Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Peter Parker

Poetry in paint

At the age of just 21, Samuel Palmer produced one of British art’s greatest self-portraits. At the age of just 21, Samuel Palmer produced one of British art’s greatest self-portraits. Although he is wearing the clothes of the period (1826), the face that surmounts the casually fastened soft high collar is both Romantic and modern, instantly and thrillingly bridging the gap between his century and our own. As Rachel Campbell-Johnston notes in her welcome biography, Palmer’s hair is unbrushed and he seems not to have bothered to shave: ‘It’s hardly the image you would expect from an upcoming artist at that time. He does not strike the pose of the

Lewis Jones

The last place on earth

Colin Thubron has called Siberia ‘the ultimate unearthly abroad’, the ‘place from which you will not return’. Colin Thubron has called Siberia ‘the ultimate unearthly abroad’, the ‘place from which you will not return’. Many millions have not — Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were lucky — but these days quite a few do, and most of them seem to write books about it. The latest is Jacek Hugo-Bader, a Polish journalist who, as a 50th birthday present to himself, travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok in an old lazhi (‘tramp’, a Soviet jeep), driving 12,968 kilometres in 55 days, at an average speed of 43.8 kmph. That’s when the girls stop walking

Alan Judd

The ne plus Ultra

The story of Bletchley Park, MI6’s second world war code-breaking operation, has grown with the telling since the early 1970s accounts — although, as Briggs points out, Bletchley’s first public disclosure was in Time magazine in December 1945. The story of Bletchley Park, MI6’s second world war code-breaking operation, has grown with the telling since the early 1970s accounts — although, as Briggs points out, Bletchley’s first public disclosure was in Time magazine in December 1945. In recent years it has become the stuff of fiction, film and feature, and almost anyone who was there and is still alive is guaranteed a publisher. Aged 90, Asa Briggs — distinguished historian,

Friday

Peter Robins

Link-blog: unintentional gags

Geoff Dyer begins his new New York Times column with an excellent stylistic joke. Aggregators are destined to conquer the world (me probably excepted). Mrs Murdoch oughtta be in chicklit. Two pieces of interesting news from the Millions: you’ll feel less guilt about reading a book in the bath if it’s already dirty; and Ayn Rand’s editor was a communist. Mark Twain’s advice for little girls, illustr ks+ated .

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: A friend of ours

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: A friend of mine was throttled by Pete Postlethwaite once. It was outside a TV studio, people were smoking and Postlethwaite was only demonstrating some bit of business he had done while playing Macbeth, but even so, very few of us can claim to have been strangled by someone Steven Spielberg once called ‘the best actor in the world’. Postlethwaite died in January, to a vast and unexpected surge of public grief. Now arrives an autobiography, A Spectacle of Dust, written during illness, incomplete at death, finished by

Thursday

David Blackburn

Summer reading | 21 July 2011

It’s a tradition of the British summer. A Tory MP produces a summer reading list of weighty and worthy tomes to co-incide with the summer recess. This year, Keith Simpson has compiled the list, and as you can see it’s long as your arm. Spectator Book Blog contributor Nik Darlington has made a few selections from the list. And of course, we’d like CoffeeHousers’ recommendations too. Diary: Alastair Campbell, Diaries Vol. II: Power and the People and Diaries Vol. III: Power & Responsibility. Peter Catterall (editor), The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After, 1957-1966. Earl Ferrers, Whatever Next? Reminiscences of a journey through life. Chris Mullin, A Walk-On Part: Diaries 1994-1999, A View

Matthew Richardson

A hatful of facts about…Jane Austen

1) Last week, a Jane Austen manuscript sold for £993,250 at Sotheby’s. The manuscript contains the writing of an unfinished Austen novel, The Watsons, complete with numerous revisions and amendments. It has been bought by the Bodleian library in Oxford. Speaking to the BBC, Dr Chris Fletcher claimed: ‘It’s worth every single penny. This was the last…fiction manuscript in private ownership. We felt…very strongly that we needed to step in, bring it into public ownership for the enjoyment of scholars, but also the nation.’ Austen memorabilia commands famously high prices. In 2008, a lock of the author’s hair was flogged off for £4,800.   2) Austen’s work has spawned innumerable adaptations

Wednesday

David Blackburn

A truly British indulgence

The blackly comic Pickerskill Reports have returned to Radio Four, in a news series starring Ian McDiarmid. Here’s an exclusive video of McDiarmid introducing the new series and the quintessentially British character at its heart. 

