Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

<span id="1323854785983S" style="display: none"> </span>The potency of the eunuch

‘Castrati were even said to know the ‘secret des Lesbiennes’ when it came to giving women sexual pleasure, cheerfully making up for their cruel loss with improvised dildos made of wax.’ Helen Berry’s The Castrato and His Wife, a broadly biographical study of a castrated Italian opera singer named Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, describes the sexual potency a eunuch could pose, or at least be considered to pose, in eighteenth-century England. While castrati (castrated men) were hardly rare in Italy at this date — it was estimated that 4,000 Italian boys were castrated each year to keep their voices juvenile for operatic training — in London they remained a curious, if

Tuesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Sam Leith’s books of the year



Obviously Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child is a masterpiece. So is Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson. But having already said as much in these pages, I mention them only in passing. You’re less likely to have heard about Grant Morrison’s clever, passionate Supergods, but I urge it on you if you have any interest in myth, magic, comic-book culture or the question of why you’d put nipples on a Batsuit. I was grateful to the Man Booker judges, maligned as they have been, for shortlisting Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which I’d not have read otherwise. It’s wonderfully funny and original. Oh, and there’s The Pale King, too. Craig Raine dismisses

The Spectator

Christmas holiday poetry competition

Spectator readers have gone where seasoned pros Alice Oswald and John Kinsella feared to tread: by writing a poem about the present ascent of money. The entries for the last online poetry competition were of a typically witty standard, many thanks for submitting them. Particular praise goes to the poems written by Basil Ransome Davis, Sam Gwynn and Didi Mae Hand. But the winner of the prized bottle of Pol Roger is Felix Bungay for this amusing verse on Britain’s present financial ills: ‘Our monetary system isn’t sound. It’s built on very shaky ground.Now as it all collapses, “blame capitalism” scream the chattering classes.But free markets aren’t to blame, when

Monday

David Blackburn

Booker time

The Press Association is reporting that Matthew Crawley (AKA Dan Stevens) will be on the Booker panel next year. Sir Peter Stothard is the chairman of the judges and he will be joined by broadcaster and historian Amanda Foreman and academics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon. That’s a heavyweight list. Even Stevens counts as a critic, having just launched an online literary magazine called The Junket. Stothard said, ‘We have two of Britain’s finest professional critics, with expertise in novels from the 18th to the 21st century, a distinguished actor who is also an accomplished literary critic and an historian who is one of the most successful biographers of our

David Blackburn

A date for your literary diary

Faithful readers of the Spectator will recall that Jeffrey Bernard was frequently ‘unwell’, usually after having dropped by the Coach and Horses in Soho. Bernard is not the only writer to have darkened that particular pub’s towels. A procession of inky soaks has stumbled through its doors over the years: Dylan Thomas, Daniel Farson and generations of Private Eye staff to name but a few. Next year, on 7th February, this famous pub will host a new literary event: The Omnivore’s Hatchet Jobs of the Year. The Omnivore’s aim is to promote ‘honesty and wit in literary journalism’ by awarding a prize to the author the ‘angriest, funniest, most trenchant book

Douglas Hurd

Douglas Hurd’s books of the year

All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings. However many books are written about the second world war there will always be room for one more — provided that it is first class. Max Hastings has now established himself in eight separate volumes as a master of this subject. He does not glorify war; indeed through skilful use of eye-witness accounts, his emphasis is on its horrors. No one will regret buying this latest illustration of his skill. He dwells less on the strategic decisions of those who directed the war and more on the actual fighting as perceived by the civilians who suffered and the soldiers, sailors and airmen who

Anna Baddeley

Can we have an ode against greed, please?

