Book Reviews

In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Raine. Two years ago, after a distinguished career as a poet and all-round man of letters, he published his first novel — and received a series of reviews that, as Woody Allen once put it, read like a Tibetan Book of the Dead. According to virtually all of them, Heartbreak was fragmented, name-dropping, pretentious, and not really a novel anyway: more a loose collection of thoughts, revealing an alarming obsession with sexual organs. But with The Divine Comedy, Raine responds with almost heroic defiance. If you felt like that about the last book, it seems to shout, try this one

Who is Britain’s greatest ever general? The BBC and the National Army Museum put the question to the public at the end of last year. The public declared the Duke of Wellington Britain’s best, together with William Slim. Professor Saul David is not so sure. His latest book, All The King’s Men: The British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, sketches the beginnings of a revision of Wellington. I asked him about this rather bold move. ‘I certainly did not set out writing the rather large section [in the book] on Wellington to bash him, but the more detail I got into about his career and how he reacted to

The Queen rarely intervenes in public life. It is a mark of the vehemence of the recent attacks on the Church of England that she has leapt to its defence, characterising it as the guardian of people of all faiths and none. The storm of words between secularists and establishmentarians will intensify tomorrow when the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, publishes his defence of faith, We Don’t Do God: The Marginalisation of Public Faith. It’s a strident book , especially as Carey was more ridiculed than revered as a liberal primate. Freddy Gray has interviewed Lord Carey in the latest issue of the Spectator, and Lord Carey summarised his points: ‘What I am getting at is that

This week’s Shelf Lifer, Mary Quant (pictured here in 1960s), invented both the mini-skirt and hot pants. If that weren’t enough, she later claimed to have invented the duvet cover. She tells us which part of the Bible she would take into solitary confinement and which character in Little Women gets her going. Her autobiography is out tomorrow. 1) As a child what did you read under the covers? Enid Blyton – My father disapproved as it was fashionably thought to be bad English. 2) Has a book ever made you cry and if so which one?   Many books and most of all those by Amelia Ann Stiggins. 3) You

Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not

Gatsby’s back. A film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring book will released later this year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Why now? Asks Philip Hensher in today’s Telegraph, a question he easily answers: ‘It’s just the novel for us. Its world reflects on bubbles and gaudy display, and people whose magnificent social position conceals an obscure history. You don’t have to look far to find Gatsby-like figures in London today. Would a modern-day Gatsby be a property developer, selling glass-walled penthouses for tens of millions? Or would a modern-day Gatsby be a Russian oligarch, with origins lost in some Siberian village and sinister staff patrolling the outer rim of