Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 23 August 2008

In their now famous book Nudge, self-described ‘paternalistic libertarians’ Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein cite this new paint as an example of ‘feedback’ — the notion that people will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results. If you’ve tried typing on an outdated PC, where characters take seconds to appear on screen, you know how disconcerting slow feedback can be. But it can be a matter of life or death: Vehicle Activated Signs (the ones which flash up your speed) have been shown to prevent more accidents than speed cameras — at 5 per cent of the cost. Instant feedback may improve behaviour more than delayed punishment.

Interconnect

The Circus

The Circus by Noel Daniel You’d have to be a strong man yourself just to lift this amazing collection of photographs and circus posters. It covers the years 1870 to 1950 and is quite eye-watering. Buy this book and you’ll never have to watch television ever again. You sir, the man at the back in the pink suit, are you strong enough to lift this tome? Roll up! Roll up! See the dog-faced woman!

Michael Howard

His finest hour

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning by John Lukacs Nine years ago the American historian, John Lukacs, published an excellent little book, Five Days in London: May 1940. In this he analysed in detail that critical moment in the history of the Second World War — perhaps indeed in the history of Western civilization — when the British people, under the leadership of Winston Churchill, decided to reject Hitler’s peace offers and, against all the odds, to fight on until ultimate victory. Now Lukacs has given us an even smaller book, less than 150 pages, that covers exactly the same ground and says little that he did not

Sebastian Smee

Muddying the waters

This fitfully involving, but for the most part irritating, melodrama is Tim Parks’s 14th novel, and not one of his best. Set almost entirely in India, it begins with the funeral of one Albert James, a trailblazing anthropologist whose elliptical, wide-ranging theories never really took root, and it ends with the death of his widow, Helen, an aid worker, some months later. Parks concerns himself with the interior lives of his characters as they negotiate grief and curiosity about the dead man’s unfinished research (Parks admits in a note that James was loosely inspired by the social scientist Gregory Bateson). But none of them ever quite comes into focus —

Marcus Berkmann

Really not happy at all

Bits of Me are Falling Apart by William Leith Some years ago, a young scribbler named William Leith began a column for the Independent on Sunday that divided opinion among readers and, indeed, other young scribblers like me. Instead of writing about the world outside, as columnists had previously felt obliged to, he wrote about himself and his collapsing life in simple, unadorned prose. I remember reading it every week to the sound of my own grinding teeth, partly because I couldn’t see the point of it, but mainly because at the time I was consumed by professional jealousy of any contemporary who was clearly doing better than I was.

Allan Massie

Life and Letters | 23 August 2008

Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a sudden spurt. The latter, surely; he wasn’t someone to conceal bad news from. ‘I am always eager to acknowledge the worst,’ he wrote in the last published volume of his diaries, ‘and often in advance of the evidence.’ A day or two later came another email. ‘Now that I know I’m not going to die

Wednesday

Raymond Carr

Our modest contribution

St Petersburg and the British: The City Through the Eyes of British Visitors and Residents by Anthony Cross To early English visitors St Petersburg seemed an ‘abstract’, artificial city with no roots in the past. It was the creation of one man, Peter the Great, determined to replace Moscow as the capital of his empire by a new city on the banks of the Neva ‘where there was nothing to be seen but marsh and water’. By 1774, for Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, the first tourist to publish an account of St Petersburg, a settlement of mean wooden houses in 1703 had been transformed into ‘one of the most magnificent cities

Bryan Forbes

In his own words

Ever Dirk: The Bogarde Letters by John Coldstream (editor) The art of letter-writing being in terminal decline and with precious little romance in emails or mobile-phone texts, this fascinating collection of Dirk Bogarde’s letters is a rare gift to those who think nostalgically of a less mechanical way of life. Puffing on 60 cigarettes a day, Dirk bashed out some two million words in missives to friends, fans and professional colleagues. This enigmatic and complex man was a natural letter- writer, his thoughts and emotions fragmented onto the page like mercury from a broken thermometer. Tapping out often libellous opinions on his ancient typewriter, he spared neither himself nor his

