Book Reviews

Who’s Jeffrey Sachs? Leading American development economist and United Nations adviser, Sachs is broadly on the left of the political spectrum. His most famous book is The End of Poverty. What’s the book about? Another analysis of the current financial crisis, the book is a mixture of diagnosis and prescription, focusing on America. What are his big ideas? Sachs is no Keynesian, calling the idea to solve the crisis with more government borrowing “a magical argument without any empirical support”. He thinks the US urgently needs to stabilise its national debt, for reasons both economic and moral. In order to do this, he proposes raising taxes sharply, and not just

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, the Labour party was split into three camps: those who genuinely adored Brown, those who believed he could change (elected as New Gordon, govern as New Gordon?) and a deflated Blairite rump that had given up the ghost.  It is not immediately clear which of these camps is most reprehensible. But the most culpable were those who knew that a Brown premiership would be a disaster and still allowed it to happen, including Tony Blair, who, as Alistair Darling reveals in this brilliant autobiography, said at the beginning of his premiership that working with Gordon Brown was “like facing the dentist’s drill

‘They were afraid. Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the willingness to face fear. They faced their fears.’ The words are familiar. Euripides rehearsed them, Seneca upheld them, Mark Twain perpetuated them. But never have they seemed as relevant as when former SOE [Special Operations Executive] agent Noreen Riols spoke them of her former fellow agents in an auditorium of stunned Guildford Book Festival goers last Sunday afternoon. That’s the thing about spies, they’re practical, resourceful people, not idle dreamers. Compare Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, or the much bandied ‘keep calm and carry on’ of

Be honest, how many times have you used your local library in the past year? If you live in Kensal Rise, the answer is “not enough”. Before it was locked up last week, after the High Court overturned a last-ditch appeal by campaigners, its pretty Victorian library had been getting only 850 visits a week.   With each of these visits costing £4, Brent Council decided this wasn’t sustainable. Kensal, along with five other “under-performing” libraries, would be closed, with some of the £1 million saved going towards the borough’s six remaining libraries. There are also plans underfoot to build a new “super library” near Wembley stadium.   Naturally, the

Andrew Motion has joined the chorus of disapproval against this year’s Booker shortlist, saying that it has created a “false divide” between highbrow literature and accessible books. He went on to describe the split as a “pernicious and dangerous thing”, adding that it was “extraordinary” that authors like Graham Swift, Alan Hollingshurst, Edward St. Aubyn and Philip Hensher had not been shortlisted.    Stern stuff from the former Poet Laureate, who was chief Booker judge last year. His words will further inspire those who think that a new prize should be created, one that recognises an “uncompromising standard of excellence”. Those are the words of Andrew Kidd, the literary agent who is the spokesman

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the