Is it possible to hold a literary award these days without igniting some sort of controversy? The latest storm in an inkwell surrounds the TS Eliot Prize, whose shortlist shrunk after two poets dropped out in protest at its sponsor, the hedgefund Aurum.   John Kinsella and Alice Oswald have boycotted the prize, explaining ‘the business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics.’ The poetry world is holding its breath to see if any remaining shortlistees, which include heavyweights Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside, will follow suit.   The news has been met with an inevitable online backlash. ‘Pagey’, a commenter on the Guardian website

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Poetic justice edition

Protest and poetry have occupied the literary pages in recent days. The TS Eliot Prize has been rocked by the withdrawal of two nominees, Alice Oswald and John Kinsella, who objected to the prize’s hedge-fund sponsor. The Books blog will examine this curious issue throughout the week; but, for now, here’s Geoff Dyer and William Skidelsky debating the topic. Skidelsky: To me, it was striking that neither poet appeared to find anything much out about Aurum. For them, apparently, the dread words “hedge fund” were enough. Do either of them actually know anything about what hedge funds do? Bankers are often accused, rightly, of arrogance, but there’s a kind of

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

At the end of the day, we can’t do without verbal padding

I had last week the pleasure of lunch with Mark Mason. Between or perhaps while walking (overground) the route of the London Underground for his latest book, Walking the Lines, he has been writing occasionally for The Spectator. I had wanted to discuss with Mark his piece (‘It’s so annoying,’ 5 November) about the viral spread of the word ‘so’ as a pointless means of starting a sentence or conversation. Dot Wordsworth, too, has been confounded by the fashion, and I reported the phenomenon many months ago in the Times; though on this magazine’s letters page a weary reader has reviewed the great debate and concluded ‘So what?’ So –

Ian Thomson

Bookends: Saving JFK

Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its surfeit of period detail (bobby socks, Hula Hoops, big-finned cars). I rather enjoyed it. King, now an august-looking 64, is a writer of towering cleverness, whose fiction manages to appeal to a reading public both popular and serious. Much of what passes these days for literary fiction is mere creative writing. Give me genre fiction (John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith) any day. A fiction without a story — Kings knows — is scarcely worth its weight in paper. Before

Marcus Berkmann

Nothing on paper

On the subject of e-readers, I suspect the world population divides neatly into two halves. On one side of the chasm, hell will freeze over and Accrington Stanley will win the FA Cup before anyone will even touch one. And on the other, that looks like fun, can I have one for Christmas? I was a member of the first group — in fact, its president and hon. secretary — until offered a Kobo for free, complete with Penguin’s new range of dedicated e-books. Like all sensible publishers, Penguin has already dipped its corporate toe in the e-book market, but this new range of ‘Shorts’ and ‘Specials’ is different, in

Paul Johnson

A gimlet eye

We should be grateful to families which encourage the culture of writing letters, and equally vital, the keeping of them. Leopold Mozart, for instance, taught his son not only music but correspondence, and as a result we have 1,500 pages of letters which tell us everything we know of interest about the genius. His younger contemporary Jane Austen also came from a postman’s knock background. We have 164 of her letters, from January 1796, when she was 21, to the eve of her death in 1817. Some have been cut by the anxious family, and some suppressed altogether, but the remainder are pure gold. As in her novels, she never

Lewis Jones

Settling old scores | 10 December 2011

As a boy, Brian Sewell was unimpressed by opera but enraptured by pantomime which, he reveals in Outsider, sowed in him ‘an undying ambition, never fulfilled, to play the Widow Twanky in Aladdin’. Panto’s loss has been art criticism’s gain for, his tremendous erudition and exquisite prose aside, Sewell is surely the funniest art critic of our time, and easily the campest. In his ‘Prelude’ he remarks that he has ‘dug deep into indiscretion’, and ‘some may say that I have dug deeper still into prurience’. They would have a point. The first chapter, which is about his mother, or ‘principal demon’,  sets the tone. She ‘had, I think, as

