Book Reviews

The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the ensuing Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the ensuing Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, an estimated 5,000 Jews

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is as an exclusive for the books blog. An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and edible’ and ‘a goldmine of pleasures’, which leads you to expect something discursive, entertaining and not particularly substantial, but Hitchings (in real life the Evening Standard’s drama critic) has a

If the Observer was hoping to reignite the debate on the future of cultural criticism they couldn’t have found a soggier squib than American academic Neal Gabler’s unenlightening essay. Professional criticism, thinks Gabler, is dead. According to him, reviewers, or “cultural commissars”, used to be able to control what we “ordinary folk” read, watched and listened to “through a process close to cultural brainwashing”. Now we ignore them, consulting blogs and Twitter instead. Gabler sees this as a revolution against cultural elitism. Several things annoy me about his doomladen, US-centric prognosis: 1. The conflation of the death of criticism with the death of cultural elitism If professional criticism is in

Being anonymous doesn’t immunize you from criticism, as the nameless author of O: A Presidential Novel has discovered recently. Numerous high profile reviewers have been sharpening their critical cutlery and tucking in.   Simon Schama, usually the model of bouncy good humour, was brought to a savage, Swiftian boil by ‘this turkey’ in the Financial Times over the weekend. And his guess at the reason for anonymity is amusing, if not a little cruel: ‘…if you’d committed something as dull as this you’d want to make sure no one found out either.’ A definite thumbs-down.   Justin Webb, in the Times, is a touch kinder. The book might read as

Those who expected a novel loosely based on Barack Obama’s re-election to be a puff piece should look away now. O – A Presidential Novel is a refreshingly cynical look inside the Obama White House by an anonymous someone who claims to have seen the President live and work at close hand. Like Primary Colours with Clinton, the novel never attempts to disguise who “O” might be. And, like the West Wing, it is an irreverent and witty take on an ideal Washington world, following the ups and downs of compelling characters from across the spectrum. From lobbyists, hungry journalists to rich donors, O takes a peek at every level

Peter Hoskin wrote the Bookends column for the latest issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of the blog: Did you know they once burned comic books? And in America, no less. In schoolyards. It was shortly after the end of the second world war, and legislators and parents were all shook up about what these ten-cent publications with their scenes of violence and distress were doing to the minds of their children. So on the concrete they went, in messy piles. A sprinkling of fuel, a lit match, and the fire soon caught hold. Some of the kids even cheered the flames on. I know this last

‘But perhaps there was an answer, using a kind of extreme logic. My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and he countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way. Then, perhaps, the