize) we’ll look at another big beast captured in the literary pages this week: Jeanette Winterson. The Daylight Gate is the

He’d probably agree with Edward Gibbon’s assessment of history as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’ but Ned Beauman’s instinct as to why we do what we do is a lot more basic. We’re motivated by sex: whether we’re having it or – as is more often the case in Beauman’s world – not having it. And he might have a point. Take for example Ernst Hanfstaengl who described his former buddy, a certain Adolf Hitler, as “a man who was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the