Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other ‘great’ character

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest

Amis: Porn is an attack on love

Pornography is in the news, and Martin Amis has been thinking about pornography. Those two facts are not related, not necessarily. Tomorrow’s issue of the Spectator contains an interview with Amis, who is on vintage form. Pornography, he says, is an attack on love; it is the repudiation of significance in sex. Pornography has, he says, created a ‘big disconnection for human beings’ between their conceptions of sex and its biological realities. He says, ‘There is no more talk of love in porn than there is about having babies. It’s as if you made babies by some other way, like sneezing.’ I recommend reading the interview when it is published

Dirty secrets

‘Now most lobbyists spend their days clicking through PowerPoint slides about obscure policies while bored junior congressional staff check their BlackBerries under the table. Those guys are the rabble. Comparing them to the folks at the Davies Group is like comparing Zales to Tiffany and Cartier. Davies is among a handful of strategic consulting firms that do very little formal lobbying. These outfits are run by Washington heavies—ex–House Speakers, ex–secretaries of state, ex–national security advisers—and they exert a far more powerful and lucrative influence through the Beltway’s back channels. They’re not registered as lobbyists. They don’t do volume. They don’t advertise. They have relationships. They’re discreet. And they’re very, very

Out of the deep

It is a pretty toothy jaw of hell that Philip II of Spain, the Doge of Venice, and the Pope kneel before in prayer in a famous El Greco painting of the late 1570s. Philip and the other rulers of the so-called Holy League might just observe within hell’s mouth the skeletons of those they deemed Infidels — the very Turks, perhaps, their men had recently defeated off the Gulf of Corinth in 1571.  For a struggle so bloody, the Battle of Lepanto that inspired El Greco’s painting makes a relatively cameo appearance in David Abulafia’s masterful human history of the Mediterranean Sea. Even now in paperback, The Great Sea is

Discovering poetry: Thomas Wyatt’s dangerous games

‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle tame and meek That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they have put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise Twenty times better: but once in special In thin array after a pleasant guise When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,

Across the literary pages: Amis Asbo special

The promotional tour for Lionel Asbo: State of England has been suspiciously quiet. The fact that Martin Amis hasn’t sworn, bitched or nominated the queen as guinea pig for euthanasia booths stirred the press into feverish levels of anticipation. Had the OAP (Old Age Provocateur) finally lost his teeth? Or was he simply biding his time before biting back? A satire on Lionel Asbo – Wayne Rooney look-alike and dedicated chav –  and his lottery win, it seems written to offend … even without subplots involving teenage pregnancy (she &”was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus”), incest with a thirty-something year old granny, pit bulls and acid attacks.

The art of fiction: Michael Morpurgo

The rallying call to save libraries – about as unifying a topic as the monarchy at the moment – was taken up by Michael Morpurgo in his slot at cultural juggernaut, the Hay Festival, last week when he called the closures a form of child abuse and tantamount to inciting more riots.  During the Hay interview, timed to promote his memoirs and accompanying short story collection, the former children’s laureate, in typically self-deprecating style, did not attribute his success to talent so much as to the joy his mother took in reading aloud to him. The reader rather than author is at the heart of Michael Morpurgo’s art of fiction, which

Interview: Evgeny Morozov and the net delusion

You are reading this article thanks to the greatest invention of the last 50 years: the internet. The web is often regarded as a panacea for absolutely everything. It is revolutionising the world’s economy. It is changing leisure and entertainment. And it is also a political tool that can liberate oppressed people. Jared Cohen, a former internet guru at the US State Department, once remarked: ‘Any combination of these [digital] tools [Facebook, Google etc.] allows for a greater chance of civil society organizations coming to fruition regardless of how challenging the environment.’ There is nothing that this incredible device can’t do. It is the greatest ever democratiser. But, a few

Shelf Life: Paul Daniels

Paul Daniels, whose first name is actually Newton, is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He tells us what he’s reading at the moment and what he thinks about Janet Street Porter. His website is found at pauldaniels.co.uk 1) What are you reading at the moment? Charles Dickens by Michael Slater 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Water Babies by the Reverend Charles Kingsley 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? No, never 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? This is an old

Fiction by subscription

What if you could pay £20 a year and get two good new books in return, with your name printed in the back of them? It sounds good to me, which is why I’ve just subscribed to And Other Stories, a new independent publisher that operates in this collaborative, subscription-based manner. By essentially paying for your copy of a book before it’s printed, you help to enable the whole process. Brilliant for all involved. This is an interesting model for And Other Stories to have chosen because, while it seems so revolutionary, in actual fact it’s surprisingly similar to publishing’s traditional set-up. The big publishing houses also operate on a

