Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

James Stourton

Scotland’s phoenix

The late squarson, Henry Thorold, was fond of pointing out that his Shell Guide to Lincolnshire was the bestselling of the series, not because of any intrinsic merit but because no guide to the county had been produced since the early 19th century. The same might turn out to be true of the latest volume of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, Dundee and Angus. The county, which changed its name in the 19th century, has not been described since Forfarshire Illustrated (1843) and the five volumes of Alexander J. Warden’s Angus or Forfarshire (1880-85). The book under review cannot quite claim to be the last ‘Pevsner’. Whilst most English counties are

Marcus Berkmann

Living the music

I used to read NME when I was young. Of course I did. I was obsessed by pop music in its every colour and my youth happened to coincide with the old inky’s heyday, or certainly one of them. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Musical Express was one of four weekly music magazines. Record Mirror was for kids (people a year or two younger than us). Melody Maker was worthy and a bit dull. Sounds was brash and lively, but too keen on heavy rock for my taste. NME was broader in range and more ambitious in tone, and it had the writers: strung-out drug zombie

Nicolas Barker

Figures in a landscape

As you cross the Trent, you are very much aware that you have moved from the south to the north country. The next great divide is the Tyne, with the dramatic straggle of Newcastle stretching east and west. Beyond lies mile upon mile of Northumberland, all the way to the Scottish border, arable land for grazing (punctuated with coal mines) by the coast, giving way to heathery moors and countless sheep. The centre of this often wild and always beautiful land is Alnwick, with roads stretching out, to north and south the Great North Road, east to the fishing port of Alnmouth, westward to the Roman Wall and the Cheviots.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

On the way to the forum

In 150 BC, Cato the Elder arrived in the Senate House in Rome with an eye-catching basket of figs. This redoubtable statesman — often referred to as ‘censorius’, an epithet I have coveted since my childhood — was famous, apart from his censoriousness, for his conviction that the most important thing for Rome at any given moment was the military destruction of its enemy, Carthage. Yet here he was, instead of making another swingeing speech on that topic, apparently about to eat his lunch. Cato picked out an especially juicy looking fig. He took a bite. And then he asked, in his most censorious of tones, ‘Do you know where

Andrew Gimson

A safe pair of hands | 7 April 2012

Michael Spicer is too honourable to be a brilliant diarist. As he himself says, ‘I eschew tittle-tattle or small talk.’ These diaries cannot be read, as Chips Channon’s or Alan Clark’s can be, because they offer a joyful cascade of indiscretions. When Clark dies in September 1999, Spicer writes of his fellow Tory MP: ‘We never really hit it off. I thought he was untrustworthy.’ Spicer’s father was a soldier, and these diaries read like the history of a regiment written by one of its most loyal officers. A few pages are devoted to Spicer’s hotheaded youth, in which he sets up Pest (‘Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism’) and

Andro Linklater

Not quite cricket

To the French, Albion’s expertise in perfidy will come as no surprise. But centuries of warfare have given them time to learn. With their experience only dating back to 1914, the Germans clearly found it difficult to grasp during the second world war that nowhere is the truth more expertly and instinctively spun than in the land of the gentleman. While a schoolchild soon masters the lie simple, and the lie financial merely requires a degree of brazenness easily developed by proximity to other people’s money, the lie belligerent demands an instinct for dis-simulation that must be bred in the bone of its practitioners to be carried off convincingly.Thus, alongside

Ariane Bankes

Where dreams take shape

The question of what artists actually get up to in their studios has always intrigued the rest of us — that mysterious alchemical process of transforming base materials into gold, or at least into something marketable in the present volatile art world. Today’s studio might as likely be a laptop as laboratory, factory, hangar or garden shed, but is nevertheless an apt prism through which to explore the notion of creativity, and this boldly ambitious volume does just that, interviewing 120 British artists in a freewheeling way about their practice and process, inspiration and ideas. Sanctuary pays tribute to Private View, that inimitable portrait by John Russell, Bryan Robertson and

Friday

David Blackburn

The KJV on Easter

I wanted to find a YouTube clip of a classical British actor reading of Christ’s Passion from the KJV. There must be such a thing, but I can’t find it among the morass of American, Spanish and Pentecostal recordings. That seems to signify the growing irrelevance of Anglicanism and Englishness in this digital world. But, who needs Ken Branagh when you can read the greatest book ever written at the click of a mouse. As it is Easter, here is ‘The Suffering Servant’ prophesy — taken from the book of Isaiah, chapter 53. 1Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?  2For he

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Interview: Tom Holland on the origins of Islam

In the fifth century BC Herodotus of Halicarnassus set out a history of hostilities between the Greeks and the Persians. For all his quirky non-sequiturs (Ethiopians’ skin is black, so must be their semen…) he fulfilled his not-so-modest objective to immortalize the deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, in particular, the reason they warred against one another. Tom Holland (who is, incidentally, in the process of translating Herodotus’ Histories) evokes more than a little of this spirit in his new book, In the Shadow of the Sword, an intrepid history of the evolution of the Arab Empire. From Rubicon to Persian Fire and Millennium Holland has hurtled through ancient history

Mark Mason

Only connect | 5 April 2012

Most of the time life is messy. But sometimes — just occasionally — it all comes together. I’d been reading Howards End. One of the classics I’d never got round to. Hadn’t even seen the film starring Emma Thompson, on account of it being a film starring Emma Thompson. By two-thirds of the way through I was still undecided; novels from over a century ago can be hard work, largely because of the wordiness. (Many of Dickens’s champions admitted that in the recent Charles-fest.) You know there must be something there — books don’t become classics for nothing — but it can take a bit, often a big bit, of

