Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Winning words

If you want to see what an ambivalent attitude we have towards rhetoric, you have only to look at the speeches of Barack Obama. Before Obama became President, when he was out on the stump, there was no holding him back rhetorically: he soared, he swooped, he lifted his eyes to the hills and found all kinds of inspiring imagery there. But the moment he took office something strange happened. All that silver-tongued stuff dropped away and instead he started sounding as if two trucks had collided in his mouth. The message was plain: rhetoric is for the posters, for the promissory notes. When it comes to actually doing the

Art Books: A sumptuous tour

In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of the art nouveau houses designed by Antonio Gaudí, who had died four years earlier. Waugh was captivated by the swooshing ‘whiplash’ lines of the building. He hired a taxi and asked the driver to take him to any other buildings in the same style. So he saw a number of Gaudí’s fantastical creations, including his church (often mistakenly called a cathedral), La Sagrada Familia. It took an extra-ordinary leap of taste for Waugh to admire this flamboyant architecture at the height of the Modern Movement, with its insistence on ‘clean

Chagrin d’amour

The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man. He organised the French Resistance in London and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. After the war, he was appointed De Gaulle’s chief of staff and he became known as the sinister éminence grise behind De Gaulle’s presidency. He and Nancy shared a love of France, beauty and jokes. He was never faithful

The meanest flowers that blow

Sarah Raven comes of a botanising family. Her father John, a Cambridge classics don, travelled all over the British Isles studying wildflowers. Like his own father, Charles Raven, he was a gifted watercolourist, and between them they drew almost every plant in the British flora. Sarah still possesses 18 volumes of their watercolours. Nevertheless, to illustrate her huge, learned and comprehensive book of 500 wildflowers, she chose a photographer, Jonathan Buckley. This was partly because she had written with him before on other books, but mainly because they could travel and work together. They visited over 100 sites to track down the specimens, often 20 or 30 in one favoured

A man who quite liked women

It is noticeable that the kind of young woman that a clever public man most likes talking to is intelligent but totally unchallenging. This is pleasant for both. She gets to pick up useful knowledge, while he can hold forth, happy that she doesn’t have the inclination or firepower to disagree, argue or interrupt.    Dr Johnson was a bit like that. He wanted women to be equal ‘but not too equal’.  Hannah More, a successful playwright young enough to be his daughter, had too much natural self-belief for him, and he did not admire her dress sense. He was wary and in awe of the confident poet Elizabeth Carter,

A cult of virility and violence

Mussolini’s brutal sex-addiction makes for dispiriting reading, but provides material for a fine psychological study, says David Gilmour Bunga bunga may be a recent fashion, but adultery for Italian prime ministers has a long history. The first of such statesmen, Count Cavour, had affairs with married women because he was too nervous of being cuckolded to risk having a wife of his own.  One of his successors, Francesco Crispi, suffered such amatory turbulence that the police were often called to break up screeching rows between his wives and his mistresses; in old age he was accused by the press of trigamy because he had fathered children by two women in

Book of the month: A great endeavour

Is the world in need of a yet another Sherlock Holmes story? Well, with the successful publication of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk it seems it is. Riding on the crest of the wave created by BBC’s ingenious series Sherlock, which brings the brilliant detective into the 21st century, and the Robert Downey Jnr blockbuster movies, which portray Holmes as a scruffy Victorian bruiser, Horowitz’s novel, authorised by the Conan Doyle estate no less, attempts to give us an authentic Sherlockian adventure. Of course, creating copycat Holmes tales is nothing new. There have been literally hundreds of them over the years. Indeed in 1954 Doyle’s own son Adrian, with

Briefing note: Writers’ lives, pt 1

If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of literary biography then you’re spoilt for choice this autumn. Our bookshops – what’s left of them – are bursting with writerly lives and letters. Here’s what the critics made of the ten most-talked-about titles: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford This sympathetic biography has got some pretty dreadful reviews, as you’ll know if you’ve read the Spectator’s Briefing Note. David Sexton’s hatchet job in the Evening Standard was the most brutal. ‘His book is unreadably poor. He can’t write for toffee … What can Martin Amis feel now, to discover that such a dimwit should be fated to

The art of fiction | 18 November 2011

The Charlie Rose show is a cultural treasure, provided you ignore the host. In this instance, the late John Updike talks about the art of fiction from the perspective of the character he is “measured against”, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. In two and half minutes of candour, Updike reveals much about his method and how his most famous creation altered that method. Their relationship extended beyond the page and into Updike’s body and soul; he even admits that they transferred ailments. To all intents and purposes, Rabbit was real.

