Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Friday

Paul Lay

Put the Civil Wars back on the syllabus, Mr Gove

The English Civil War, the Civil Wars, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms: call them what you will, they are the most important and perhaps the most exciting period in British history and they should be at the core of the school curriculum throughout the UK. That is the conclusion I came to following a question put to me by a disgruntled teacher at a recent conference in Cambridge on how I would organise the National Curriculum for history. The question was prompted, quite reasonably, by a committed and conscientious professional sick of panelists like me with little or no experience of the classroom bemoaning the shortcomings of history teaching

Thursday

Walter Ellis

Reading into that good night

New York —  Call me an old curmudgeon, but it seems to me that the only way the description World Book Day would make any sense would be if, in some way, the world was brought together by a book — preferably on the same day.   But for that to happen, J.K. Rowling would have to produce an unexpected eighth volume in the Harry Potter series — Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Expectation, perhaps — when in fact, from what one hears, she plans to enter the murky world of Ian Rankin and Edinburgh noir.   So we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Even if we could wave

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: A literary spring awakening

March is a strangely active time in the book world. Like plants that have been slumbering through the cold winter, books are beginning to wake up and stir themselves into action for the joys of spring. Please indulge me with the slightly dippy analogy, as I think it’s surprisingly pertinent. After all, spring tends to be the time that books by ‘budding’ new authors are published, and when people are more inclined to amble to a bookshop and ‘leaf’ through some books. This is a time to remember that books are of course derived from trees, even etymologically stemming from a word meaning ‘beech’. Maybe this literary spring awakening shouldn’t

David Blackburn

Dickens takes the Duff Cooper Prize

There is no stopping ‘the Inimitable’ in his bi-centenary year. The Duff Cooper Prize was awarded last night, and the winner was Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. The prize is awarded to the best work of history, biography or political science published in French or English in any given year; it is held at the French ambassador’s residence in London. Douglas-Fairhurst beat Susie Harries’ life of Pevsner, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, Anna Reid’s Leningrad and Jonathan Steinberg’s Bismarck. The Spectator has two contrasting reviews of Becoming Dickens. Judith Flanders said it was ‘a work of art’ that offered fresh psychological insights on very well worn facts; and Matthew

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Wilbur Smith

Wilbur Smith is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He tells us which books make him cry, describes the party he wishes he could have attended and lets us in on a ‘highly rewarding but rather sticky experience.’ Apparently, his agent Charles Pick once told him “Write for yourself, and write about what you know best.” He seems to have taken this piece of advice to heart. Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith is out now. Visit his Facebook to find out more.  1) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The first book I ever read under the covers at boarding school was Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor.

David Blackburn

The lost world of Lawrence Durrell

This week marks Lawrence Durrell’s centenary. Durrell was once the great white hope of British fiction, but the cult has lapsed since his sixties heyday. Richard Davenport-Hines recently reappraised the The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell’s most famous work. He wrote, ‘It is hard now to recapture the impact half a century ago of these novels’ heat, luxuriance and profanity.’ 50 years of sex and social liberalism in the West has obviously tamed Durrell’s ‘profanity’. And the conservative backlash in the Middle East has made his once exotic tale seem slightly fanciful. The cosmopolitan Levant has ceased to exist, replaced by corruption of a different kind, characterised by fear, xenophobia and oppression. Most modern eyes would read the famous

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Paxo Britannica

A ‘gigantic confidence trick’ — that is how Jeremy Paxman describes the British Empire. The first episode of the TV series which accompanies his book, Empire: What ruling the World Did to the British, aired last night. Paxman’s thesis can be reduced into a string of his trademark soundbites. British imperialism was a ‘protection racket’, based on the conceit that a handful of well-equipped soldiers and well-educated officials could provide stable government for the feckless potentates of India, Africa and the Middle East. Any challenge to British interests was ‘met with savage retaliation’, which invariably resulted in expansion. The answer, then, to the problem of imperial security was deeper and further subjugation.

Richard Foreman

Stealing Sherlock’s starlight

A new character emerged in popular fiction in the 1890s. He was intelligent, a master of disguise, accompanied by a faithful assistant and unorthodox in every way. But it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. It was the cricketer — and amateur cracksman — A.J. Raffles. Indeed, Raffles could be seen as a dashing alter-ego to the sober consulting detective. The connection between the two characters is further enhanced due to fact that the creator of Raffles, E.W. Hornung, was Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. Yet whereas Holmes has flourished for over a century (and one could argue that his popularity is greater now than ever) Raffles’s star has waned, or gone out completely for most people. Yet, ironically,

Monday

David Blackburn

Steinbeck on love

John Steinbeck was born 110 years ago today. To mark the occasion, here, courtesy of the always intriguing Letters of Note, is a letter Steinbeck wrote to his son Thom, then a teenager. It speaks for itself. New York November 10, 1958 Dear Thom: We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers. First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love

David Blackburn

A diamond jubilee

Sometimes a usually toxic stereotype can play out harmlessly, charmingly even, before your eyes. It happened to me at Jewish Book Week (JBW) yesterday. I was in a queue at the bookshop, minding my own business as the couple ahead moved to the check-out. They were an odd pair at first glance. He was tall and dishevelled, his kippah threatening to escape from his head. She was short, but beautiful — immaculate clothes, lustrous dark hair and handsome features. Her movements were precise as she advanced on the cashier, while he lingered a yard or so behind. She asked, ‘Is there a discount if you buy more than one?’ The cashier said that there

