Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Ian Birrell

The freedom fighters who dared to take on a communist superpower

In May 2020, as the planet grappled with the pandemic, China’s state media declared that there were ‘obvious deficiencies’ in Hong Kong law enforcement needing to be addressed. Any delusions this might have referred to intensifying police brutality in response to massive pro-democracy protests, let alone the unleashing of Triad thugs to attack participants, were dashed rapidly. Details emerged days later of a draconian new security law that criminalised any form of dissent, whether at home or abroad, with threat of life imprisonment. ‘When the world is not watching, they are killing Hong Kong,’ said Dennis Kwok, a lawyer and pro-democracy legislator. He was right. This was the moment that

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

From The Archives: Robert Webb

26 min listen

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam’s conversation from 2017 with Robert Webb. His moving and funny book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls ‘The Trick’: the gender expectations that he identifies as causing many of the agonies of his adolescence and young manhood. What is it to be a man? Are we doomed to lives of inarticulacy, shagging, fighting and drinking — giving pain and fear their only outlet in anger?

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

From The Archives: Speeches that shape the world

28 min listen

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam’s conversation from 2017 with Philip Collins, former speech writer to Tony Blair, about his book When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape The World and Why We Need Them. He takes Sam through the history of rhetoric, how Camus is the original centrist Dad, and why David Miliband’s victory speech is perhaps one of the best speeches never delivered. 

Thursday

Roger Lewis

The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West? Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in

James Cahill

Andy Warhol would have revelled in the chaos of his legacy

Andy Warhol’s legacy has been dogged by rows over authenticity more than that of any other modern artist. Warhol might well have predicted the chaos and even delighted in it. He once signed a fake painting at Christie’s – four silkscreened Jackie Kennedys – for the hell of it. ‘I don’t know why I ever did,’ he wrote in his diary – and yet the confession makes clear that he maintained a distinction, in the end, between what was fraudulent and what was his. You can’t sign a fake if everything is real. The task of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board – established in 1995 by the foundation which handles

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Surprise package: Tackle!, by Jilly Cooper, reviewed

Jilly Cooper, queen of the British bonkbuster, has turned her attention to football for her 18th novel. She was inspired after sitting next to Sir Alex Ferguson at lunch one day. She also thanks Kenny Dalglish, Alan Curbishley and ‘my wonderful neighbour’ Tony Adams in her acknowledgements. Her friend, the former home secretary Michael Howard, even took her to a Liverpool match, where she met Steven Gerrard.  Her legions of fans need not worry, however. We are still in Rutshire, the village Cooper created for her earlier novels; Rupert Campbell-Black, the hero of Riders, Rivals and Mount!, who was allegedly partly modelled on Andrew Parker Bowles, still lives in Penscombe

Alexandra Coghlan

The popularity of ‘Amazing Grace’ owes much to its melody

Type ‘Amazing Grace’ into YouTube and you can cancel any other plans you might have had for the day. Page after page serves up everything from Elvis Presley to Pavarotti, Gospel choirs and winsome Celtic lovelies, folkies in fabulous knitwear and X Factor finalists strenuously proclaiming their surgically enhanced faith; even an American president. There are arrangements for electric guitar, steelpan orchestra, bagpipes or (God help us) beginner flute ensemble. Saved from the storm, Newton was aware of ‘a sense of the amazing grace that snatched me from ruin’ All of which suggests that James Walvin’s Amazing Grace is a book landing in fertile soil. This is a song that’s

Joel Morris

Alan Partridge has had more incarnations than Barbie

Alan Partridge is back, and this time he’s restoring a lighthouse. The third volume of the Norfolk microstar’s faux autobiography is a meticulous parody of the celebrity-in-search-of-a-televisable gimmick genre, blending fan-friendly, behind-the-scenes tales of his more recent public adventures (This Time, Scissored Isle, From the Oasthouse) with a classic midlife lurch for purpose, part Griff Rhys-Jones rescuing threatened buildings, part Clarkson’s Farm. Though Steve Coogan’s id-slaying monster started out as a media satire, Alan Partridge has become a vital national mirror in which middle-aged, middle English, middleweight, middlebrow man (let us call him Homo Partridgensis) can watch himself weather and crumble. The act of restoring a suitably phallic landmark on

Simon Winchester

The invisible boundaries of everyday life

Norman Shrapnel, the wise and kindly parliamentary correspondent of the Guardian back in the day when it was a readable newspaper, tried never to give a book a bad review. He liked to say that anyone who had taken the time and trouble to write about anything at length deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt, and so he generally dipped his reviewer’s pen in honey rather than vinegar. I must say that on picking up Maxim Samson’s Invisible Lines, I felt quite otherwise. I wanted at first (an important caveat) to paint my laptop’s entire screen with vitriol. Within two pages I’d begun to loathe the author’s

Lynn Barber

Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

In 1994, Norman Mailer called Madonna ‘our greatest living female artist’. She was huge in those days. I remember teenagers like my daughters constantly asking ‘What would Madonna do?’ But my grandchildren haven’t even heard of her. She seems to have faded faster than most. Why? Perhaps it’s because, as often claimed, she’s the ‘queen of reinvention’. But people who reinvent themselves every few months, as Madonna always did, tend to leave other people behind. Her ‘rebel life’, as told here by Mary Gabriel, is a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators who were vital to her for a year or two and then discarded. Her first manager,

Horatio Clare

Seeing the dark in a new light

True darkness, it turns out, can be experienced but does not exist. If you have been down a deep mine where the guide tells you to turn off your lamp you will have seen – in not seeing – something close to it: an utter nothingness in which your body and mind seem to shrink and expand at the same time. On a school trip to Big Pit in South Wales my entire class fell into a moment of unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated silence, a gasped amazement at the disappearance and invisibility of ourselves. Just for a moment everything vanished – and then the whooping and squealing started.  This double impulse,

Don Paterson

What convinces Jeremy Corbyn that ‘there is a poet in all of us’?

