Book Reviews

Talk about timing. Just as Robert Harris’s cautionary tale about the perils of meddling with the financial markets was hitting the shelves, Greece was teetering on the edge of default and Swiss Bank UBS announced that unauthorised trading by one of the company’s investment bankers had led to $2.3 billion worth of losses. Harris has always had a nose for the topical. His 1999 novel, Archangel, noted that curious, self-sabotaging flaw in the Russian character which yearns for a totalitarian hard man in the Kremlin; a few years later, Vladimir Putin had completed his quiet ascent to the presidency. Harris’s wonderful 2007 thriller, The Ghost, functioned as a critique of

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never be able to do it in a trillion years. At any one time, though, there are only a couple of sketchwriters who are any good at all, and some of us find we move papers in order to read them. I realise now I must have been a very strange teenager to turn to Frank Johnson first every morning, and now I am an even stranger man in

Here is the lead book review from the latest issue of the Spectator: Jonathan Sumption reviews Max Hasting’s history of the second world war, All Hell Let Loose. The second world war is still generally regarded as the ‘good war’. In the moral balance, the cause of the Axis powers was so unspeakably bad that their adversaries have rarely had to justify themselves. But there is, perhaps, more to it than the moral balance. The second war has gained in public esteem by being everything that the first war was not. It was fought for recognisable and, on the whole admirable, objectives. It did not begin, as the first had,

The Eurozone crisis leads today’s news agenda (read William Hague’s take), with evermore dire predictions being made about the future of the single currency and the European Union itself. Many readers may be left uncomprehending as billions turn into trillions, and apparently we can’t count on the BBC for impartiality, so here is your Eurozone crisis reader. 1. Europe: The State of the Union by Anand Menon Confused by the Commission? Unsure of how a qualified majority vote works? Anand Menon’s book cuts through the jargon, as its publisher puts it, sketching the parameters of an indistinct political system. Menon is not an insider and this means that the book remains simple.

The most influential authors, retailers, critics, agents, publishers, broadcasters and poets were all listed in The Guardian Book 100 this weekend. First prize went to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos who – in addition to diversifying from books to groceries – is currently setting up Blue Origin, a company which offers space travel to the general public. Author JK Rowling; Google CEO, Larry Page; Waterstone’s last chance, the Daunt/Mamut team and Chief Executive of Hachette UK, Tim Hely Hutchinson, followed close behind. Richard & Judy continue to slip down the rankings while Stieg Laarson won’t let death get in the way; his ghost checked in at number 18. Charles Dickens also manages to extend

‘John Smith is dead.’ These four blunt syllables, as elemental and atmospheric as the first line of a classic novel, form the opening of Chris Mullin’s new collection of diaries. This is a fascinating read, crammed with gossip, jokes, insights and anecdotes, not all of them political. Mullin’s first disclosure is that the ‘decent interval’ between a leader’s death and the tussle to succeed him lasts about three seconds. The ‘Stop Blair Camp’ formed as soon as Smith was buried. They try to court Mullin and he brushes them off. ‘I’m in the Win the Next Election Camp.’ He considers backing John Prescott, but ‘I can’t bear the thought of

David Jones has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s she starred in film adaptations of her younger sister Jackie’s novels The Stud and The Bitch, and in the 1980s as Alexis Carrington in the American soap opera Dynasty. More recently she has reinvented herself, in these pages and elsewhere, as a grande dame and moral arbiter, bemoaning the debased standards and general vulgarity of our times. The World According to Joan finds her in full Lady Bracknell

At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris.  However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic advancement which, ironically enough, was to prove feminine in nothing but name.   While some women at this time were busy playing Calliope to Europe ’s artists and musicians, swathes of other down-and-outs were falling prey to the disease of the moment, Hysteria. Interred in the notorious L’Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris – a century later