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka has broken her busy reading schedule to answer this week’s Shelf Life questions. She admits to a fascination with Biggles and Paddington Bear. Her latest book, Various Pets Alive and Dead, is published by Penguin. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Old Filth by Jane Gardam (almost finished — would have if wasn’t writing this), Together by Richard Sennett, Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman.   2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Biggles was my beloved under-the-covers companion.   3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? I sobbed so much reading War and

Fleur Macdonald

Funny women

The disappointment of second place at the Dionysiac festival might have been easier to bear had Sophocles known his Oedipus would eventually give credibility to a slew of neuroses and skew the literary canon forever. Even Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth would be lined up for a session on the couch. But he could never have imagined, while twiddling his stylus, that his version of the tragic hero would become the template for modern man. Likewise, as she twizzled her olive pick in some uptown bar back in ‘97, Candace Bushnell probably had little idea she was about to unleash a myth just as potent, taxomizing female social relations for the next decade …

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Evgeny Morozov: Digital snooping is a security risk

Acclaimed author Evgeny Morozov is in London promoting the new edition of his book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. It argues that internet freedom is an illusion and that everyone’s freedom is at stake. It is timely, then, that his trip has coincided with the web surveillance row that has been shaking the coalition. Morozov met with the Spectator this afternoon, and this is what he said about ‘email snooping’:  DB: With email snooping, I’d assumed that the security services did that already? EM: They do it already, but they do it retroactively. So they can get the information out, which is what they call communications data, which is basically

David Blackburn

Fictionalising totalitarianism

Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room gave Hilary Mantel and J.M. Coetzee some stern competition on the 2009 Booker shortlist. Mawer’s evocation of place stays long in the memory, but his crowning achievement was the description of the glass room itself — a minimalist house, built in the countryside above Prague, through which the savage history of 20th century Europe is told. The book’s flaw was the scale of Mawer’s ambition: trying to tell that exhausting history in just a few hundred pages. It is a strange criticism in this, the era of the literary doorstop, but The Glass Room was nowhere near long enough. I hoped that Mawer would return to the 20th century’s

David Blackburn

Trans-Atlantic rivalries

Everyone remembers an inspiring teacher. The teacher who sticks in my mind was a bearded sage who loved Hardy and celebrated Winterval. I know in hindsight that he was a self-indulgent charlatan; but his wide-reading and enthusiasm were enthralling. That last quality made him a good teacher as well as a memorable one: it encouraged pupils to read beyond the plain texts set by stolid examiners, and allowed them to think for themselves, just a little bit. But his enthusiasm could be his undoing. He had a weakness for making drastic announcements about the ‘state of fiction’ or the ‘role of the author’, which even his enraptured students recognised as

Monday

Steven Mcgregor

The battle for free speech in China

I haven’t been much drawn to erotica or political allegory, but Chen Xiwo’s I Love my Mum changed that. Relaxed, in an open necked shirt and jeans, at a recent English PEN event in Bloomsbury, Xiwo looked the antithesis of a persecuted writer. He appeared with a range of other speakers, from exiled writers to documentary filmmakers, to discuss contemporary literature in China. Many writers at the event are trying to provoke, trying to inspire change. Xiwo, for instance, penned a novel gilded in matricide and incest to comment on the Chinese state, aptly titled, I Love my Mum. It was banned in 2007; the reason why was ‘classified information.’

Daisy Dunn

Mother tongues

Elif Shafak, the most widely read novelist in Turkey, was in advocatory mood at Oxford Literary Festival last Saturday. Lamenting the demise of the kind of oral tradition former generations once extolled in Turkey, she illustrated some of the ways in which language in a written culture can be used to address barriers. Above all, and in whatever form, ‘we need stories’, she explained. The curiously nomadic Dr. Shafak was born to Turkish parents, raised by her mother (a diplomat) and grandmother, and only acquired English after moving from her birthplace in Strasbourg to Madrid as a child. Today she speaks with such acuity in English about so many topics

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 2 April 2012

Ben Macintyre is back. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is the last instalment in his trilogy about British espionage in World War Two, following the hugely successful Agent Zig-Zag and Operation Mincemeat. In Double Cross, Macintrye tells of how a cabal of eccentric double agents hoodwinked the Nazis into believing that the allied invasion of Europe would come through Norway or the Pays de Calais. Or that is the narrative he presents in his uniquely compelling and humorous style. Here is what reviewers have made of it so far. Sir Max Hastings was ecstatic, but not uncritical, in the Sunday Times (£): ‘I quibble with this book’s subtitle

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Prophetic times

The subject here is colossal, covering a substantial stretch of the later Roman empire, the last years of the Persian empire, the conversion of the Arabs, the spread of Christianity and what happened to Judaism. The time span runs, effectively, from the death of Jesus to the moment in the eighth century when the Abbasids acquired through violence the vast empire of the Umayyads, stretching from the Loire to the Hindu Kush, and founded Baghdad. The title of Tom Holland’s book is rather studiously general, but his central topic is unmistakable: the founding and establishment of Islam and its political and martial setting. If Holland didn’t want to make a

Richard Davenporthines

A polished fragment

One evening nearly 40 years ago the world’s press descended on Patrick White in Sydney: they rampaged outside his house, pounded its doors, shouted through windows, camped on the lawn. The reason for this hullabaloo was that White had beaten Saul Bellow in the race for the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1973. Yet in contrast to Bellow, there is scant recognition of White’s name nowadays. His books are seldom read. There is no bodyguard of loyal emulators, as Bellow has with Martin Amis. The publication — in the year of White’s centenary — of an austerely precise slice of his literary remains provides a moment to recall and appraise