Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

The top ten iBooks of 2011

While the Kindle continues to solve storage problems for the bibliophile on the go, it is the iPad that is actually changing what books are and stretching our definitions of reading. Here is my selection of the ten best iBooks released for it this year:  The Waste Land  To anyone unconvinced about the appeal of iBooks, I can only present this, the greatest edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that has ever been published. You can use it to read the poem, with or without notes, or to have the poem read to you by the likes of Eliot and Alec Guinness. You can also watch a peerless performance

The unstoppable McCall Smith omnibus

Alexander McCall Smith shows no sign of tiring, which will come as good or bad news depending on your view. He has numerous titles out next year. There is yet another instalment of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detection Agency: The Limpopo Agency of Private Detection will be published in hardback on March 1. No further comment is required because McCall Smith’s sleuthing formula is as famous as the Voodoo-Hoodoo. Next, the latest episodes of McCall Smith’s Corduroy Mansions experiment, A Conspiracy of Friends. This was originally an eBook, serialised on the Telegraph’s website. The plan was to revive the episodic form by which Dickens, Thackeray et al wrote. Now, the

From the archives: Mr Dickens’ ghost story

It is the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth in February, and Christmas Day today; so a sterling occasion to reproduce The Spectator’s original review of A Christmas Carol from the archives. It was written for our issue dated 23 December 1843, and differs from most modern reviews in quoting extremely liberally from the text, to the extent that there is more Dickens than Spectator in what follows. But, on this morning of all mornings, I thought few would complain about that: ‘The object of this seasonable and well-intentioned little book is to promote the social festivities and charities of Christmas, by showing the beneficial influence of these celebrations of the

London as Dickens saw it

The first thing you’ll notice about the Museum of London’s ‘Dickens and London’ exhibition is that it Dickens hardly features. Dickens’ novels and journalism describe the scene, but the man himself is largely unseen — one of many artistic figures in the throng of booming Victorian London. The Spectator’s obituary praised Dickens’ skill in ‘softening the lines of demarcation between the different classes of English Society.’ But he was not alone in this. Robert Dowling’s ‘Breakfasting Out’ is the best example of a trend in Victorian visual art for showing working people rubbing shoulders with the well to-do in everyday life. Several exhibited paintings suggest that some of this class

Alexander Chancellor’s books of the year

David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy is a riveting history of a country whose unification only 150 years ago may have been the worst thing that ever happened to it. Still a fragile and divided nation, in which northerners deride southerners as ‘Africani’, its troubles anticipate those of a united Europe, for, like Europe, Italy’s glory lies in the achievements of its parts rather than of the whole; or so Gilmour powerfully persuades us. For pure entertainment, however, it’s hard to beat Craig Brown’s One on One, which is a chain of 101 stories of chance encounters between famous people. It starts with Hitler being knocked down by a car

The art of Dickens – A Christmas Carol

A change this week as we wind down for the Christmas holiday: Alastair Sim’s immortal Scrooge the morning after the night before. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 to rapturous applause — the Spectator’s original review will be republished shortly. Critics praised Dickens’ success at distilling the Christian message of goodwill to all men in Scrooge’s dramatic transformation. As Scrooge says, rather cornily, to Cratchit, ‘I’ve not lost my senses, Bob. I’ve come to them.’

Anne Applebaum’s books of the year

Snowdrops, A. D. Miller’s literary thriller, has to qualify as the book I was ‘most unable to put down’ this year. It’s set in a contemporary Moscow which I instantly recognised — glamorous, vicious, amoral and terrifying all at once. Miller puts his finger right on what makes modern Russia so compelling to outsiders. When his main character, a bland Englishman, allows himself to be enticed into a scam involving beautiful girls, phony building permits, and enormous amounts of money we intuitively understand why. For those who prefer their scams closer to home, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s book on the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash is

Tales from the greatest city on earth

Quiz question: which famous 12-word quotation is followed by the phrase ‘for there is in London all that life can afford?’ Clue: two of the words are ‘tired’. If you need any more clues … well, I might as well warn you now that this probably isn’t the blog post for you. Because it’s about London books. It’s struck me that our capital city is the perfect example of a gift that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to writers and their inspiration. It seems Dr Johnson was correct: 350 years on and there’s still all that life can afford in London. It’s fascinating the different ways authors

Philip Hensher’s books of the year

It was an exceptional year for the novel, with impressive books from Adam Mars-Jones, Ali Smith, Edward Docx, Edward St Aubyn, A.S.Byatt, Cressida Connolly, Ross Raisin, Amitav Ghosh, Tim Binding and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to mention a few. Many congratulations to the enterprising Hesperus for bringing a small but enchanting German classic, Hans Keilson’s Komodie in Moll, to English readers for the first time. The three new novels I’d particularly commend are, first, Robert Harris’s superb The Fear Index guaranteed to appeal to anyone who shudders when their laptop unaccountably fails to switch off. Secondly, my friend Alan Hollinghurst’s magnificent The Stranger’s Child, universally acclaimed as the best novel of

