Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Colin Amery

Soaring splendour

The glorious monuments built in India by the Mughal emperors, from Babur in the early 16th century to Bahadur Shah Zafar II in the mid-19th century, have long deserved a comprehensive illustrated survey in one volume. George Michell is the ideal author. He is both a great scholar and a fervent communicator on many aspect of India’s cultural history. He has worked as a hands-on archaeologist on major Indian sites and recently established a Deccan Foundation to protect the wonders of that little-known region. He has been extremely well served in this magnificent book by the photographs of Amit Pasricha, who describes himself as a ‘panoramic photographer’. His photographs are

Peter Oborne

Guilty by association

It has become increasingly obvious that something went terribly wrong with British intelligence-gathering, both its methods and morality, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. Earlier prime ministers had displayed scruples about the use of intelligence gained from torture. But during the Blair premiership this changed. Britain became part of a nightmarish universe where the standards which we claim to represent were undermined and sabotaged. It is important to stress that there is no evidence at all that our intelligence officers were (unlike their gung-ho counterparts at the CIA) directly engaged in torture. But there is a great deal of evidence that we despatched terrorist suspects

Selina Hastings

Friends across the sea

On 12 February 1952 the novelist Anthony Powell received a letter from a bookseller in New York. Robert Vanderbilt Jr was the proprietor of a couple of Manhattan bookstores and a great admirer of Powell’s. He wrote to ask if he might himself publish a couple of the novelist’s out-of-print works. Powell was delighted. The two titles chosen were Venusberg and Agents and Patients, the covers of both to be designed by Powell’s old friend Osbert Lancaster. As their letters make clear, Powell and Vanderbilt quickly found they had much in common, and as Powell had worked in publishing before the war, he was able to engage very much on

Robert Chandler

A kind of tenderness

The son of a grocer, Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. While studying medicine at Moscow university, he published hundreds of comic sketches in order to pay his way and support his parents and siblings. After becoming famous in the late 1880s, he practised as a doctor only intermittently; most of his medical work was on behalf of the peasants, and unpaid. In 1890 he made the difficult journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island, where he investigated the living conditions of the convicts, around 10,000 of whom had been exiled there. During the 1890s Chekhov’s tuberculosis worsened and from 1897 he had to

Bevis Hillier

Wearing well

Born in the same year as John Lennon (1940), I was a sucker for the Beatles from the start. They were the accompaniment of my youth, love’s obbligato. I liked their music because it replaced the raw animality of rock ‘n’ roll with sophisticated melody. I think Schubert would have been proud to have composed ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hey Jude’. Also, unlike most of the rock ‘n’ roll hunks, the Beatles were skinny. So was I — grievously thin — and it was a relief that we skeletons could now come out of the cupboard. In the early photographs of the Fab Four, wearing the monkey-suits their manager Brian Epstein insisted

Richard Shone

Oh brother!

Long in the writing, deep in research, heavy to hold, this is the latest of umpteen biographies of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90). But it should be said straightaway that it is extremely readable, contains new material and is freshly, even startlingly re-interpretative of a life whose bare bones are very familiar. The more one reads, the more absorbing it becomes, both in its breadth of approach and its colossal detail. Potential readers, however, should be warned: this is no sentimentalising study, no apologia for the excesses of the ‘mad genius’ of popular renown. Quite the contrary: one’s dismay intensifies as the self-crucifixion of Van Gogh’s life unfolds, disaster after disaster

Kate Grimond

The tale of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

On 31 May 1961 Ian Fleming wrote to Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape, publisher of his James Bond novels: ‘I am now sending you the first two “volumes” of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Heaven knows what your children’s book readers will think of them.’ He ended his letter: ‘I am gradually reactivating myself and I hope to be up in London for about two days each week. Though much will depend on a gigantic medical conference this afternoon.’ Six weeks earlier, Fleming had suffered a serious heart attack. He was 52. Despatched to convalesce at a seaside hotel on the south coast and forbidden a typewriter to prevent him from working, he passed

Mark Mason

Bookends: A metropolitan menagerie

London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per day each to get through the English winter), while as recently as Live Aid an urban myth arose that the revolving stage was pulled by horses. The capital’s no different from the rest of the country; if the British showed as much concern for their fellow humans as they do for their dogs, life would be easier. The latest book tapping this market is Animal London (Square Peg, £9.99). Not that the photographer Ianthe Ruthven has gone for fluffy or cute. Her animals are inanimate, either because they’re statues, monuments,

Friday

Christopher Hitchens

From the archives: Christopher Hitchens meets Jorge Luis Borges

To mark the death of Christopher Hitchens, here is a piece he wrote in June 1986 to commemorate the life of Jorge Luis Borges. Jorge Luis Borges, Christopher Hitchens, The Spectator, 21 June 1986 Christopher Hitchens recalls a meeting with the Argentine poet, who died last Saturday ‘This is my country and it might be yet, But something came between us and the sun.’ As the old man threw off these lines, he turned his blind, smiling face to me and asked, ‘Do they still read much Edmund Blunden in England?’ I was unsure of what might give pleasure, but pretty certain in saying that Blunden was undergoing one of