Peter Parker

The greatest show on earth | 10 December 2011

Jessica Douglas-Home’s aptly titled book is based on the diaries of her grandmother Lilah Wingfield, who attended the Delhi Durbar in 1911 and then spent some weeks touring India. It is a glimpse of Empire from a privileged position since Lilah was the daughter of a viscount and the grand-daughter of an earl, brought up at Powerscourt Castle in Ireland and spending her summers at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. She sat in the grandstand for ‘Distinguished Spectators’ at the Durbar and was the guest of several Indian rulers during her tour. She did not, however, ‘share the assumption of superiority that afflicted many of the officials of the Raj’, her

Molly Guinness

Don’t mention the war

It wasn’t easy being the daughter of the artist Avigdor Arikha. In this memoir, Alba Arikha mixes teenage fury with glimpses of her godfather Samuel Beckett and a fragmented account of her father’s experiences of the Holocaust. Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the poet Anne Atik, surrounded themselves with the intelligentsia of Paris and drove their daughter mad: ‘I resent their purity and knowledge. Their values and morals. My father’s anger. My mother’s goodness.’ Avigdor Arikha was an irascible, dismissive and earnestly didactic father. Alba paid no attention when he tried to teach her about the Sumerians; she would not stay quiet when he discussed art and politics with his

Philip Ziegler

Voyages of discovery

Roger Louis is an American professor from the University of Texas at Austin who knows more about the history of the British Empire than any other two academics put together. When the Oxford University Press embarked on its mammoth history of the Empire the general editor they chose —to the chagrin of certain professors from the Commonwealth — was Roger Louis. Among his other responsibilities is the British Studies seminar, which was founded at Austin 36 years ago. But Professor Louis is not the university’s only attraction. The Harry Ransom Center houses one of the most, if not the most, important collection of modern literary manuscripts in the English-speaking world.

Dan Jones

A beautiful bloody world

The half-millennium or so that followed the division of the Carolingian empire in 843 AD was a time of profound social and political change in Europe. Kingdoms were established, new forms of law and theories of power were developed and military technology and tactics were revolutionised. Relations between church and state were transformed. The emerging European states developed new cultural identities, while western Christendom as a whole also began to define and assert itself against the Islamic states in the Middle East and north Africa, and the ailing remnants of the Byzantine empire to the east. By the middle of the 15th century, the various kingdoms of Europe were strong,

Jonathan Mirsky

Lifelong death wish

In February 2009, in a review in these pages of Stefan Zweig’s unfinished novel, The Post Office Girl, I wrote: ‘Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers “to see.’’  In The Post Office Girl Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart.’ Especially the details of loneliness, I should have added. Intimations of suicide darken this novel, and in 1942, with the manuscript incomplete, Zweig, age 60, and his much younger second wife, Lotte, poisoned themselves in a small Brazilian town and died in bed with her embracing him. It is telling that

Jonathan Keates

Wizard of the Baroque

Not content with being the greatest sculptor of his age and one of its most gifted architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had some talent as a painter and draftsman. Surviving self-portraits reveal him as the possessor of a positively overstated physique du role. In its most youthful incarnation the face has an air of presumption and entitlement which adulthood will darken with a combativeness that is almost wolfish. Even in the chalk drawing made around his 80th birthday (now in the Royal Collection at Windsor) the glance, under bushy white eyebrows, still smoulders and the slightly parted lips seem poised to challenge or command. Born in Naples in 1598, Bernini spent

Friday

Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner’s books of the year

My reading this year has been retrospective, dominated by Stefan Zweig, the most gentlemanly of writers. Beware of Pity, translated by the estimable Anthea Bell, remains powerfully shocking, yet classically restrained, while The Post Office Girl, in a less memorable translation, is queasily convincing. Both are published by Pushkin Press. Zweig seems unfazed by the horrors he implies, and indeed his understated worldliness is a corrective to contemporary fashions. I make exception for two of those contemporaries: Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)  and Colin Thubron (A Mountain in Tibet), both of whom do an excellent job of dealing with fears all the more potent for being largely concealed.