Benjamin Eastham

Preaching the faith

The first thing to tell you about Lars Iyer’s Dogma is that it is very funny. It didn’t make me laugh out loud on the tube, which seems to be the reviewer’s traditional stamp of approval for successfully comic novels, but this is partly because I didn’t read it on the tube. Had I read it on the tube I would have laughed, but silently, because I am British. The other thing to tell you is that Dogma is the second in a trilogy of what might loosely be termed philosophical novels, or more precisely novels about the inadequacies of philosophy. Which second point explains why I was so eager

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: 30 years on

It is 30 years since the Falklands war, and a flush of anniversary memoirs is being published. The best of the bunch is Down South, by former navy man Chris Parry. We’ll have an interview with Parry later this week; but, in the meantime, here’s Max Hastings (£), who made his name reporting on the war, on Parry’s account: ‘The SAS — “a strange lot” in Parry’s words — may indeed be the best of its kind in the world, but its institutional conceit creates problems both on and off the battlefield. At South Georgia, in the first British attempt to take back territory, the SAS’s insouciant insistence on landing

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A few kind words of advice for Rachel Cusk

How can we help the talented writer Rachel Cusk to overcome the extraordinary hurt she has suffered as a consequence of losing her family and, far more importantly, her feminist identity? Mrs Cusk has been explaining, at some length, and repeatedly, to like-minded souls at the Guardian the anguish occasioned by the apparent disappearance of this latter possession. She first detailed, over what seemed to be many, many thousands of words, how she felt now that her marriage had come to an end. She left her husband because she was tired of him, it seems, and her children now shuttle back and forth between the two domiciles — one familiar

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The family plot

Sam Leith explores the effect that certain writers’ relatives have had on their published works This book’s sort-of preface is a lecture on aunts and absent mothers in Jane Austen — an odd diversion, given that nowhere else in its pages are aunts, or female writers for that matter, given much of an outing. Colm Tóibín sets out his stall early doors: he’s a formalist. Noting the difficulty critics have had getting to grips with Mansfield Park’s great couch-potato Lady Bertram — is she a goodie or a baddie? — he rebukes them high-mindedly: The novel is not a moral fable or a tale from the Bible, or an exploration

Matt Ridley

Seeing red

With each passing year it becomes clearer that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease. While wind power and biofuels devastate ecosystems and economies, temperatures and sea levels rise ever more slowly, just as the greenhouse theory— minus feedbacks — predicts. As James Delingpole acutely observes, the true believers are left with a version of Pascal’s wager embodying a ‘dismally feeble grasp of cost-benefit analysis’: that, however unlikely it is, the potential cost of global warming is so high that anything is justified. Not only does this argument apply to the cure as well as the disease; it also applies to every small risk of something big

Byron Rogers

More sinned against than sinning

When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor Realdus Columbus: in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, this great man claimed to have discovered the clitoris.   But no, there is no comedy, apart from the doings of one Frances, Lady Purbeck, who in 1635, with the son of the Earl of Suffolk, lived happily and ‘adulterously’ in what

Andrew Gimson

Anglo-Saxon divide

Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of both England and Germany. In due course it occurred to him, as a man of wide cultural sympathies, that he ought to be in a position to write an interesting book about Anglo-German relations. But how to structure such a work? Oltermann is too polite to say so, but a great part of the problem is that modern English readers are abysmally ignorant of Germany. This used not to be the case: before 1914, to be educated was to be

John McEwen

How do birds fly south?

Did you know the external ‘shell’ of the ear is the pinna? That a woman’s oestrogen level alters the way she hears the male voice, making it richer, and thus may affect her choice of mate? That Pride and Prejudice was published the year (1813) that Europeans discovered the kiwil? That Leonardo da Vinci ‘was one of the first to comment on the extra-ordinary tongue of the woodpecker’? These are some indicators of the general interest of this book, subtitled ‘What It’s Like to Be a Bird’, which demonstrates humans are much more birdlike than previously thought. The principal reason is that, like them, we rely most on vision and

Ferdinand Mount

Spiritual superhero

When totting up the positives from the British Raj, people often put the railways first, followed by the Indian Civil Service or the Indian Army. The Empire was won by the sword and held by the sword. It was racially exclusive, its taxes were often predatory, and its punishments savage. But at least it left an institutional legacy that helped to make independent India a startling success against all the odds, after the bloody wound of Partition and despite the excruciating poverty of the second most populous nation on earth. But what the British bequeathed to India was not only a usable future but a usable past. This may sound

Eric Weinberger

What makes Romney run?

It can be odd to read a biography of a major political figure for whom, every day while one reads it, the story continues. Everything we hear in the news now about Mitt Romney seems to have been the case in 2008, when he first ran for president; or 2002, when after leading the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City he returned to Massachusetts and became governor (still the only election he has won); or even 1994, when his political career began with a race for US Senate against Ted Kennedy, to whom he delivered a few scares before losing comfortably, 41-58. Still the question of authenticity — what does