Tuesday

Austen Saunders

A run of the mill bloke

Piet Barol is young man contentedly conscious of the fact that he is ‘extremely attractive to most women and to many men’. Lucky Piet. His good looks do him no harm when he arrives in Amsterdam in 1907 to be interviewed for the position of tutor to a rich hotelier’s son. The job is his after a little flirtation with the lady of the house, and throughout the rest of the novel Piet sets to work on using his new position as a first step towards the life of luxury he feels (as most good-looking young people do) is his natural right. One of the other things he has to

Monday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 18 July 2011

The Observer reports that publishers are seeking out five major music stars who are to write their memoirs, such was the success of Keith Richards’s book and the life. ‘Call them the Big Five. Game hunters have their wish-list of trophy animals, and rock music has its own – the elite group of rock stars yet to be bagged for publishing deals. This month, after HarperCollins snapped up the autobiography of Pete Townshend of the Who after a bidding war, publishers’ sights are firmly set on the few remaining major talents to have held back from a book deal. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Robert Plant and Bruce Springsteen are on

Saturday

Peter Robins

Link blog: the complexity of insults

The complexities of using the word douchebag in an essay on Dante. The risks of attempting to take Thomas Kinkade seriously. A great answer to the “Have you really read all those books?” question. A home for unfinished novels. An almost instant bookshop.

Alan Judd

Bookends | 16 July 2011

I like books with weather and there’s plenty in this one, all bad, which is even better. Set in London during a cold winter, Blue Monday (Penguin, £12.99) is the first of a new series for Nicci French, the successful husband and wife author team. I like books with weather and there’s plenty in this one, all bad, which is even better. Set in London during a cold winter, Blue Monday (Penguin, £12.99) is the first of a new series for Nicci French, the successful husband and wife author team. The central character is a consultant psychoanalyst called Frieda Klein, and the plot revolves around identity and identity transfer. The

Paul Johnson

When the going got tough

The acute emotional pain caused by his first wife’s infidelity was of priceless service to Evelyn Waugh as a novelist, says Paul Johnson Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, in 1966, and his reputation has risen steadily ever since. His status as the finest English prose-writer of the 20th century is now being marked by an annotated complete edition of his works, sumptuously published by the Oxford University Press. As a prolegomenon, Penguin is issuing another complete edition in hardback, the first eight volumes of which are now available, priced £20 each. They include his life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four

Caroline Moorehead

Good companions

‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become his companion again, in this affectionate hommage of photographs and short, scholarly texts. ‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become his companion again, in this affectionate hommage of photographs and short, scholarly texts. Stark herself is all the more present in that she appears from time to time among the monuments, with her small stout figure, beaky

Lee Langley

Wool of bat and lizard leg

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth. Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living; shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers — mezzadri, ‘half-people’, handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts — eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground

Michael Beaumont

Up the creek

Philip Marsden is a romantic historian. This is the story of Falmouth from its early days until the end of the age of sail. He writes with great love of the town near which he has lived all his life, and keeps darting from its history into personal anecdotes about expeditions made in his old motor launch Liberty, sometimes in search of pirate treasure. It makes for an attractive book. Until the 17th century there was no town of Falmouth. Its present centre is still known as ‘the Moor’, a place where swampy land meets the tide; a bog, in fact. For this reason the original town was founded up

Marcus Berkmann

Casualties on the home front

War correspondents aren’t like the rest of us: they can’t be. War correspondents aren’t like the rest of us: they can’t be. Most of the writers I know sit at home all day eating biscuits and staring out of the window. But war correspondents are out there, risking life, limb and sanity, seeing things we can only imagine; and as well as a journalist’s skills, they need a writer’s soul, to turn what they see into something people simply have to read. No wonder we’re so fascinated by them. Part of me would love to do a job like that. Fortunately the other 99 per cent of me, including the

David Gilmour

Enterprising Scots

If you wish to see how Scotland changed in the century after the Act of Union (1707), you might visit and compare the two houses in Edinburgh that belong to the National Trust for Scotland. Gladstone’s Land, built for a wealthy merchant in the 17th century, is a six-storey tenement in the old town, a place rich with period ambience but narrow, confined and in its heyday unhygienic. It could hardly contrast more vividly with The Georgian House in the new town’s Charlotte Square, which has space and elegance and the architecture of Robert Adam. If you would like to know why such a transformation took place, what opportunities the

Charlotte Moore

Fun-loving feminist

How to be a Woman is a manifesto memoir. Feminism, says the Times journalist Caitlin Moran, ‘has ground to a halt … shrunk down to a couple of increasingly small arguments, carried out among a couple of dozen feminist academics’. Moran wants to pull feminism out of its rut, dust it down and sex it up. She does this by laying bare her own transition from childhood to adulthood, when she hurtled through adolescence like ‘a monkey strapped inside a rocket … There isn’t an exit plan.’ Feminism is ‘serious, momentous and urgent’, which is why Moran seeks to make it accessible through anecdote and chat. She deliberately avoids the

Peter Parker

Citizen of the world

When Francis King returned to Oxford at the age of 24 in order to resume an education interrupted by the second world war, he had already published two novels. ‘Eager to publish more’, he decided to switch from Classics to what he saw as the easier option of English so as to leave more time for his writing. And publish more he did, with a bibliography that eventually ran to over 50 items, comprising not only novels and volumes of short stories, but poems, plays for radio and several distinguished works of non-fiction. He had an equally prolific career in literary journalism, which started during the war when J.R. Ackerley