Ahead of his time – 100 years of William Golding

It took ten attempts, nine rejections, one brave publisher, but ultimately only a handful of revisions before the late Sir William Golding finally saw his debut novel, Lord of the Flies, in print in 1954. To mark the centenary of Golding’s birth the Bodleian Library in Oxford recently unveiled the original manuscript. The book’s text, instantly familiar, is displayed alongside a collection of Golding’s other, less celebrated books, highlighting the true paradox of his literary career.   While there’s no shame in growing fat off the royalties of a single masterpiece, one of the many things John Carey’s magnificent biography of William Golding made clear is that he never wanted

Inside Books: What’s in a name?

This is the second instalment of Emily Rhodes’ Inside Books series. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some titles evidently smell particularly sweet, there can be some rather unexpected bookish twins. Last week, several children — and a few doting parents — rushed into the bookshop to ask if we had Inheritance. I had to quell my initial instinct to show them Robert Sackville-West’s Inheritance, his very good book about Knole. Strange I

The immortal Nat Tate

An anonymous buyer paid more than £7,000 at Sotheby’s last night for the late Nat Tate’s signature work, Bridge No.114. The money will go to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund because, of course, Nat Tate never existed — he was the invention of the novelist William Boyd, who also painted the atrocious picture above.  Tate was conceived in 1998, at the height of the fever for the Young British Artists, when Boyd decided to play an intellectual game. He would test the credulity of the art world by writing the biography of a fictional artist. Boyd’s imagination conjured an unappreciated American genius, whose work had been lost his contemporaries. Tate, exhausted by frustration and failure, threw

Charles Moore

The hunting duchess

Charles Moore’s column in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine contains a wickedly funny literary item. Here it is, a day early, for readers of this blog: The Duchess of Cornwall also strikes a blow for cultural subversion this month. For Give A Book, the excellent charity set up in memory of the playwright Simon Gray, she has chosen the pre-war children’s classic Moorland Mousie by ‘Golden Gorse’, about a wild Exmoor pony. The tale is told in Mousie’s voice. The Duchess says the book ‘brings back happy memories of the many hours that my sister and I spent galloping over the moors with Moorland Mousie and his friends’. Thanks to

Shelf Life: Stephen Vizinczey

Stephen Vizinczey, whose 1960 classic In Praise of Older Women was re-released last year as a Penguin Classic, is next in the hotseat. 1) What are you reading at the moment?  Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam   2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? I was lucky that I never had to read under the cover. From the age of 5 my mother was glad to see me reading. She didn’t care what I read, as long as it was a book.   3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?  The Diary of A Madman   4) You are about to be

Right back to the start

This is the story of a book which argues that everything in the world is made of matter; that human flourishing should be the goal of any rational society; and that not only is divine intervention in nature or history a myth, but that all religion is a masochistic self-deception the powerful use to control the credulous. Its author was not Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, or Voltaire; but a Roman poet called Lucretius who lived in the first century BC. Lucretius was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His epic poem De rerum natura is a manifesto of Epicurean philosophy. This was not, as its ancient and Christian enemies

The Costa shortlists

The shortlists for the Costa Awards were announced on Front Row last night. A list of the books competing for the £30,000 prize is below. The judging panels will meet between now and mid December, and the individual category winners will be announced on Wednesday 4th January 2012. The final awards ceremony will then take place on Tuesday 24th January. Novel Award The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes A Summer of Drowning, by John Burnside Pure, by Andrew Miller My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, by Louisa Young First Novel Award City of Bohane, by Kevin Barry The Last Hundred Days, by Patrick McGuiness Tiny Sunbirds Far

One for the Christmas stocking

Wordy things have had a renaissance of late. Stephen Fry’s superb five-part BBC series, Fry’s Planet Word, aired recently; David Crystal has just produced a handsome new volume, The Story of English in 100 Words; and now Mark Forsyth, of Inky Fool blog fame, offers up the charmingly titled The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language.   As such a quirky handle suggests, the book is a collection of verbal curiosities. Forsyth investigates what he calls the “glorious insanities of the English language” by exploring the etymological roots of words. The results are fascinating. Take the rich dialect of drink: we learn how our

Interview: Andrew Feinstein’s Shadow World

Andrew Feinstein is a former South African MP and member of the African National Congress (ANC). He served as the chairman of the parliamentary public accounts committee and resigned in 2001 when the ANC refused to conduct an investigation into the notorious 1999 South African Arms Deal. He has recently published an exhaustive study of the global arms trade, titled The Shadow World. He spoke to the Spectator about the corruption he has uncovered, the damage it is doing to democracies around the globe and the way ahead.     Why did you write this book now? I’ve been researching it for almost five years, since my first book on a specific

Intellectualism is back in vogue

The English have never been ones for lounging around in black polo necks, chain-smoking and discussing the Marxist implications of a full stop. Intellectualism is a habit we leave to others. Compared to friends across the Atlantic or over the Channel, the rare beast we call the English literary intellectual has been starved. Until recently, their means of sustenance has been limited to a few publications. The London Review of Books is an oasis in the intellectual desert of the British Isles, even the cakes in the café are “independent-market, surprising and energetic”. Recent issues included a spat between Establishment figures Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson and a poem by