Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 4 October 2008

One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. Keynes in which he describes what his readers’ grandchildren should expect 100 years on. The piece is followed by 14 essays from present-day economists (four of them Nobel Laureates) discussing why Keynes got some things right and others so wrong. To his credit, Keynes’s economic predictions seem spot

Allan Massie

A very slippery book

A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). No doubt Lady Hester’s admirers find Kinglake intolerable, but his

Mark Amory

The Half

‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. For 25 years Simon Annand has been allowed to catch these vulnerable moments and the result is a series of intimate, revealing and beautiful portraits. Many of the subjects are famous, a few are not. Some do exercises like athletes, pulling their limbs into unlikely positions — sometimes sitting beside a wash-basin, like Saffron Burrows (above). Others lie on the floor; Derek Jacobi before ‘The Tempest’ may be asleep. Julia Stiles looks defiant. Glenda Jackson and Max von Sydow, surprisingly, roar with laughter. Naturally enough, many are

Robert Macfarlane

Diving into darkness

In 1972 Tim Robinson — a Yorkshireman by birth, a Cambridge mathematician by training, and an artist by vocation — moved to live on Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands that lie off the Galway coast. His first winter there was hard and ominous: long nights, big storms, and a series of accidental deaths among the islanders, by falling or drowning. Enough to send anyone home. But Robinson stayed, and shortly afterwards began work on what is, to my mind, one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English. He started to walk his island, obsessively and in all weathers, pacing off its coastline and traversing

Jonathan Sumption

The pragmatic approach

‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. It seems a bit early to be discussing how to survive the 21st century. After all, there are 92 years left in which to do it, years in which we can expect traditional verities to fall away, existing technologies to be transformed, and problems yet unheard of to supplant the imperative causes of our own day. Political pundits have always tended to extrapolate from both the problems and the solutions of their own time, and Chris Patten is no exception. Such works have a short shelf-life. Yet

Jonathan Bate

Of cabbages and kings

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit., with its lemming-like leaps from mandarin French theory to each latest fashion in identity politics, I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study of Forests: The Shadow of

Wednesday

Bevis Hillier

A laughing cavalier

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley. What started me off were Leigh Fermor’s variations on William Blake’s couplet: A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage. Leigh Fermor’s first conceit made me cackle: Blackbirds fluttering from a pie Cause four-and-twenty cheers on

Honor Clerk

Morality tale with a difference

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and culture, is at the core of John le Carré’s latest novel. Stained by a centuries-long history of anti-semitism, tarnished by its recent association with Mohammed Atta, present-day Hamburg provides a writer with a rich mix of post-9/11 moral complexities — a city caught between an anxiety to make amends to the Americans for the outrage

Robert Salisbury

A safe pair of hands

A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness, by Norman Fowler To write a political memoir is difficult. Too bland, too afraid to be rude about former colleagues, you risk boring the general reader while disappointing your publisher. Too critical, you lose the few friends among your former colleagues you have left, while appearing spiteful and embittered to the general reader. We can all think of examples of ex-ministers in both categories. Nigel Lawson is one of the few among late-20th-century politicians who have avoided both Pooh-traps and produced a memoir which is near to being required reading for the interested amateur. Norman Fowler is no Nigel Lawson. This

Melissa Kite

Carrie on shopping

One Fifth Avenue, by Candace Bushnell One of life’s intriguing  mysteries was how Carrie Bradshaw managed to fund a rapacious Manolo Blahnik habit whilst spending her entire working life sitting in her knickers and vest in front of a laptop in her bedroom typing drivel about men. This was skilfully glossed over, and my enjoyment of the wondrous Sex and the City never suffered from it. Slowly, despite myself, I came to believe that there were female columnists in New York who wrote one loosely worded article a week and got paid so much for it that they could afford an apartment in the West Village and a hoard of

Geordie Greig

Unruly children as parents

If as a child you found your parents embarrassing then this hiss-and-tell memoir will make you feel a lot better, as Cosmo Landesman had parents who were off the Richter scale of embarrassment. Jay and Fran were two wacky, middle-aged American egotists who arrived in ‘the land of the stiff upper lip’ and caused mayhem. Blind to their own blush-making toxicity, they were obsessed with being famous. Life at home was like a bad sitcom, as they canoodled with their respective lovers in front of their children’s schoolfriends and then, like some grotesque TV reality show, shamelessly paraded their open marriage to the media, the ultimate examples of the look-at-me-me-me

