Book Reviews

Beware prophets and charismatics, warned Machiavelli. And he would know, having watched Savonarola’s brand of ascetic lunacy impede his political career, not to mention Florence’s prosperity and security. In his latest book, Paul Strathern revisits the city’s most effervescent period at the close of the fifteenth century, as princes, prelates and proles vied for its ‘soul’ at one of the ‘most important moments in Western history’. Whether Florence merits such prominence is open to debate, when Spain was acquiring the New World, anti-clericalism and new learning were stirring Reformation and the Ottoman Empire came close to crushing Christian civilisation east of Vienna. But Strathern’s enthusiasm and breakneck-paced style will more than

Bethlehem was an odd venue for the birth of Christ; but not as odd as choosing Bedford for the New Jerusalem. Yet, in 1919, a widow named Mabel Baltrop, was declared to be the daughter of God by a group of women styling themselves the Panacea Society. They called her Octavia and she appointed 12 apostles who spread the word from Bedford to the globe’s four corners, founding a utopian communion followed by 130,000 people. The movement was observantly documented by devotees. This is the latest chapter in the history of the neo-spiritual boom that succeeded the slaughter in Flanders. Jane Shaw lessens the subject’s apparent absurdity by placing it in

Can nation building defeat terrorism? Jack Fairweather asks this question at the outset of The Edge of Eden, a history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Admittedly, the question is rhetorical – having been answered by all too evident failures and the high cost in blood – but that doesn’t lessen Fairweather’s impact.   Fairweather was the Telegraph’s Baghdad correspondent and the Washington Post’s man in Afghanistan; this books commits a decade of strategic and political errors made to posterity’s record. The account is high-political: an antidote to the foot soldiers’ memoirs that have emerged in recent years. Fairweather follows a group of senior officers and officials as they strive to avoid repeating the

The history of British exploration is dominated by heroic failure. Robert Falcon Scott: defeated and died. George Mallory: probably defeated and died. Those two are the greatest, or at least the most famous of our imperial adventurers; the Victorian hero Captain Sir John Franklin is more obscure, though no less heroic. Prior to the construction of the Suez Canal, British seaborne commerce searched for a fast route to the East, preferably through the Arctic Circle. The hunt for the elusive Northwest Passage became a national obsession; the subject, even, of Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.  Expeditions became more frequent after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1845, the 59-year-old Franklin led a Royal

Ferdinand Mount: Mark Girouard’s Elizabethan Architecture is a prodigy book devoted to the Prodigy Houses, those fantastical mega-palaces which reared up out of the placid landscape in the brief, dazzling period of Elizabeth’s ending and James’s beginning: Longleat, Hardwick, Burghley, Castle Ashby, Wollaton and Montacute. The English built nothing so breathtaking before or after. The illustrations are lovely, and so is the text: crisp, authoritative, with a touch of mischief. This is a ripe example of the Girouardesque, a glorious slab of a book. Si monumentum requiris, perlege. Going to very cold places is the idealist’s last resort. David Vann’s losers escape into the snow and solitude without, of course,

Sam Leith: The book that I’ve found myself telling other people about most has been Through The Language Glass, Guy Deutscher’s gripping pop-science book about linguistics and neuropsychology, describing how language shapes our perception of reality. I also hope people look at the handsomely produced A Hedonist’s Guide to Art. I must confess an interest: I’ve contributed a couple of essays and it’s edited by a friend, Laura K. Jones. But it’s highly original, and stuffed with fascinating gobbets from contributors as diverse as Brian Sewell, Will Self, Gilbert & George and Genesis P. Orridge. Lewis Jones: Chasing the Sun tells non-scientists all they might want to know about the

Cressida Connolly: Polly Samson’s new collection of short stories, Perfect Lives is terrific. Funny, beautifully observed and often poignant, they’re the best thing Samson has produced yet. Whether she’s recording the minutiae of modern marriage or the flora and fauna of a riverbank, this is a writer who misses nothing. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was a revelation. The stories sound ghastly: some of them are less than a page long, few characters are given names and Davis approaches her subjects sideways and in sudden scuttles, crablike. But the effect is quite brilliant — wry, original and wholly unsettling. I can’t think of a book it would be more

Elizabeth Baines is a novelist, playwright and blogger. Her work can be found at www.elizabethbaines.com, and she blogs at http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com and at the cutting http://fictionbitch.blogspot.com. Her first novel The Birth Machine has been reissued as it was originally intended; here she relates why. Christmas, a time for dreaming, and here, sure enough, are the Christmas books offering the dream that whatever your beginnings – East End boy selling TV aerials out of a van or anthropomorphized desert meerkat – with talent and determination you’ll succeed. It’s especially ironic, it seems to me, that it should be the publishing industry peddling this notion, since literary talent has never been less guaranteed

Julian Barnes is fast challenging William Trevor as the modern master of the short story. Barnes’ second collection of short stories, The Lemon, delved into life’s complexities and he dives deeper with this latest collection, Pulse. Each character is attuned to a ‘pulse’ – an amalgamation of a life-force and an Aristotelian flaw. They struggle against or thrive upon the submerged currents of life – touched by ambition, sex, love, health, work and death.        Barnes’ range of time and place is impressive, veering from the domestic to the exotic, from the contemporary to the historical – unsurprising given his success with fictionalising history in Arthur and George. In one

A.N. Wilson: Stuart Kelly’s Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation is a very engaging, highly intelligent conversation with its readers about what we owe to Walter Scott. His heritage is found not only in literature, but also in tourism, in the banking crisis (Kelly has some good things to say about The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther and their relevance to the crisis of 2008) and much more. The author is interested in everything, from Balmoral to the Wild West, from films to Hiawatha. I loved this book and heartily recommend it. To coincide with the anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Rosamund Bartlett has written Tolstoy: A Russian Life. The extraordinary

Here is the second installment from the magazine. Paul Johnson: The book I relished most from 2010 was John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1883–1899. This is volume 5 in the catalogue raisonné being lovingly compiled by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray and published by Yale at £50. It contains a detailed account of Sargent’s greatest painting, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, which took him two years, 1885–86, to complete and is now in the Tate. Also enjoyable was the latest instalment of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle which covers the year October 1860–October 1861 and is volume 37 in this remarkable series — notable as always