Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Some are born great

Are great sportsmen born with high talent, or do they win prizes through years of application? That question, as old as sport itself, forms the basis of this book, which tries to inform readers ‘how champions are made’. Are great sportsmen born with high talent, or do they win prizes through years of application? That question, as old as sport itself, forms the basis of this book, which tries to inform readers ‘how champions are made’. The author, a former Commonwealth table-tennis champion who is now a journalist, has investigated the subject thoroughly — too thoroughly, it might be said — but fails to make his case. For sport, like

Justin Cartwright

Taking on the turmoil

Nadine Gordimer is now in her mid-eighties. For as long as I have been alive, she has been the towering figure of South African literature, a fact recognised in l991 by the Nobel committee. This is a collection of her non-fiction over 60 years, running to nearly 800 pages. There is a belief, prevalent in South Africa, that she received the Nobel more for her politics than her literature. The distinction between politics and literature is to her absurd; she quotes with approval a maxim, ‘Once I am no more than a writer I will stop writing’. No writer, she says, should be required to separate the inner life from

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 29 May 2010

Tudor thrillers are thick on the ground nowadays but this one is rather special. The Bones of Avalon (Corvus, £16.99) is something of a departure for Phil Rickman, best known for his excellent Merrily Watkins series about a diocesan exorcist in contemporary Herefordshire. Here he writes in the first person as Dr John Dee, the astrologer, mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1560, William Cecil despatches him to Glastonbury, with his younger but more sophisticated friend Robert Dudley, to search for the bones of King Arthur. But Dee’s mission turns into far more than an attempt to strengthen the dynastic foundations of the Tudor dynasty: there’s a conspiracy

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Ready for take-off

In 1969 John Gross wrote a justly praised book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. The phrase seemed slightly archaic then, and is more so now. I was going to suggest that Gross is the last Man of Letters, but I find that Stephen Bayley describes me as that in the current issue of GQ magazine — and I’m that bit younger than Gross. As editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Gross took the brave decision to end back-biting anonymity and give his reviewers by-lines: that was revolutionary, not old-fashioned. If you said he was the best-read man in Britain, I doubt there would be many challengers.

Jeremy Clarke

Viewed from below

‘What’s Taki like?’ is a common response to my telling someone I’m a contributor to this magazine. ‘What’s Taki like?’ is a common response to my telling someone I’m a contributor to this magazine. People seem to think we regular contributors are jolly shipmates together, living out of hammocks in the hold. The prosaic truth is I’ve met Taki just twice, on each occasion at a Spectator party. The first time was on the steps at the old Doughty Street office while a mid-summer ‘At Home’ bash, measuring about a Force Nine on the Richter scale, was raging inside. Conscious of his career as an international black-belt karate champion, I

Byron Rogers

Holy smoke | 22 May 2010

I have seen the last of the things that are gone, brooded the poet Padraic Colum. But then so have we all. We have seen them clustered outside the plate-glass doors of offices or under the flapping canvas awnings ouside pubs, these last irreconcilables inhaling in the wind and rain. And the crazy thing is that they are acquiring a tattered dignity, which presumably was the last thing the authorities and the doctors thought would result when they got their ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces. But what happens when their ranks thin, when eventually just one is left, as the last old Jacobite was left in some Paris

Alexander Masters

Cold comfort | 22 May 2010

A good story is made of bones. It’s the reader’s job to flesh it into intimacy. In Helen Simpson’s adventurous new collection, In Flight Entertainment, the best stories rattle like skeletons; the worst, squelch. The title piece is about a bullying businessman on a plane, up-graded to first class, pontificating: the scam of carbon-offsetting; the reason it’s pointless to stop using airplanes (‘In a word, pal — China!’); the inconvenience that the flight’s going to have to land in Iceland because some selfish guy in the seat across the aisle has just died. He’s brutally, comically awful. You long for him to die, gurglingly. Simpson, more sophisticated, lets him live,

Tom Holland

Going down fighting

Both the Greeks and the Jews were haunted by the image of a burning city. Indeed, there is a sense in which their radically differing attempts to exorcise it served to define their respective cultures. Among the Greeks, it was believed that everything most glorious about mortal achievement, and everything most terrible about mortal suffering, was to be found in the narrative of the siege and sack of Troy. Among the Jews, nothing did more to shape their understanding of the divine purpose than their anguished attempts to fathom why it was that their god had permitted Jerusalem to fall. Even today, millennia on, the aftershocks of these twin calamities

Charlotte Moore

Last year is best

The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna’s first novel since her prize-winning Inglorious, is clever, ambitious and not wholly successful. The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna’s first novel since her prize-winning Inglorious, is clever, ambitious and not wholly successful. It is a tribute to her skill that she handles her four narrative strands without lapsing into confusion; the reader is deftly directed on a journey through time and place. The danger is that emotional resonance is sacrificed to an over-schematic insistence on concept. Her first story is based on historical fact. In 1865, Ignaz Semmelweis is confined to a Viennese lunatic asylum where he is barbarously treated. Semmelweis, a doctor, discovered

