Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Roger Lewis: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

38 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Roger Lewis, whose book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers has been republished to mark 100 years since the comedian’s birth. Roger tells Sam about the difference between Sellers’s public persona and private life, plus his influence on comedy today. They also discuss how Roger reinvented the way biographies were written, and whether the view he had of Sellers as a teenager changed through writing the book. Produced by James Lewis.

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

A portrait of alienation: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai, reviewed

Twenty years on from winning the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with a vast masterpiece of a love story which has been longlisted for this year’s prize. Our two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, come from wealthy neighbouring families in Allahabad, but both are in America when the novel begins. Sonia is in Vermont, working for the college library while finishing her studies, and Sunny is in New York, as a reporter for the Associated Press. When Sonia flees a coercive relationship after suffering depression and Sunny agrees to help a childhood friend choose a bride, they both return to India, where they encounter one another

James Ball

Even now, Nick Clegg offers too little too late

Earlier this year a former staffer of what was then Facebook, now Meta, wrote a gossipy tell-all memoir about her time in the office there. It was a huge hit – especially after the company’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan secured a ruling to prevent its promotion. Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, proved that there was a considerable appetite for anything that describes what it’s like to work for big tech. All of which boded well for Nick Clegg, who was Kaplan’s predecessor as the public face of Meta to governments across the world – until his departure was unceremoniously announced a few days before Donald Trump’s return to

Maggie Fergusson

The mystery of Rapa Nui’s moai may be solved

Boris Johnson claims that in his first year at Oxford he attended just one lecture. Delivered in the crepuscular gloom of the Pitt Rivers Museum, it was about Rapa Nui, the tiny Pacific island 2,200 miles from mainland Chile. As a boy, Johnson had read the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island and had become obsessed. No wonder. For although Rapa Nui – or Easter Island – is only half the size of the Isle of Wight, it has a haunting history teeming with questions. Who first discovered this speck in the Pacific? How did they get there? How did they manage to settle in this

Tom Miller

Is China riding for a fall?

The West gets China wrong. Spectator readers know the country as a vampire state feasting on foreign intellectual property and spewing out phony economic data in its thirst for wealth and power. It certainly is these things – but it also isn’t. It is more complex, and telling only half the story is ultimately self-defeating. While there is plenty to appal us about modern China, there is also much that we can learn from it. In Breakneck, Dan Wang reveals both sides of the ledger. ‘Too many outsiders see only the enrichment or the repression,’ he complains. His ‘big idea’ is that China is an engineering state, building at breakneck

Francesca Peacock

My husband first and last – by Lalla Romano

In 1984 Innocenzo Monti died after a short illness. He and the writer Lalla Romano had been married since 1932 and had met in the late 1920s in her native Piedmont. Romano – a poet, painter and the author of 19 novels – wrote the story of their life together in her 1987 book Nei mari estremi, rendered as In Farthest Seas by the translator Brian Robert Moore. The structure of the book – an auto-fictional memoir – is bifurcated. The opening, shorter, part deals with the first four years of the relationship, from the moment of their first encounter (he was ‘wearing hiking boots, we were in the mountains’),

Andrew Lycett

The short, restless life of Robert Louis Stevenson

The discriminating Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges once revealed his fondness for ‘hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson’ – a list that was quirky and eclectic, adjectives that neatly encapsulate Robert Louis Stevenson himself. The story has often been told – but it’s a good one – of how the wiry, velvet-jacketed Stevenson emerged from Edinburgh’s haute bourgeoisie to become a hugely successful writer, before ending his shortish, sickly life on the Pacific island of Samoa in 1894, a revered expatriate married to a wilful American woman a decade his senior.  Leo Damrosch, a literature professor at Harvard, offers no special sparkle,

Nick Spencer

The concept of ‘the West’ seems to mean anything you like

A hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote to Geoffrey Faber, for whose publishing company he had just started work, complaining: ‘The Defence of the West… is a subject about which everyone thinks he has something to say.’ Plus ça change? Back then, people were coming to terms with a war that had shown the West to be neither as unified nor as civilised as had been assumed. A century on, American isolationism, demographic decline, mass immigration, Islamism and a slow but decisive shift in global economic gravity are giving commentators the opportunity to bloviate endlessly about the decline/suicide/end/decay/of the West. But what exactly it is that we are defending or

Philip Hensher

What has the reparations movement ever done for victims of modern slavery?

Slavery was – and importantly continues to be – a moral abomination. Its existence in the 21st century is a disgrace. Whole communities such as the Uighurs are subject to forced labour; two years ago it was estimated that 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China. And slavery is a problem much closer to home. Immigrants in the West are also at risk. A student of mine, an Indian national, enquired about the possibility of working at a Brick Lane curry house. He was told that they would ‘employ’ him, but that he would have to surrender his passport and sleep in a locked room on the premises.

