Book Reviews

It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about a week. Funder’s point of entry is Ruth, who, some 60 years later as a very old lady in Australia, receives in the post a copy of Toller’s auto-biography, I Was A German, with some manuscript amendments made by him in the week before he died, in 1939. Despite the gap in time and place,

Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne: A Global History by Becky Sue Epstein. The Perignon tale is in there, along with many more lively and engaging stories from the history of sparkling wine (which, Epstein assures us, goes back

As literary fly-on-the-wall moments go, it would be hard to beat. John Banville – the most austerely mannered stylist in the language, the archbishop of literary fiction – hands his publisher the typescript of his latest. Then he springs the surprise: by the way, it’s a crime novel. Plot, character, the lot. One would forgive the publishing exec for falling horizontal from the shock.   The only possible hint of such an inclination had been with Banville’s 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence. And it’s a faint one at that. Narrated by a murderer from his cell, the book is more Proust than Poirot with its prissily exact narrator and

Benjamin Black – aka John Banville – is back for another round of detective fun with A Death in Summer. Does the crossover magic work for a fifth outing?   In the Guardian, Mark Lawson admires the way Black’s hero, Quirke, alludes to heroes of the detective genre: “He is known only by his surname (Dexter’s Morse), is an alcoholic chainsmoker (Rankin’s Rebus), loves poetry (P.D. James’s Dalgleish), has a difficult relationship with a daughter (Mankell’s Wallander) and has difficulty in sustaining relationships (everyone’s everyone).” What such allusion amounts to, Lawson claims, is ‘a respect for the form in which he has chosen to work.” On which note, Lawson adds:

The President of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron MP, has spent the last few weeks pre-empting Sir John Vickers’ report on banking reform. Tough legislation to split up the banks must now be passed “before the next election”, he insists: it is “right for the country”, and “must happen as soon as possible”. Reading Masters of Nothing – the new book from Matthew Hancock and Nadhim Zahawi on the banking crisis – the ex-NUS officer may have found some unlikely allies in the new crop of Conservative MPs. Although there is still a debate about the timing of reform, Masters of Nothing is an authoritative and scathing critique of financial