Book Reviews

John Farndon has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of the book blog. Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth . . . wrote Tennyson in his sonnet about the gigantic sea monsters of Viking myth. The kraken legend is often said to have been inspired by real sightings of giant squid, and this is why Wendy Williams in her Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid has chosen this as a title for her book. But there was no need for

Few things are more intriguing than an unfinished novel. With fitting symmetry, two books have been published posthumously in the past two years: Nabokov’s The Original Laura and Jose Saramango’s Cain. This year, Little Brown is to publish The Pale King, an unfinished work by David Foster Wallace – a claimant to the title of Great American Novelist, who took his own life in September 2008. Publication has been delayed twice by what one publisher described as ‘entirely foreseeable circumstances’. Obviously, sensitivity is paramount in this tragic case, but it seems that The Pale King is finally ready to be crowned. Precise publication details remain obscure, but editors on both

In a recent review of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, Robert Macfarlane remarks that the English scrubland between town and countryside is a theme that seems currently to be occupying the national consciousness.  The border country that this book describes is the territory which people pass through on their way to other places; the no man’s land traversed by motorways and criss-crossed by telephone wires.  Macfarlane is completely right: not only have two poets, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, written a book about the edgelands, but the BFI is organising a short film festival on the subject of ‘liminal Britain’ later in the year. The idea of edgelands

Roger Scruton is a man who has found himself condemned for defending the right things in the wrong way. Love, home, happiness and justice are the overriding concerns of his work, but his arguments about how we can achieve them have been repeatedly damned as mad and dangerous by those kind enough to appoint themselves the moral policeman of public thought. Mark Dooley, it is fair to say, is not one of those moral policeman. He is instead a Scrutonian acolyte whose aim in this book, The Philosopher on Dover Beach, is to outline and celebrate what he takes to be Scruton’s “philosophy of love”. Dooley does not try to

John Aubrey was at his most vivacious when describing the cavaliers of his era. ‘A gallant in an age of the lewdest bawdy,’ he wrote of Lucius Carey with ill-disguised pleasure. These men were rogues like Rochester, Lovelace and Herrick – broke, drunk and invariably syphilitic. They were also royalists, a licentious contrast to their puritanical political opponents. The ’roundheads’ regarded the cavalier’s person and politics with equal loathing, convinced that both would lead to eternal damnation. Milton’s famous evocation of pandemonium in Paradise Lost has a censorious tone that was perhaps a reaction to the abandon of Restoration England. Renowned historian John Stubbs has returned to Aubrey’s fascination by

Jerry Hayes, the former Conservative MP for Harlow and criminal Barrister, returns to The Spectator Arts Blog with his take on Janet Street Porter’s book Don’t Let The B*****ds Get You Down, which has recently been reprinted in paperback. You really won’t want to put this book down. Because the moment the first page of this execrable excuse for a self-help manual is finished, you will feel compelled to hurl it from the nearest window and pray that it won’t land on consecrated ground. This is not just any old turkey. It is a Janet Street Porter primal scream of a self-boasting, oven-ready, 25-pounder. It is a book that quite