Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

David Blackburn

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

Wednesday

Charles Moore 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

Fleur Macdonald

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

Austen Saunders

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

David Blackburn

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

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

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

David Blackburn

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

Monday

Fleur Macdonald

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

Anna Baddeley

The thrill of déjà-lu

Anyone who’s been charged with plagiarism knows there are two ways to save face. Either own up and claim you were making a statement, or deny and employ the ‘Great Minds’ defence, like I did when accused of copying Tacitus in my A-Level history coursework. The funny thing about Q.R. Markham, whose much-hyped spy thriller has been pulped after readers discovered it was a patchwork of other novels, is that he’s stayed silent. Naturally, this has prompted others to invent their own theories as to what the Brooklyn bookseller, real name Quentin Rowan, was up to. Assassin of Secrets – composed almost entirely of passages by other writers – has

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: remembrance edition

The weekend’s literary pages sounded the Last Post in honour of Remembrance Sunday. The re-release of Sir Andrew Motion’s collection of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, is being feted by critics. And Motion read from the book at a party in Oxford on Friday night, a memorable experience for those who witnessed it.  The former Poet Laureate also took part in a discussion about new war literature for the Guardian, together with Michael Morpurgo and Luisa Young. The events of the Great War have now, for the most part, passed out of living memory and into history. The challenge for writers and historians, say those interviewed by the Guardian, is to preserve the sentiment of Remembrance

Saturday

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 12 November 2011

A further selection of our reviewers’ favourite reading in 2011 Richard Davenport-Hines Amidst the din, slogans and panic of modern publishing, my cherished books are tender, calm and achieve a surpassing eloquence by dint of tightly controlled reticence. Anthony Thwaite’s Late Poems (Enitharmon, £10) are written by a man of 80. Each of them is word-perfect: some recall dead parents; others foreshadow Thwaite’s death; and throughout there is the clear, crisp wisdom, pensive sadness and absence of confessional self-pity that show a mastery of language and feeling. Amos Oz’s Scenes from Village Life (Chatto, £12.99) is set in an Israeli pioneer village which is being chi-chied with boutique wineries as

Lewis Jones

Bookends: About a boy

The Go-Between was L.P. Hartley’s best novel, Joseph Losey’s best film, and probably Harold Pinter’s best screenplay. In the novel, the Norfolk house and estate are fairly incidental but, as Christopher Hartop’s charming and generously illustrated Norfolk Summer: Making The Go-Between (John Adamson, £12.99) reminds us, they dominate the film. As a local historian and cinéaste, Hartop recreates the cloudy summer of 1970 — made to seem sunny mainly by sound-effects, of buzzing insects and so on — at Melton Constable Hall, where Losey, Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Edward Fox were visited by various Cokes and Barkers (Elspeth and Raffaella were extras in the cricket match). Made under the

Richard Bradford

The legacies of Jennifer Johnston

Cross the soaring Foyle Bridge from the East and take the route to Donegal. Shortly before you cross the border — now completely imperceptible — you will find the grand, imposing gates to a country house. As you descend the drive, the hum of traffic subsides and the years, centuries, roll back. Had it been built a few miles to the west it might, like many others, have been consumed in the vengeful aftermath of 1916. Partition protected it from that, but half a century later its Georgian windows shook to bomb blasts from the city. That Jennifer Johnston has spent most of her writing career in this place is

Andrew Barrow

Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway

Basil Peyton-Crumbe is a multi-millionaire landowner. An embattled man known to all, even his dogs, as ‘Banger’, he claims to have despatched at least 41,000 pheasants with the cheap old 12-bore he’s had since childhood. Shooting pheasants, he believes, is ‘an exquisite accomplishment’, as complex as writing a sonata or designing a cathedral. On the first page of this bloodthirsty novel, Banger’s trusty old gun explodes in his hands and blows half his head off. No one seems particularly upset. Not his half-brother William, who succeeds to the estate, and certainly not his Springer Spaniel, Jam. Dismissing his dying employer as ‘a selfish oaf’, ‘fat arse’ and ‘grouchy old bastard’, 

Andrew Taylor

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

The novels of Jane Austen have much in common with traditional detective fiction. It is an affinity that P. D. James has herself explored, notably in her essay ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, which she included as an appendix to her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest. Both types of fiction operate within enclosed and carefully structured worlds; both depend for their plots on a threat to the established order; and both conclude with tidy resolutions that contain an implicit promise that a happy, orderly existence now lies ahead. Death Comes to Pemberley combines these two traditions in a whodunnit set mainly at Mr Darcy’s stately home in Derbyshire,

Charlotte Moore

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull, a stout, plain, clever Victorian, founder-member of the feminist Langham Place group, manager of the ground-breaking Victoria Press which extends employment possibilities for women, has her story lightly fictionalised in The Sealed Letter. The action starts with the return from a posting to Malta of Fido’s erstwhile best friend, Helen Codrington, a naval wife with a yellow-whiskered colonel in tow. Helen needs an alibi and a trysting-place; the apparently guileless Fido and her drawing-room sofa will do nicely. Before Malta, Fido had lived with Helen and her older, straitlaced husband Harry. Fido’s asthma had been the pretext for Helen to leave the marital chamber and curl up

Andrew Gimson

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

If David Cameron and his friends wish to know why they and their policies are so despised by some Conservatives of high intellect and principle, they should read Robin Harris. His book is a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship, with penetrating things to say about Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan and the rest. But much of its savour derives from Harris’s disgust — the word is not too strong — with the various forms of bogusness, including intellectual cowardice veiled by complacent politeness, which recur so often in the history of the Conservative party. Harris recognises the ‘note of genius’ in Disraeli, but scorns the pious, posthumous ascription

Philip Ziegler

The Diamond Queen by Andrew Marr

‘Of making many books there is no end’, particularly when the subject is Queen Elizabeth II. It is less than ten years since Ben Pimlott and Sarah Bradford independently produced authoritative and excellent biography-centred books on the Queen. Since then a fair number of minor studies have appeared. Can enough have happened in the meantime, can enough new information have been revealed, to justify two new books? The answer, rather surprisingly, is a cautious ‘yes’. Both Andrew Marr and Robert Hardman are serious students of their subject. Both write well and thoughtfully. Neither offers sensational revelations — just as well, since it seems unlikely that there is anything sensational to

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Blue Night by Joan Didion

This is a raw, untidy, ragged book. Well, grief is all of those things. On the other hand, Didion wrote about the death of her husband in an iconic memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, which apart from being raw was none of them. So she knows how it can be done.  That book was about the horribly sudden death of her husband, about shock and pain and then the confusion of bereavement and loss. But it was also a vivid portrait of the man himself. ‘One never knows when the blow may fall’, yet people have been surprisingly surprised that it fell again so quickly on Didion, when her

Fay Maschler

A History of English Food by Clarissa Dickson Wright

It is where cookery is involved that tele-vision gives perhaps the greatest succour to the book trade. After Jennifer Paterson’s death in 1999, the remaining ‘Fat Lady’ barrelled into view with Clarissa and the Countryman, Clarissa and the King’s Cookbook, as a gamekeeper in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous and as presenter for a documentary on her soul-mate Hannah Glasse. Such exposure, combined with an unapologetic mien and candour that have attracted the somewhat patronising description ‘national treasure’, could only have helped her autobiography Spilling the Beans scale the heights of the bestseller lists and allowed the next manuscript, a year-long diary and rant called Rifling through My Drawers, to