Much like its editors, I have no idea who Poetry for the Many is for. However, the choir it preaches to is quickly identified. It opens with a dedication to Julian Assange, the free speech martyr in no way a narcissist patsy for a hostile state. A member of UB40 summarises the book’s aim on the jacket: to ‘encourage the working classes to embrace and enjoy culture’. Elsewhere, in the course of four separate introductions, I divine some plan to make poetry both politically relevant and accessible to the lower orders. This project apparently requires the literary advocacy of Len McCluskey and Jeremy Corbyn. They have written personal introductions to

Frances Wilson

The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor

Emperor of Rome? Is there a typo in the title? Mary Beard’s latest book is about not one but 30 Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE), so why the singular? The answer is that Emperor of Rome is a study of autocracy and one autocrat, as Marcus Aurelius put it, is much the same as another: ‘Same play, different cast.’  Beard’s subject is emperors as a category, because it was the symbol of rule rather than the ruler himself that mattered to the 50 million imperial subjects between darkest Britannia and the Saharan desert in the first three centuries of the Christian

Benedict Allen

Will the Caucasus ever be tamed? 

How to get your head around that searingly beautiful but complicated land that lies between the Caspian and Black Seas? The early Arab historian Al Masudi called the Caucasus jabal al-alsun, the mountain of tongues, and through the centuries the place has certainly seen its fair share of peoples, many of them troublesome, many of them troubled. Indeed, for somewhere you might think would be a transcontinental backwater, its outcrops, secluded valleys and expansive plains usefully separating its formidable neighbours – Russia to the north, Turkey and Iran to the south – it’s proved remarkably busy over the centuries; also persistently relevant. The turbulence of the region is rarely far

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Andrew Lycett: The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes

38 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Arthur Conan Doyle’s biographer (and historical consultant to the new BBC TV programme Killing Sherlock) Andrew Lycett. Introducing his new book The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes: The Inspiration Behind the World’s Greatest Detective, Andrew tells me about the vexed relation between the great consulting detective and his creator, and the extraordinary afterlife of this apparently ephemeral creation.  

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Mother’s always angry: Jungle House, by Julianne Pachino, reviewed

Jungle House is not the sultry tropical tale you might expect either from its title or from its vivid, palm-strewn dust jacket. Instead, Julianne Pachico’s third novel concerns AI. This is not immediately obvious, and although there is an appealing directness to the writing, it means that no time is spent setting the scene or allowing readers to get their bearings fully. I could have done with more explication of the circumstances in which a young girl, Lena, comes to live in an AI-controlled house. At the book’s opening, Lena has her work cut out: There’s fishing and mushroom-gathering and swimming in the river. Five days a week are for

Adam Begley

Fast and furious: America Fantastica, by Tim O’Brien, reviewed

It’s been said again and again but rarely so plainly illustrated: American life is now too berserk for fiction to keep up. Tim O’Brien’s wild, rollercoaster satire America Fantastica is as wacky as its title suggests; but it can’t compete with the daily trainwreck that calls itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. O’Brien tracks with furious contempt the spread of a highly contagious illness: mythomania and delusional conspiracy theories infecting the body politic and poisoning a defenceless citizenry in the dark pre-Covid days of 2019. The name ‘Trump’ is never mentioned in the novel, but the ‘avalanche of oratorical whoppers’ issuing from the White

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

In the dark early 1960s, at least we had the Beatles

‘These things start on my birthday – like the Warsaw Uprising – and spoil my day,’ wrote the understandably self-pitying Barking housewife Pat Scott in her diary on the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. ‘And then to spoil it more, Ted [her husband] took his driving test for the second time and failed.’ It is clashes like these, of the personal and humdrum against the political and global, that make David Kynaston’s close surveys of Britain in the second half of the 20th century such fascinating and lively documents. Yes, the world might be about to end, but that was no excuse to spoil Pat’s

Michael Moorcock

The hubris of the great airship designers

Tribal rivalries have existed from humanity’s beginning and have fuelled the creation of every prestigious monument ever built. By the Age of Science we were building not pyramids but ironclads and submarines fighting for ascendancy at sea, expanding our empires in spite of an ever-growing movement for colonial independence. The Spanish-American war of 1898 added the United States to the list of great nations believing it to be their destiny, even duty, to bring their kind of progress to the world. Many understood that achieving overwhelming technological power as a nation guaranteed that no antagonist would dare attack. Limited by agreements made after the first world war, Britain no longer

A.S.H. Smyth

A strong whiff of goodbyes: The Pole and Other Stories, by J.M. Coetzee, reviewed

New books by, articles about or Sasquatch-like sightings of J.M. Coetzee routinely send me back to that infamous YouTube clip of Geoff Dyer face-planting while being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide Book Festival – an episode often cited as evidence that the Nobel Laureate has no sense of humour. The garlanded ex-South African’s work is famously as dry as the Karoo, and Coetzee himself has been accused of having only ever laughed once. But a smile is visible in ‘The Pole’, the longest story in this collection. Beatriz, in her late forties, is an educated Spanish woman, ‘a good person’ in a ‘civilised’ (read dormant) marriage, involved in organising