Cressida Connolly

Cressida Connolly’s books of the year

Nicola Shulman’s study of Sir Thomas Wyatt and his times, Graven With Diamonds, is both sparkling and scholarly. Nothing I’ve ever read about the court of Henry VIII has made it so vivid. For the first time one could really grasp Anne Boleyn’s wit and intelligence, both of which she must have needed, to keep the king off for seven years — seven years! — until they could marry. The book is marvellous about Wyatt’s poetry: indeed, about the point of poetry in general. A gem. I loved the young German writer Judith Hermann’s short story collection, Alice. The stories are beautifully written, very precise in their detail, yet enigmatic. Finally,

Jack Van-Burholdbind

Poets against progress

The TS Eliot Prize hedge-fund furore has been making headlines for more than a week. Even the Spectator has devoted space to the controversy caused by John Kinsella and Alice Oswald, whose motives were initially unclear. Kinsella has since taken to the pages of the New Statesman to explain himself. He says that he has spent ‘life enjoying the sublimity of a golden wheatcrop on the verge of harvest’. He opposes the ‘colonising culture’ of harvest and husbandry. Poetry is an ‘active entity’ that should ‘work against violence’. He has embarked on a campaign of ‘linguistic disobedience’ against the ‘scourge of salinity’ and the other ‘damages’ caused by the need

Thursday

David Blackburn

Britain fights back against gloating Sarko with killer reading list

It’s no state secret that Britain was outmanoeuvred by France at last week’s European Summit. The Old Foe triumphed and their political establishment has been, in the words of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, farting in our general direction ever since. President Sarkozy has described David Cameron as an indignant child and the Parisian equivalent of Mervyn King has insisted that Britain’s credit rating be downgraded. We British are renowned for our stoicism, but there are limits. The Foreign Office has rebuffed the garlic-infused petulance wafting across La Manche: literary Tory minister Keith Simpson has produced his customary holiday reading list and it contains a few putdowns for our Gallic cousins.

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: A poetic licence for hedge funds

Last week saw poets Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdraw from the shortlist of the TS Eliot Prize. Their refusal to be in the running for this prestigious award was on the grounds that the Poetry Book Society, which runs it, is sponsored by hedge fund manager Aurum Funds. Oswald said that she thought ‘poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions’. But, in this austere time of government cuts, when many arts organisations like the Poetry Book Society are about to lose their funding from the Arts Council, can we really blame them for accepting some ready cash from a hedge fund? Well, judging from the angry comments following

Lewis Jones

Lewis Jones’s books of the year

Even in translation, Michel Houellebecq’s novels are witty, mad (particularly in translation) and sickeningly funny. I’m reading his latest, The Map and the Territory, which won the Prix Goncourt last year. As expected, author and characters are superb in their disgust with and contempt for the world in general, and especially France, art, tourism and gastronomy, all of them hideously related. The sex and atrocities have been rationed, though; the writing has new polish and finesse; and a shocking sympathy has crept into the proceedings. Even if it did not win the Man Booker Prize after I backed it at 8-1, I thought Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English was miraculous. I’m not

David Blackburn

In memory of Russell Hoban

American author Russell Hoban died yesterday, aged 86. I’ve never read a word of Hoban, nor do I know anything about him: so the obituaries made for very interesting reading. There appear to have been two Russell Hobans. The first was the dreamy writer of children’s books; the second was an émigré in London who wrote experimental science fiction, of which Riddley Walker is the most famous and challenging example. The book opens: ‘On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Ian Rankin

This week Ian Rankin tells us which Jilly Cooper heroine he would sleep with and the title he’d give his self-help book. 1) As a child, what did you read under the covers?  Enid Blyton books and lots and lots of comics (Victor, Hotspur, plus annuals dedicated to those same comics).   2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?  I had a lump in my throat towards the end of David Nichols’ One Day…. 3) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?  Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Bleak House

David Blackburn

Egypt’s Dickens becomes the champion of a fledgling democracy

Naguib Mahfouz would have been 100 years old last Sunday (he died in 2006 aged 94). Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was renowned for describing, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary,  ‘the scent, colour and texture of life in the streets of his native Cairo’. Those qualities were particularly apparent in his best known work, The Cairo Trilogy — a historical trio spanning the two world wars, published in the mid ‘50s during Colonel Nasser’s rise. The trilogy is a native counterpoint to Lawrence Durrell’s Levantine Alexandria Quartet. The novels resound with cosmopolitanism, cultural observation and an immediate sense

Philip Ziegler

Philip Ziegler’s books of the year

In her biography of William Morris Fiona MacCarthy opened a window onto the brilliantly talented yet curiously anaemic world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. In The Last Pre-Raphaelite she switches her attention to Morris’s once great friend and later stern critic, Edward Burne-Jones. Her scholarship is exemplary; her style fluent; her judgment discriminating; above all, she makes her weird galère come vividly alive. Her book is fun to read. No one could say the same of Ian Kershaw’s The End.  Kershaw is not into fun: his cool yet remorselessly horrific account of the last days of Hitler’s Reich should be compulsory reading for any ruler contemplating taking his country