Alan Watkins

The end of old Labour

Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there was a tide in politics which prime ministers were powerless to resist. Lord Donoughue’s Downing Street diaries came later. The first volume, on his days as a ‘special adviser’ to Harold Wilson, was dominated not so much by Wilson as by Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender. Indeed, ‘Marcia’s Tantrums’ would have served as a catchier subtitle

Colin Amery

Back to simplicity

Mlinaric on Decorating, by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric I wish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with it at the dining-room table, where I discovered the rather encouraging information, as I looked at the paint peeling from my Doric columns, that he, the man I had always thought of as the great high priest of the perfect interior, was in fact the begetter of the decorating style known as ‘shabby-chic’. That was

Saturday

Simon Baker

A furious, frazzled youth

Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has recently suffered unrest. He spent his freshman year at college in his native Newark, which enabled him to live at home. It should have been ideal for a quiet boy such as Marcus, who wanted nothing more than to achieve good grades, but his normally easy-going father had a breakdown of sorts which made him

Judith Flanders

Out of the frying pan . . .

Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and Churchill, Rommel and Monty. Too few of these, however, give us authentic voices, telling their own stories. Further, most end with VE or VJ Day, with happy crowds dancing down the Mall. But what came after? How did families reconnect after six years of separation, privation, horror and fear? In Stranger in the House, Julie

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Getting even

Just Me, by Sheila Hancock My Word is My Bond, by Roger Moore Me Cheeta, by Cheeta Everyone knows what the Hollywood autobiography is like. It contains the assurance that the author has been made to feel exceptionally ‘humble’ exactly at those points where someone ordinary might expect to feel smug and triumphant — a knighthood, or an Oscar. (‘The citation specified it was for my work for charity, which was particularly humbling.’) It contains the parting expression that the hero or heroine is really overwhelmed by the feeling of good luck. (‘How blessed am I to have experienced such love … I am a very lucky, lucky woman.’) And,

Graham Stewart

That worthless piece of paper

Munich, by David Faber David Faber’s account of the Munich crisis has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the four-power conference that made appeasement a dirty word.  But it is timely as well as commemorative.  True, the recent comparisons drawn between Hitler and Putin are dangerously misplaced. Nonetheless, Western politicians are finding themselves debating the same sort of issues over Georgia — with Ukraine and the Baltic States to follow — that divided their forebears over Hitler’s Czechoslovakian demands in 1938. Are national boundaries inviolate or subject to revision along ethnic grounds? Would offering guarantees to small countries protect them or make confrontation from their big neighbour more

Charlotte Moore

Meet the disposable family

The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon ‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on the run from her older, widowed husband, Gavin, thrusts a bag bulging with diaries and fictionalised autobiography into Emily’s hand. ‘Please don’t read them’, says Sappho. Of course I meant to read them, Emily silently tells the reader. I am a mother, and have my daughter’s best interests at heart. One wonders in this book

Jerome De-Groot

A jealous addiction

The Act of Love, by Howard Jacobson From ‘Readers’ Wives’ to Molly Bloom, the idea of a man somehow sharing his loved one sexually is a common and complex one. ‘No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else’, asserts Felix Quinn, the pompous narrator of Howard Jacobson’s latest taboo-breaker. As he recounts the story of his seduction-by-proxy of his own wife, he runs through the canon of voyeuristic wife-pimping from Herodotus’s account of Candaules and Gyges through Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’ to Pierre Klosowski by way, repeatedly, of Othello. Quinn’s rather twisted, masochistic point is that jealous love fears loss; better to

Lucy Hugheshallett

Slippery slopes

Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing up plans to transport forces to Germany, a nation he assumed would be his ally. Nine months later, after protracted secret negotiations with both groups of combatants, Italy switched allegiance and entered the war on the side of France and Britain. Foreign observers concluded that the Italians were, in Asquith’s words, ‘voracious, slippery and perfidious’.