Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

George Binning

Hay dispatch: Turning on Thomas

Hugh Thomas gave an update on his progress through his three volume history of the Spanish Empire. He has recently published volume two: the Golden Age, in which he examines the reign of Charles V and the conquest of South America. Aptly named the Golden Age because he refers to an age of amazing discovery during which the Spanish were afflicted with an insatiable hunger for gold and two thirds of Spain’s income was mined from South America. Thomas had chosen to focus mostly on what the Spanish brought to South America, namely writing, domestic animals, the wheel and Christianity. He asserted that Christianity had been gladly welcomed by the

Philip Hensher

Honour the most exalted poet

What’s your punishment going to be, when you get to Hell? At least as envisaged by Dante, you might be somewhat surprised. Hitler (mass murderer) is in the outer ring of the seventh circle, up to his eyebrows in a river of blood and fire. Still, that’s a little better than the innocent manager of your local HSBC (banker), who is in the inner ring, running perpetually on burning sand. Both get off much lighter than the poor lady who, the other day, told me how much she’d enjoyed something or other I’d written (flatterer). She’s a whole circle lower down in the second bolgia, or pit, sitting in excrement

Rupert Christiansen

Hall of mirrors

After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. Alan Riding’s new study of the episode forcefully reminds one that it was never that simple: objectively researched and soberly balanced though the book is, navigating its moral maze leaves one queasy with mixed feelings. Where should the line be drawn, what constitutes collaboration or resistance, were the Pétainistes craven defeatists or

Judith Flanders

Pearls before swine

The story of Harry the Valet is the stuff of fiction. He was a dazzlingly adept, smooth, glamorous jewel thief, who never stooped to petty crime but carried off the kind of robberies more commonly found in novels and films: huge ruby necklaces, diamonds and pearls all poured out, pirate-treasure fashion, into his waiting hands. The Valet was the son of a successful lower-middle-class tradesman, a picture-framer, who died when he was a young man, leaving his widow to carry on his business, unsuccessfully. Harry meanwhile bet on horses, drank and smoked and revelled in bad company, soon finding himself with no money and no profession. He took the easy

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 4 June 2011

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

Ian Thomson

Deep, dark mysteries

For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure. London Under, his brief account of the capital’s catacombs and other murky zones, manages to radiate a dark mystery and sulphur reek. ‘There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground’, Ackroyd announces, like a Victorian raree-show merchant. This is an entertaining if slightly daft book, that reveals what a weird world lies beneath our feet. Whether Ackroyd has actually been to all the places he describes is uncertain. Journalists have contorted themselves through narrow, stinking cave-galleries and risked leptospirosis from rat urine in their quest for London subterranea. But the stately Ackroyd? The London sewers are vividly described

Andro Linklater

‘I told them’

No messenger bearing bad news can expect to be popular. But to be dis- believed as well adds a particularly bitter twist, since the messenger’s character can only be vindicated by proving the truth of his horrific message. That was Jan Karski’s fate. He was the Polish resistance fighter sent to London in 1942 to tell the world that the Jews in Poland were being exterminated. Not in their hundreds, not in their thousands, but in their millions.There would be none left, Karski reported, unless the Allies publicly promised a retaliation sufficiently terrible to halt the Nazis in their tracks. ‘I had this feeling’, Karski confessed after giving his information

James Hamilton

A catastrophe waiting to happen

Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. The subtitle of the book is quite accurate. Vesuvius probably is the most famous volcano in the world, because unlike all others it has attracted for some 2,000 years multifarious extraordinary people to study it. Darley

Anthony Cummins

We are the past

Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). The Monument is rubble, Tower Bridge has ‘long gone’ and scavengers are chopping fingers off frozen bodies to snatch rings. Our narrator can’t remember much — two thirds of the book pass before we find out her name is Izzy — but a couple of randy fellow vagrants claim to know her, and some children say she’s their mum. By the time one of

William Leith

Speak, Memory

One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. But he sees that a man called Ben Pridmore is the world’s ‘memory champion’. Foer is instantly intrigued. He himself has, he says, an average memory. He forgets lots of things — where he put his keys, for instance. And

Ferdinand Mount

Elegy for wild Wales

If you drive West out of Carmarthen on the A40, you pass through a landscape of dimpled hills and lonely chapels and little rivers full of salmon trout. This is Byron’s Country, the place where Byron Rogers was brought up in the late Forties, not knowing a word of English, until at the age of five he made the momentous journey a few miles east into Carmarthen town. It is a very odd place. In the graveyard at Cana, just beside the road, you will find the grave of Group Captain Ira Jones DSO, MC, DFC and bar, MM, one of Wales’s greatest war heroes. He was famous for killing

Friday

Colin Amery

Bookend: Bloodbath

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

George Binning

Hay dispatch: The meaning of life

If one scientist were to sit at a table full of philosophers it might seem at first that the scientist had the upper hand purely by virtue of their self confidence. The philosophers’ humility might be no match for the all encompassing certainty of science. Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry and author of A Scientist’s Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence, stood up before an audience of several hundred and proudly declared that science would eventually answer every question relating to the physical world, even perhaps, to morality. Science is the only way to answer a question, he said, as all science is based upon evidence and observation. He

Peter Robins

Link blog: Of drunks, criminals and profanity

A way of becoming very drunk while stocktaking your bookshop’s science-fiction section (via). A collector’s guide to true crime, including an unexpected connection between Dennis Nilsen and Virginia Woolf. A celebration of the typographic specimen book that is rather lovely to look at. An easy way into Jean Rhys – at least, easy if you know sufficient French. A vintage television interview with Joan Didion, elegantly glossed. A book-promotion technique based on photographs of cute dogs reading. An erudite discussion on the right Nordic crime to choose if you really, really didn’t like Stieg Larsson. The first instance of the word ‘fart’ in the New Yorker (during a review of

Thursday

George Binning

Hay dispatch: Fonting up

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

Matthew Richardson

Rolling in the Hay

Our coverage of the final days of this year’s Hay Festival begins today. Here’s a selection of facts and myths about the world’s grandest literary festival. 1) This year’s reconciliation between Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul joins a long list of memorable events at the festival. In 2009, Ruth Padel held her resignation press conference at Hay to explain why she was stepping down from being Oxford Professor of Poetry. The year before, Gary Kasparov publicly slated Western governments for turning a blind-eye to Russian corruption. 2) The festival has glamorous friends. Former US President, Bill Clinton, famously labelled it ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. In 2009, Stephen Fry was

Wednesday

Austen Saunders

The strange case of the unreadable bestseller

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

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

Stirred rather than shaken

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

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 31 May 2011

The Telegraph is live at the Telegraph Hay Festival. The Salon reports on ‘Stephen from Baltimore’s’ attempt to re-write James Joyce’s Ulysees on Twitter: ‘All volunteers need to do is choose a section, or several, from the 18 episodes, structured loosely on Homer’s epic, “then thoughtfully, soulfully, fancifully compose a series of 4-6 tweets to represent that section.”‘ The Guardian’s Digested Read, by John Crace, turns its cutting eye on Jeffery Deaver’s new Bond book, Carte Blanche. ‘On his way out of M’s office, Bond noticed an attractive young agent chatting to Moneypenny. Ding-dong! Stockings or tights? “The name is Bond, James Bond,” he said. “Ophelia Maidenstone,” she replied. “I’ve

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 May 2011

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