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

Exploring the enchanted gardens of literature

‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created. Both Elizabeths lived in Nassenheide in Pomerania (now Rzedziny, Poland), but whereas the fictional one had a spectacular garden, with a majestic clematis ‘Jackmanii’, giant poppies and delphiniums, the real Elizabeth, according to E.M. Forster (who was briefly employed as a tutor to the von Arnim children), did not have much of a garden at

Peter Stothard

Horoscopes and horror – the reign of Septimius Severus

Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, was renowned during his reign (193-211 AD) for the mass killings of his rivals (ruthlessness even by ancient standards); for his genocide against the Scots (a rare recourse, despite Rome’s bad reputation as imperialists); and his budget-stretching generosity to his soldiers. He had an unusually glamorous Syrian wife, Julia Domna, who indulged her pet philosophers and her husband’s superstitions while setting a hairstyle trend. He had women Christians thrown to wild animals. His two sons, Caracalla and Geta, notoriously hated each other. The Roman empire ran economically while Severus was alive (with many old buildings repaired and renamed, as though Severus had built them)

Helen Brown

A simple life fraught with difficulties: Ruth, by Kate Riley, reviewed

‘The only solution for anger at your husband is to bake him a pie,’ says the eponymous heroine of Kate Riley’s first (and, she claims, last) novel, Ruth. ‘She heard it first from her mother and understood: daily acts of love were the best way to express anger.’ This is advice that Ruth both eyerolls and obeys. Born in the late 1960s and raised in a closed, communist, Christian community, she’s a beguiling, original character whose playful wit and innocent anarchy poke holes in the bubble world she inhabits without ever trying to push her way out. Instead, she invites us to imagine a society in which there are no

Ariane Bankes

Art and radicalism in 1930s Britain

What is art for? How can it, should it, relate to the political framework of its time? How far can it shade into ‘propaganda of the imagination’? These are some of the questions threading through Andy Friend’s compelling account of the first decade of the Artists International Association, or AIA, a vital but under-explored British movement welding art and politics against the growing threat of international fascism.  The story opens in 1933 in the candlelit rooms of Misha Black above Seven Dials, Covent Garden, where a dozen impecunious jobbing artists met to discuss a sensational report from the Soviet Union. This was that thousands of Russian artists were regularly employed

Adam Begley

On the trail of a missing masterpiece: What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan, reviewed

Ian McEwan delivers pleasure on the page with the ticktock reliability of an expensive Swiss watch. Even the lesser novels are immaculately written and cleverly plotted, full of provocative ideas, captivating characters and compelling incidents. In the better novels, he achieves a kind of elevated self-awareness, a supercharged intelligence that gives the fiction what feels like literary autonomy. My favourites, Black Dogs (1992) and Atonement (2001), seem to take on a life of their own. I imagine McEwan serenely blessing their emancipation. What We Can Know is not lesser, and the pleasures – bookish pleasures, especially –are in abundant supply. As the title implies, McEwan is testing the limits of

Tibor Fischer

Ignorance, madness or folly – what exactly constitutes stupidity?

Best remembered now in the English-speaking world as a lyricist, Friedrich Schiller is often quoted for his line: ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.’ I was waiting for that observation in A Short History of Stupidity. It didn’t appear, but Stuart Jeffries assembles an impressive team of thinkers who have come to the same conclusion. You can’t win: imbecility will always ace you. The great crime for Socrates was ignorance – something often mistaken for stupidity There is of course the question of what exactly constitutes stupidity. It’s a hard thing to pin down and the definition strays into many areas. Jeffries offers a learned, picturesque ramble through

Nicholas Lezard

Sebastian Faulks looks back on youth and lost idealism

I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of that noted gentleman of letters, Sebastian Faulks. I once invented a novelist named Julian Sensitive, whose only claim to fame was an autobiographical novel called, after T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘My Trousers Rolled’. That was a crude joke compared with the hilarity inspired byFaulks’s title. As it turns

Alex Clark

Courage and humour in the face of unimaginable grief

In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for a fortnight. ‘Did you have much trouble deciding what to wear?’ he asked as he left his ham sandwich uneaten at a family lunch. Afterwards, he made his way to the railway tracks. A dozen years later, Miriam’s older sister Marjorie died by suicide in the same manner the day before her 52nd birthday. Toews

David Wootton

Alchemy – the ultimate fool’s errand

Alchemy, astrology and medicine (before the triumph of germ theory): three worthless intellectual systems which provided a good living for many into the 18th century and even beyond. Alchemy turned into chemistry; astrology was divorced by astronomy; and medicine (which might have become Pasteurism or Listerism) somehow kept its old name while abandoning all its old therapies. There have always been people with the good sense to say that alchemists and astrologers were charlatans, and doctors were more likely to kill you than cure you, but few listened. After all, all three could claim to be ancient, respectable forms of learning. And all three were too good to be true.

Jamie Collinson

The joyless rants of Andrea Long Chu

Andrea Long Chu is the poster girl critic of the American progressive left. Writing primarily for New York magazine, she made her name with takedowns of celebrated novelists such as Hanya Yanagihara, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reviews that ‘scrutinise authors as well as their works’. Refusing to separate art from artist is, of course, central to both critical theory and wider progressive politics. ‘If that makes me an ideologue, so be it,’ Chu writes. Authority is a compilation of these pieces, two new essays, and others that Chu published between 2018 and last year. ‘Why shouldn’t a book review

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Andrew Bayliss: Sparta – The Rise and Fall of An Ancient Superpower

43 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrew Bayliss, author of Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower. Andrew tells Sam what we know — and don’t know – about these much-mythologised figures from the Ancient world and tells the story of how a tiny city-state punched above its weight, until it didn’t. This is Sparta. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.