Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

Hollywood Costumes: Reinventing the celebrity

While the V&A is ever the place to move with the times, it values its traditions and knows what it does best. The museum’s major forthcoming Autumn exhibition, Hollywood Costume, promises to be a crowd pleaser. In many ways it will hark back to the groundbreaking 1979 V&A exhibition, The Art of Hollywood, which focused on film set — as opposed to fashion — design. Orson Welles wrote the foreword to the earlier exhibition’s catalogue: ‘Dear John Hambley, Thanks, but I don’t think I’m a good choice for the foreword to your catalogue. Menzies is the only name on your list I could enthuse over. You should realize that in

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Marvell’s seductive voice

Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use, Did after him the World seduce: And from the fields the Flow’rs and Plants allure, Where Nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos’d within the Gardens square A dead and standing pool of Air: And a more luscious Earth for them did knead, Which stupifi’d them while it fed. The Pink grew then as double as his Mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint. And Flow’rs themselves were taught to paint. […] ‘Tis all enforc’d; the Fountain and the Grot; While the sweet Fields do lye forgot: Where willing Nature does to

Monday

David Blackburn

Obama 2.0, ready to try politics

Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor’s honour at St. Stephen’s Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate portrait of Michelle Obama, who has begun ‘pushing back’ against ‘an independent journalistic project’.   According to Kantor, the First Lady is a strong personality, quick to rebuke others but loath to take criticism herself. Obama’s reaction to the publication of ‘The Obamas: A mission, a marriage has inadvertently substantiated Kantor’s claim, with Michelle Obama

David Blackburn

Dressed to Kill Bill

It’s a strange experience, to stand before the checked pinafore dress that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. It is very plain, and its technicoloured blue has faded into a pallid grey. Yet it is instantly arresting, instantly fantastic. The word ‘iconic’ is as well-worn as an old jumper, but it’s an apt description of that simple dress and its place in Hollywood lore. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s major autumn exhibition this year is to be Hollywood Costume. You might sigh in anguish that the V&A has devoted yet another show to clothes and cinema — this will be its fourth in the last couple of years after

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Authors rail against attack on free speech in India

Jaipur — It was a sad weekend here for freedom of speech, as the Rushdie controversy took one strange turn after another. Having read from the banned The Satanic Verses on Friday night, in protest of Rushdie’s absence at the festival, writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi and Jeet Thayil were advised by lawyers to leave Jaipur or risk arrest by Rajasthan authorities. By Saturday evening Kunzru was in Bangkok with his fiancée, the novelist Katie Kitamura, who had also been scheduled to speak at the festival. She said in an email that ‘the situation developed incredibly fast, and we were obliged to leave the country almost immediately’. Kunzru

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Age of ideas

Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to write, his friend Timothy Snyder proposed making this book — out of the edited transcripts of a long conversation they would conduct over several weeks in 2009. The book-as-conversation is, as Snyder points out in his foreword, a rather Eastern-European artefact. That’s apt to its content: Snyder is a historian of the region. Judt has

Anthony Sattin

Spirit of place | 21 January 2012

There are two ways of viewing the changes sweeping through the Arab world in general and Cairo in particular. There is the significance of individual events, such as the moment that the Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight and lit the fuse on protests that brought down the government of President Ben Ali. And there is the bigger picture, one that looks back at the years of economic decline, decades of abuse, mismanagement and corruption. In this long awaited book, the London-based Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif gives us two very different views of individual events, a tale of two halves. The larger and more successful part of the

Maureen Waller

Queen of sorrows

She was the ill-educated younger child of the Duke of York; a mere female, she was sickly and not expected to survive, let alone become Queen. But, as this monumental and long overdue reappraisal shows, it was a mistake to underestimate Anne Stuart. She had always been ambitious and had great tenacity. She had no qualms about putting her beloved Church of England above loyalty to her father and King, the Catholic James II. Indeed, she was a key player in the Revolution of 1688. Legislation declaring that the monarch could not be Catholic or married to a Catholic meant that the question of her Catholic half brother’s legitimacy and

A.N. Wilson

Helping our unbelief

Over 125 of the 320 pages in this book are either blank, or taken up with black-and-white illustrations, of subjects as various as Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie, slates arranged by Richard Long, Buddhist truth-seekers going for a walk in a wood, and a little boy having his Bar Mitzvah in a New York restaurant. It is in the remaining 200 or so pages that the author must persuade his readers that there is no reason why atheists should not practise a religion, or, if they are not disposed to follow one of the existing cults, why they should not make one up for themselves. It is an

Alexander Fiskeharrison

Stronger than fiction

I think it was a Frenchman — it usually is — who observed that the English love their animals more than their children. At first glance, General Jack Seely’s Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse — originally published as My Horse Warrior in 1934 — is striking proof of this. In an entire book devoted to the exploits of his horse, the author’s final mention of his son Frank is stunning in its brevity: We had a last gallop together along the sands, Warrior and [Frank’s charger] Akbar racing each other; then I drove him in a motor-car to rejoin his regiment .… He asked me to

James Mather

Holy law

In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection was a blessing from God, they pronounced, and all believers touched with it were bound for paradise.  The hordes who fled their villages to escape the disease were apparently unconvinced. So too was an Andalusian scholar named Ibn al-Khatib, whose observations showed it to be spread by human contagion, not the hand of the Almighty.

