Book Reviews

Nigel Havers is in the hotseat this week. He tells us about his intimacy with the Racing Post and his dreams of playing Casanova. You can catch him tonight in Corrie. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Racing Post 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? The White Hotel – DM Thomas 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? War & Peace – Leo Tolstoy, The Darling Buds

We all know the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and Dachau. But what about Pechora, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk?  Why are the camps to which Nazism’s victims were deported household words, while the Gulag archipelago – the far flung network of Soviet labour camps and penal colonies where the victims of Stalin and Communism suffered and died – remains terra incognito to most of us. Despite the vast disparity in the death toll – (Communist regimes killed, according to the respected ‘Black Book of Communism’ an estimated 100 million in the 20th century, ranging from the major monsters Lenin, Mao and Stalin to more minor Marxist killers such as Pol Pot,

‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’ And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .And still the pensive lands complain,And dead men wait as long ago,As if, much doubting, they would knowWhat they are ransomed from, beforeThey pass again their sheltering door. I stand amid them in the rain,While blusters vex the yew and vane;And on the road the weary wainPlods forward, laden heavily;And toilers with their aches are fainFor endless rest—though risen is he. Historically, most poems about Easter have been written by Christians. They are normally celebrations of faith. Thomas Hardy, however, was very self-consciously not a believer. But people’s need to understand the world in broadly religious

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

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

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

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