The Pursuit of Love: Not just for girls

After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens and Craig Taylor’s Londoners. This week it’s a Timberlake Wertenbaker adaptation of Possession and an early Christmas present, The Pusuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Many of us will have a comfort book, something we return to in times of illness, romantic strife, double dip recession and so on. Mine would have to

Ferdinand Mount’s books of the year

What strange persons get themselves chosen to govern us. I have spent quite a bit of the past year reading some brilliant lives of our prime ministers, each of them heavy enough to sprain a wrist but light enough to tickle the imagination: in historical order, David Brown’s Palmerston, D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, and Philip Ziegler’s Edward Heath. Pam, Supermac and Ted managed to put across very different images of themselves, but all three were essentially solitary and implacable personalities who kept their enmities in better repair than their friendships, all unpopular in youth and chilly in old age. No coincidence I think that they

Library campaigners hunt the secretary of state

Library campaigners in Brent suffered a setback yesterday when the Court of Appeal decided that the local council was not in breach of the law when it closed 6 local libraries. The library campaigners lost on all counts, including on grounds of equality. The judgment also said that the burden of centrally imposed budget cuts was a determining factor: ‘Given the scale of the spending reductions the council was required to make, and the information available following earlier studies, a decision that the library service should bear a share of the reduction was not, in my judgment, unlawful.’ It remains to be seen how Lord Justice Pill’s decision, in what is regarded

Rumpole’s seasonal cheer

Music fans may groan at the glut of greatest hit collections clogging up shelves at this time of year. Bookshelves are usually immune from such compilations, though the odd one slips through. In this case, it’s a positive. Forever Rumpole: The Best of the Rumpole Stories brings together some of the most winsome of John Mortimer’s tales. With a healthy range, and stories breezy enough to tackle on a full stomach, it is a timely fireside companion.   The charm lies largely with Horace Rumpole, Mortimer’s caustic lawyer. With his waistcoat, cigars and fondness for a tipple or two, Rumpole takes his rightful place in the pop-fiction pantheon. The back

Allan Massie’s books of the year

Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here received less attention that it deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your own’. Graham Swift does just that. The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung is a novel that everybody interested in

Across the literary pages: Three dead wise men

Death has made a telling visit to the literary world in the past week: Christopher Hitchens, George Whitman and Vàclav Havel have all died. The appreciation of Hitchens is fast approaching the precedents set by his targets, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa — an irresistible irony that he would certainly have appreciated. The growing beatification is the measure of journalists who aspire to Hitchens’ undoubted courage and style; the greatest possible testament to the man himself. Next to the fabled Hitchens, Whitman needs further introduction. He restored the Shakespeare & Company English bookshop on the Rue Bûcherie in Paris after the war. But he was rather more than a shopkeeper. Whitman’s acumen was for

Portrait of a singular man

The posthumous publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime diaries continues the restoration of his reputation, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft Nothing is more elusive than reputation. A writer’s standing goes up and down like a share price, during his life and after, for no obvious or objective reason, as D. J. Taylor observed in a recent perceptive essay in the TLS on the fall from favour of Angus Wilson, although I still read his novels if no one else does. Then again, others recover. Terence Rattigan’s stock was very low when he died in 1977, long sneered at as the epitome of middlebrow, middle-class West End theatre. But lo, there has been a

Poison Ivy

‘Who was she?’, a browser might ask on finding three re-issued novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and ‘Why should I read them?’ Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of 13 children of a Victorian physician. After his death, his widow wrapped herself in anger and subjected her children to cruel, neurotic tyranny. Their verbal laceration continued after her death in 1911, for Ivy took control of her siblings, and enforced a sadistic autocracy learnt from her mother. On Christmas Day 1917, the two youngest girls, ‘Topsy’ and 18-year-old ‘Baby’, for whom family life seethed with aggression, nerve storms and spite, locked themselves in a bedroom, and died in one another’s arms

Funny old world

The most remarkable thing about this book is that it should have been published at all. No one could have imagined in 1961 that Private Eye — a blotchy reproduction stapled together on what looked like yellow scrap paper — would still be going 50 years later, selling hundreds of thousand of copies every fortnight and apparently employing about 50 people. Adam MacQueen has not written a history of the paper but has compiled a biographical album of contributors, staff, stories and various dramas in its history. The author suggests that it could be read from cover to cover, but that would be hard work even for a satirical anorak.

Glamour on the campaign trail

Though this book is published by Oxford University Press and the author teaches at the University of Southern California, it is really only semi-demi-academic. Steven J. Ross has conducted interviews and trawled through archives, but his instincts are for the flat vividness of journalism rather than anything more scholarly or searching. In a footnote he may mention that Harry Belafonte, in an interview in the mid-1990s, got the date of a crucial meeting with Martin Luther King wrong by three years, but is happy to quote Belafonte’s version (in that same interview) of what King said — ‘We are caught up in a struggle that will not leave us’ —