Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Arkansas tales

Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of phobias: of clowns, of old furniture, of Benjamin Disraeli’s hair. Brutally dyslexic, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for Sling Blade, but writing a memoir, he says, would be beyond him. So, in an intriguing act of creative symbiosis, his friend Kinky Friedman, the Jewish country- singer and novelist, has taped him talking to friends late at night and turned these rambles into a book. The Billy Bob Tapes (Virgin, £18.99) has many of the flaws of ordinary ghosted showbiz memoirs. But Thornton has wonderful stories to tell, particularly

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Two iron ladies in the Andes

A long-exposure photograph of the night sky will show you something that you never see, however often you look at the stars: thousands of perfect curves, concentrically arranged around an invisible pinhead. Everything is wheeling slowly about a single point. A good book or a great adventure, fictional or real, often does the same. There is a fulcrum: a still, quiet centre to the tale. For me, for instance, in Orwell’s Burmese Days, the moment when, walking alone in the forest, John Flory sees a green pigeon, is that centre. On page 30 of Meriel Larken’s thrilling and moving real-life adventure, one that swishes us across continents, through jungles, up

Nicola Shulman

Poet of the middling sort

‘If you cn rd ths msg, you cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb’. So ran the advertisement for the Brook Street Bureau employment agency. It was the ubiquitous ornament of tube trains, buses and escalators in the 1970s, now seen no more and forgotten, at least by me, until Andrew Hadfield’s biography of Edmund Spenser whistled it back from the void. Here is Spenser’s career in a nutshell, according to the emphases of Hadfield’s study, a phenomenal work of scholarship and insight, if not itself a nutshell at almost 600 closely- printed pages. Hadfield is at pains to show Spenser, the pre-eminent poet of the 16th century,

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Not grinning but scowling

I am deeply envious of Chris Cleeve, so maybe everything that follows should be taken with a pinch of salt. This is a guy whose first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award and whose second nestled snugly in the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. ‘Stunning,’ said the International Herald Tribune. ‘Stunning,’ said Newsweek. ‘Stunning,’ said Bookmarks Magazine. From the dust jacket of his latest, the author’s wry, clever, benevolent features (I just wish I were as nice as him) radiate calm: relax, they seem to say. I’m going to take you on a journey. All of which can only leave you thinking: wow. And: boy, this

Michael Howard

Whitehall’s murky recesses

Peter Hennessy is one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators of our time, so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that I approached his latest book. This was increased when I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that he had stood as the Conservative candidate in his school’s 1964 mock general election. My anticipation was heightened by his introduction, which promises an examination of the roles of myth and imagination in the writing of history. Of the many quotations we are treated to, the one which seemed best to reinforce that promise appears on the very first page, and comes from Enoch Powell: All history is myth. It

Anthony Daniels

For richer, for poorer

It is an old-established truth, a truism in fact, that money does not buy you happiness — though, as the late Professor Joad pointed out, it does allow you to be miserable in comfort. Yet the great majority of people, knowing this, nevertheless devote their energies to increasing their wealth, which suggests that happiness is not actually their ultimate goal. In fact, most people don’t have an ultimate goal. The authors of this book, father and son, seek to persuade us that we should devote more of our energies to things that are done for their own sake, that are good in themselves, rather than spend our lives on the

Philip Hensher

End of a dry season

The Letters of T.S.Eliot is a project which already seems to belong to another world, of leisure and detailed scholarship. It was conceived of decades ago, and the first volume, under the editorship of Eliot’s widow Valerie, came out in 1988. A second volume, with the support of the excellent John Haffenden, emerged 21 years later; this third takes us only up to 1927, with a good 40 years of a busy professional life to follow. There may be a dozen volumes to go, and the undertaking in the end will rival the great Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters in scale. The editing of the Eliot letters is exemplary in

Paul Johnson

Fearsome and devilish

This life of the 11th Lord Lovat, executed on Tower Hill in 1747, in the aftermath of the ‘Forty-Five’ Rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, is primarily a work of pietas. Its author is the daughter-in-law of the last Lord Lovat, who landed with the first fighting troops of the D-Day invasion of Europe, striding ahead of them accompanied only by his piper. But Sarah Fraser deserves to be acclaimed as a notable biographer, too, for she tells a complex and sometimes bewildering story which she has amassed from a vast quantity of often intractable material. This is a brave and meaty book. The years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688

Friday

Steven Mcgregor

Exiled at the Poetry Parnassus

While the Ancient Greeks ceased hostilities for the Olympic Games, this summer will be business as usual in many parts of the world. Exiled poets from Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, China, and Uganda presented their work yesterday afternoon at the Southbank center, participating in the ongoing Poetry Parnassus. Readings took place in the cavernous, skylit, Front Room at QEH. Yet the solemnity of spoken word kept being interrupted by river watchers on the terrace coming in to order more drinks at the bar or the walkie-talkie of the janitor as she made her way around the audience, sweeping up rubbish. Mir Mahfuz Ali, who was shot in the throat by a