Friday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Festival organisers threatened with arrest over Rushdie controversy

Jaipur – In a dramatic end to the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, four writers rallied in support of Salman Rushdie by reading from The Satanic Verses. The book has been banned in India since 1988. As a result, a warrant was issued for the festival organizers; arrests which, at time of writing, have not been resolved.   In a statement made earlier today, Rushdie said he would not travel to Jaipur as planned because of intelligence reports that paid assassins were being sent from Mumbai to kill him. The author wrote on Twitter, “Very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons

David Blackburn

Assassins possibly after Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has withdrawn from the Jaipur Literary Festival. His statement makes for sobering reading. Will this ever end? For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival at the request of the local authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such precautions as might be necessary to allow me to come and address the Festival audience in circumstances that were comfortable and safe for all. I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to “eliminate” me. While I

Austen Saunders

This seat of Mars

Warfare was the fact of life in Britain from the reign of Henry VII to that of George II. Nobody who lived on these islands could escape it. It is estimated that, between the battles of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Culloden in 1746, 1.2 million people died as a direct result of warfare in Britain and Ireland. During the sequence of civil wars that ran from 1638 to 1660, 4.5 per cent of the English population, 9.2 per cent of the Scottish, and 20.6 per cent of the Irish population were killed. These were catastrophes far greater than the First World War (in which 2.61 per cent of the total

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Gilbert Adair

Earlier this week, Steven McGregor wrote a touching memorial to Gilbert Adair, the late novelist and critic. Adair self-deprecatingly described himself as ‘one of the great unread writers’, but two of his books were made into films. He adapted The Holy Innocents with the director Bernado Bertolucci; the ensuing film was called The Dreamers, and Adair later revised and re-released the novel under that name. Love and Death on Long Island was also filmed, starring John Hurt. The clip above captures Adair’s sense of humour (he was master of parody — The Rape of the Clock, a satire of The Rape of the Lock, being his most famous pastiche), and

Thursday

David Blackburn

Apple of knowledge

Publishers’ eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come in the form of ‘video, documents, apps, books, shared syllabus and assignments’, and are priced at $14.99 or less. The major innovation is a new software programme, iBooks Author, which will allow teachers to create or modify textbooks and teaching materials to their own specifications. The software is free, which is a huge incentive for American high schools

David Blackburn

Wiki-world

Did you survive without Wikipedia yesterday? English Wikipedia, and perhaps as many as 7,000 other websites, was blacked out for 24 hours in protest at the passage of two internet piracy bills through the US Congress. Simple souls merely dusted off their battered encyclopaedia, but the technically astute lifted the blackout with a host of sharp ruses and delicate subterfuge. This asks the question: can the internet be policed effectively when the intrepid will always bypass the impediments? The question has been exercising European governments and law courts for a number of years. In Britain, the Digital Economy Act (DEA) was given Royal Assent in the ‘wash up’ prior to the 2010 election. The Act is

Daisy Dunn

Reviving the forgotten queen

The dowdy Queen Anne is back in fashion. Anne Somerset’s new biography of Queen Anne, that most enigmatic of monarchs, is published today. It is nearly 300 years since Anne’s death, and a popular account of her life is well overdue. She assumed the throne of a frankly second-rate power and left it a dominant force in global politics and commerce. That transformation is hugely important to the history of Britain as a nation state; and it merits widespread discussion because Anne’s crowning achievement, the Union of Scotland and England, is under threat. The book is timely; and it is also exhaustive — covering both the general political picture and Anne’s intimate history. In today’s

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Kate Williams

Fresh from sixty radio and TV appearances in 2011 alone, the popular historian and constitutional expert, Kate Williams, is on Shelf Life this week. She tells us about her religious fervours under the covers and what’s worse than finding Mein Kampf on someone’s bookshelf. Her first novel, The Pleasures of Men, is out tomorrow. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and H.B. Morse’s 1920s work The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China — my next novel is about China in the nineteenth century. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Bible. I experienced an

Steven Mcgregor

Remembering Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair was a mentor to me, even in the year following his stroke, which was when we became closest, and I knew him best. I had just left the US Army and moved to London when I met Gilbert at a cocktail party at a friend’s flat in Maida Vale. Though it was an unseasonably warm autumn evening, he still wore a suit and tie, with a gray scarf draped around his shoulders. He looked remarkably urbane, every bit the author and critic, and we launched into a conversation about Christopher Isherwood, a writer that we both admired. “Do you want to touch the hem of my sleeve?” he