Book Reviews

Mo Hayder has a considerable and well-deserved reputation as a writer of horrific crime novels that often revolve around the physical violence men do to women. Her latest, Hanging Hill (Bantam, £18.99), is no exception. Set in Bath, it’s the story of two estranged sisters — Zoe, a detective inspector equipped with a motorbike and a welter of scars, both physical and emotional; and Sally, the divorced mother of a teenage girl, who is struggling to cope with her vertiginous plunge from the agreeable plateau inhabited by Bath’s affluent middle classes. The narrative moves alternately between the sisters’ lives and the impact that the murder of a beautiful teenage girl

Colin Amery has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath remains a real shocker. The fury of his polemic against the powers in Bath that seemed hell-bent on destroying everything except a few grand Georgian set- pieces in that beautiful city still has a terrible relevance today. Looking at the photographs of acres of modest stone houses being reduced to rubble to be replaced by unbelievably low grade ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ is utterly depressing. Even more

I don’t arrive at my camp site until 11pm, partly as a result of my own sense of comic timing, partly the result of a long lunch with Dear Mary and chums. Good fortune would have it that Spectator HQ has been pitched next to Radio Cymru’s weather reader, who tells us in the morning that it will be fine today and even hotter tomorrow. So far so good. First on my extensive program of literary delights comes Simon Garfield, talking about his wildly entertaining book Just my Type. The lecture proved so popular it was bumped up two spots to the much larger Oxfam stage. Wearing a ‘Sex Drugs

It is 82 years since the publication of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. It was an unlikely commercial success.   After James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury might be the most famous unread novel in English. American schoolchildren are forced to plough through it (on the assumption that the Great American Novel must be hiding somewhere). But nine times out of ten, when you see a paperback copy on someone’s bookshelf, the spine is beautifully un-creased.   This doesn’t surprise me. If you or I told a publisher that we’d written a modernist novel about nothing happening over an Easter weekend, of which the

James Bond is the great chameleon. From the velvety burr of Connery through to the tango tan of Moore and the aluminium pecs of Craig. And then, of course, there is the Bond of the books. Between covers (of the literary sort, at least), Bond transforms again: refrigerated in the black-and-white of print, he becomes clinical and orderly, disdaining the stagey theatrics of modern day spycraft. It is to this Bond that Jeffery Deaver returns in the latest addition to the 007 canon, Carte Blanche. Indeed, Deaver himself is given carte blanche. Rather than merely update Bond, as did Sebastian Faulks in his 2008 effort Devil May Care, Deaver recasts

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2697 you were invited to take as your first line ‘How do I hate you? Let me count the ways’ and continue in verse for up to a further 15. Readers are no doubt familiar with the  given first line, which comes, with an impertinent tweak, from the penultimate sonnet in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sequence of 44, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. And, on the subject of tweaks, Gerard Benson tells me that if you look at EBB’s manuscript in the British Museum Reading Room you will see that line 12 of the poem originally read not, ‘I love thee with the