Geraint Anderson

In the service of Mammon

The Libor scandal continues to shock, prompting bewilderment as well as disgust. The mood has turned against the City, with the FT suggesting that it ‘may be necessary to retire this generation of flawed leaders.’  In the piece below, Geraint Anderson, a former stockbroker and whistleblower, explains why his latest book, Payback Time, a story of people taking revenge on a bank they blame for their friend’s suicide, was inspired by the self-loathing caused by working for Mammon and the divisiveness which the crash has caused.      I did not write Payback Time for the money. This is not an attack on my publisher’s generosity, but a reflection of the

Thursday

The Spectator

Shelf Life special: The Skidelskys

Robert and Edward Skidelsky have written a new book for our times, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, which is published today. In their own words: ‘it is the story of… how we came to be ensnared by the dream of progress with purpose, riches without end.’ But what have this father son combination been reading while penning this and their other books? The answer is: rather more than just John Maynard Keynes. Robert Skidelsky 1) What are you reading at the moment? Laurent Binet, HHhH 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? J.B.Priestley, The Good Companions

Mark Mason

Letters to the author

Have you ever written to an author? It’s the norm these days, or at least emailing or Tweeting them is. But it’s not that long since contacting a writer meant applying pen to paper, then stamp to envelope, then feet to pavement until you reached the postbox. Real effort, and not that many people did it. Publishing in the old days, before writers all had ‘web presences’, could be a lonely business, the only real feeling for how your book had been received coming from newspaper reviews and sales figures. Yet when contact is made there can be moments of beauty. There can also be moments of terror, and indeed

Wednesday

William Osborne

A dirty, weaselly word

The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill?   I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Samantha Brick

Journalist and former TV producer, Samantha Brick was recently castigated for her Daily Mail article suggesting that some might be intimidated by her good looks. But since we’re always game at Shelf Life, we invited her to reveal which books she would read during solitary confinement, where she wouldn’t like to find herself with Patrick Bateman and what she used to read under the covers. Samantha Brick has a personal website. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Lots of ex-pats-who-have-relocated-to-France type memoirs. I’ve just negotiated a deal to write my own warts’n’all version of living the French ‘dream’, so I thought I really ought to read the others

Tuesday

Michael Henderson

The alternative Olympic song book

The song list drawn up for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is a disgrace. Surely everybody knows that by now, but then what can you expect when the selection is made by a pair of disc jockeys? There is nothing that reflects our nation’s love affair with the sea, no acknowledgement of our bawdy humour, no hymn or carol, no G and S, and the brass band appears somewhat bathetically only in the theme tune to Coronation Street. You could pop into any snug bar in the kingdom, and find a pair of sozzled old topers who could run up a better list. The obsession with pop music

J P O'Malley

Racism and real estate

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm. Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have

Clive Aslet

Et in arcadia ego

The economy is in tatters, Europe in turmoil — but don’t worry: there is an antidote to the prevailing angst, and it’s provided by this book. It could be read simply as a close look at an undemonstrative corner of the English countryside, informed by the special understanding of a landowner, Jason Gathorne-Hardy, and an artist, Tessa Newcomb. But really it offers a philosophy. ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin,’ said Voltaire. And that’s just what author and illustrator do here, both practically and imaginatively.   Each of the monthly chapters opens with a paragraph of ‘garden notes’, compiled from the diaries of working gardeners. So much for the practical side.

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Charles Cotton’s rebellion

Stanzas from ‘The Retirement’ Farewell thou busy world, and may We never meet again: Here I can eat, and sleep, and pray, And do more good in one short day, Than he who his whole age out-wears Upon thy most conspicuous theatres, Where nought but vice and vanity do reign. Good God! how sweet are all things here! How beautiful the fields appear! How cleanly do we feed and lie! Lord! what good hours do we keep! How quietly we sleep! What peace! what unanimity! How innocent from the lewd fashion, Is all our business, all our conversation! Oh my beloved rocks! that rise To awe the earth and brave

Anna Baddeley

Across the literary pages: Alastair Campbell’s Burden of Power

The publishing juggernaut that is Alastair Campbell’s diaries rumbles on, with the arrival of the fourth instalment, Burden of Power: The Countdown to Iraq. The 752-page volume covers the most tumultuous part of Blair’s premiership, taking readers from 9/11 to Campbell’s resignation two years later.   This is the sort of book whose reviews are so predictable, there’s not really any point in reading them. In fact, you could probably write your own without reading the book: ‘Those looking for revelations about Iraq will be disappointed … We don’t find out anything about Blair/Brown we didn’t know already … The prose is plain at best: Alastair Campbell is no stylist

Saturday

Frank Field

Enoch Powell as a Parliamentarian

A new collection of essays and reminisces, called Enoch at 100, has been published to mark Enoch Powell’s centenary. In this piece, Frank Field recalls his affection and admiration for his fellow parliamentarian.   When I joined the House in 1979, Enoch Powell was firmly established as one of the greatest political figures in the Commons. Whilst admired he was also feared and herein lay the strength of his parliamentary presence and its weakness. As a schoolboy I was already aware of Enoch and there were three aspects of his political life that had already impressed themselves on my mind by the time I entered the House. There was first,