RIP Ray Bradbury, 1920 – 2012

The revered science fiction, horror and mystery writer Ray Bradbury has died aged 91. He was best known for Fahrenheit 451, his blockbuster of 1953. He became known as a curmudgeon, and was something of a Luddite. He was a virulent opponent of the internet, which he viewed as a transient nonsense, doomed to fail. He refused to allow his books to be sold in digital editions, a stance which was curtailed last year when his publishers made it a condition of his contract. His recalcitrance was perhaps borne of his love of the printed book and of old fashioned libraries. He maintained that libraries were one of the few

Across the literary pages: Post-Jubilee special

Now we’ve all had our fill of bunting, bladders and BBC-bashing, it’s time to turn our minds to more high-minded pursuits, starting with a long overdue glance at the weekend’s book pages.   And you can’t get higher minded than a Nobel Laureate. 74-year-old Peruvian novelist, and ex-presidential candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa has a new book out. Called The Dream of the Celt, it’s about Sir Roger Casement, the Irish-born diplomat who was executed for treason in 1916.   When the Telegraph’s Nicholas Shakespeare asked Llosa to explain his motive for writing, he replied: ‘In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It’s something that gives me what real

The world in arms

The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, Britain at last declared war on Hitler. Infamously, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test in occupied Poland. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, over 5,000 Jews were murdered behind the Polish lines. One year into the occupation a ghetto was established in Warsaw as a holding place for Jews prior to their deportation and death. A total of 265,000 of the city’s

The courage of countless generations

The most stirring sermon I ever heard was delivered by a company sergeant-major in the Black Watch to a cadre of young lance-corporals, barely 19 years old, who were about to experience their first deployment to Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Like an old-fashioned Presbyterian minister, he warned them of the dangers of the world, in this case roof-top snipers and stone-throwing rioters, and the temptation these presented to the unwary soul, in this case, as he put it, ‘to run like buggery’. But they would not succumb, he said; indeed, they would lead their sections looking such dangers fearlessly in the face, because they were armed with a greater

Hero or villein?

‘Not one word’, exclaimed Turgenev of Tolstoy, ‘not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us!’ The recurrent underlying theme of A.N. Wilson’s prize-winning biography of Tolstoy, now re-issued after a quarter of a century, is the novelist as grand impersonator. Wilson (a prolific novelist himself) believes that there is a strong impulse in novelists to don masks or test alter egos, and that this impulse rioted in Tolstoy’s character. Throughout his long life Tolstoy switched between playing at sad orphan, landowner, libertine, crazed gambler, spiritual elder, holy fool, paterfamilias, historian, village idiot, cobbler and dissident. Sometimes he postured as a bearded prophet, doling out portentous

Girls and boys come out to play

‘You are in the polymorphous-perverse stage,’ the school psychiatrist tells the assembled boys of Favorite River Academy in Vermont in the late 1950s. Just how polymorphously perverse his audience turns out to be would have surprised even Dr Grau, had he not fallen over drunk one evening and frozen to death. It is no accident that the all-male private school in which much of the action of John Irving’s new novel takes place should be in a town with the unusual name of First Sisters. Irving’s narrator is a bisexual novelist called William Abbott, known to friends and family as Billy. ‘Abbott’ is in fact the name of his stepfather,

The pen was mightier than the brush

Of the making of books about the Pre-Raphaelites, it appears, there is no end. Like the Bloomsberries, most of the PRB are more interesting to read about than the study of their work would suggest: a few towering talents stalk the mountaintops, while many lesser ones lurk in valleys and foothills. George Boyce was one of those lesser talents — a watercolourist of some small fame among his colleagues (although he was 52 before he was elected to full membership of the Old Water-Colour Society). His friend Henry Tanworth Wells had more worldly recognition, if not the esteem of the avant-garde: as a portraitist he painted the great, the good,

Rus in urbe

One of the pleasures of my week is walking across St James’s Square. The slightly furtive sense of trespassing as one opens the ironwork gates; the decision as to whether or not to follow the circuit of gravel paths or go straight across the grass; the equestrian statue of William III and readers from the London Library eating sandwiches. Although the surrounding architecture is an odd mishmash, the shape of the square and its urban form preserves a strong sense of its original 17th-century layout. St James’s Square plays a prominent role in the narrative of Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s magisterial account of the ups and downs of the London square. It

Good queen, bad subject

There is a paradox at the heart of all books about the Queen. The very thing which makes her such a successful constitutional monarch is what makes her an impossible subject for biography. We do not know anything about her. The only book which brings her to life as a person is Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses (reprinted by Orion, £8.99), a vivid picture of nursery life when Lilibet and Margaret Rose were growing up at 145 Piccadilly. Crawfie saw it all — the neatness, the horse-obsession, the deference to the rather awful mother, the selfless sense of duty, and the goodness. No wonder this truth-teller had to be banished,