Michael Burleigh

The shape of things to come

Among writers of history a variety of genres flourish: they include battles, biographies and a significant date, such as 1066, 1492 or 1940. The television documentary maker, Denys Blakeway, has opted for 1936 in the belief that it was a better vintage, so to speak, than 1935 or 1937. Many Britons lived parallel lives, some in the new Ideal Home suburbs; a residue in what were euphemistically called Special Areas in the North East, South Wales and Scotland, as desperate then as they often are nowadays, even though the deprivation is not entirely material. The year 1936 was certainly an auspicious one for television, with white-coated Nazi cameramen filming the

Francis King

Short and sweet | 22 May 2010

This little book of limericks, some as hard and glittering as shards of mica but a few surprisingly pallid and limp, at once presents a puzzle: the real name of an author is no more likely to be Jeff Chaucer than the real name of the author of a play would be Billie Shakespeare. The first task that I therefore set myself was to attempt to discover the real identity behind the pseudonym. Accompanying the title there is also the name of Robert Conquest, writer of an introduction that, while I was reading it, seemed to be familiar, and that eventually turned out to be a revised version of a

Blair Worden

The devil and the deep sea

The sea, the sea. Land-lubbers who write or read England’s history omit it from its heart. At least, we have done so since the aeroplane and electric communications reduced the maritime components of warfare and wealth and travel. The popular imagination banishes piracy, Adrian Tinniswood’s subject, to romance and comic-strips. So we are startled by its modern re-emergence as a major hazard and impediment on the African and Indonesian coasts. That development is much closer to the 17th-century predicaments recounted by Tinninswood than is the swashbuckling glamour of Captain Kidd or Errol Flynn. Then as now, great powers were taunted by seaborne flouters of international law and by their surreptitious

Penelope Lively

Officers, if not gentlemen

The execution for desertion of a young officer during the first world war goes disastrously wrong. What exactly happened? Who was there, and why have some of those involved met untimely deaths? This is the crux of a novel that is a marriage of who-done-it and commentary on the class-ridden attitudes of the early 20th century. The action takes place in the immediate wake of the war, when battle-damaged men try to adjust to civilian life. One of these, Laurence Bartram, is persuaded to try and find out why a fellow officer, John Emmett, has apparently committed suicide; the persuader is Emmett’s sister Mary — romance hangs in the air.

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Genetics, God and antlers

‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ Oren Harman uses this quote from Immanuel Kant to open one of the chapters of The Price of Altruism, and it’s an observation that — after the steady reflection on moral law that Harman’s book invites and encourages — only seems more true by the end. ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ Oren Harman

Cressida Connolly

A girl’s best friend

If you wanted to write about Marilyn Monroe, how would you go about it? The pile of biographies, memoirs and novels about poor, sad Marilyn is already teetering. How could you make something new of her life? Clever Andrew O’Hagan has come up with an answer: by writing as her pet dog. How the hound came to be in her possession is a terrific story in itself. Maf, a Maltese terrier, was given to Marilyn by Frank Sinatra (the dog’s name was her sly reference to Sinatra’s alleged mafia connections). Sinatra got the dog from Natalie Wood’s mother, who regularly travelled to Britain to scoop up puppies, in much the

Will Robinson

Not our finest hour

Ever since Edward II’s deposition and grisly murder in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle in 1327, his reign has always been regarded as a particularly embarrassing interlude in English history. Ever since Edward II’s deposition and grisly murder in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle in 1327, his reign has always been regarded as a particularly embarrassing interlude in English history. In 1908, when there was still some pretence that such subjects had a place in the classroom, teachers were advised that the period should be ‘passed over in discreet silence’. Not only was it one of fruitless civil war; Edward was also thought to have been a homosexual, who doted

Frederic Raphael

The woman behind the god

The emperor Augustus was the original god/father. Julius Caesar was often referred to as ‘the divine Julius’, but his nephew (and adopted son) was the first Roman to have temples dedicated to him in his lifetime. If uncle Julius had died a natural death, or in some brave battle, the Roman upper class would never have suffered the decimation (and then some) which Caesar’s ‘son’ and heir visited upon it under the rubric of vengeful piety. His last and greatest enemies had had nothing to do with Caesar’s death. Mark Antony had been Julius’s number two and was actually Octavian’s brother-in-law; Cleopatra had been his uncle’s most passionate love. After

Simon Courtauld

Cherchez la femme

The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The deed was duly done one night in 1941: Erroll’s body was

George Trefgarne

The credit crunch with jokes

Unlike most financial writers, who are too serious for their own good, Michael Lewis has a sense of humour and he deploys it deftly. In Liar’s Poker, his semi-autobiographical account of the Salomon Brothers bond desk published 20 years ago, the traders always explain a market move they do not understand by blaming it on ‘the Arabs’. At once, we realise that the Masters of the Universe do not always know what they were talking about. In The Big Short, Lewis examines the credit crunch through the eyes of a handful of ‘short-sellers’, who not only saw it all coming, but put their money where their mouths were by placing

Lewis Jones

Blood relatives

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy. The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at