Jonathan Mirsky

The great deception continues

Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China by Philip Pan In 1952 the 20-year-old Maoist fanatic, Lin Zhao, ordered that a Chinese landlord be immersed in a vat of icy water overnight. She said this filled her with ‘cruel happiness’. Later she wrote to a friend about how she had helped organise the execution of other landlords, some of the two million killed in those years. ‘Seeing them die this way, I felt proud and happy.’ Lin came from a family which in Maoist terms had a ‘bad class background’, the kind of ‘black’ family that could end up with bullets in the back of

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Swedish thoughts

I’m now back from my fortnight in Sweden where I kept my word to give up Coffee House for a fortnight. There’s something about the country that makes it a lodestar for left and right, and the reasons why hit you as you travel around. Here are a few of my notes:- 1. At a café in Birkastan (an area of Stockholm, not a breakaway Islamic republic) I bumped into Johan Norberg one of my favourite writers. I urge anyone who hasn’t heard of him to read his small but powerful book In Defence of Global Capitalism. He’s been having some fun at Naomi Klein’s expense recently and his article “The

Saturday

Rupert Christiansen

Highs and lows of a musical career

Handel: The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates Since 1985, when Jonathan Keates first published this exhilarating critical biography of Handel, there have been enormous advances in the study of the composer and his oeuvre — not least the publication of two major volumes by the doyen of Handel scholars Winton Dean — and the establishment of the Handel Institute. Such developments, along with a continuing increase in the public’s appetite for his music and the 250th anniversary of his death next year, more than justify this substantially revised edition of Keates’ book. For the paid-up Handel fan — and those like me who sometimes still need persuading —

Wednesday

Jeremy Treglown

Do tell me some more about Devonshire

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley ‘I can’t remember whether you said you liked Barbara Pym,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to an old school friend around 1980, ‘but am sending Quartet in Autumn in case you haven’t got it, otherwise it can go to the Mothers’ Union Xmas sale. I do like her very much, the incidents look so trivial that there’s nothing in them and then you suddenly realise how much she’s said.’ The recommendation is typical in its lighthandedness and could also be mistaken for a fair summary of Fitzgerald’s own fiction at that time. But her work went further

George Osborne

Speaking for the silent majority

I asked Henry Kissinger recently whether he had been to see the hit play Frost/Nixon. He told me that he made it a rule never to see plays that included characters he knew in real life, which I guess must mean that he hasn’t seen much post-war political theatre. He also said that he doubted whether any actor could capture the psychological complexity of Richard Nixon, the man whom he flew into the unknown with to talk to Mao Tse-tung and the man whom he had prayed side-by-side with on the night before the final resignation. Kissinger poses but does not answer the question in his memoirs: ‘What would have

Patrick Skene-Catling

Going through the hoops

Dreaming Iris by John de Falbe Love, whether originally mental or glandular, a coup de foudre or a gradual smouldering incandescence, fulfilled or not, constitutes the basis for most readable fiction. In Dreaming Iris, John de Falbe, abiding by this tradition, examines the effects of imaginary love on two real but fragile relationships. He has written a subtly engrossing novel about characters who in actuality might provoke good shakings. This is a story of privileged family life in which the only stable foundation is a dilapidated country estate in Leicestershire. How different from love in a ‘romcom’! The admirable higher literacy of de Falbe’s prose invests adulterous yearnings with something

Andrew Lambirth

Once a fashionable monster

Maurice Yacowar, Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary, begins his ‘portrait’ thus: ‘John Bratby was an overachiever who fell short of his potential.’ Rather like this book really. Instead of a balanced assessment of one of the most interesting postwar figures in the British art world, we are offered a lurid account of Bratby’s private life and loves in the sort of shameless exposé of which their hero would quite possibly have approved. But it’s a very different thing for an artist to leak his own scandal to the papers in order to boost sales from a foreign academic’s coming along and reheating it

Jonathan Sumption

Dearly beloved Meg

Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Nearly 30 years ago, John Guy wrote what is still the best biography of this fascinating and contradictory man. Now he has turned his hand to More’s first and favourite daughter, Margaret Roper. More stood out in many ways in his day. One of them was that he believed in educating his daughters. He attended personally to their studies. He hired competent scholars to teach them. Margaret was brought up on the

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

What Toynbee doesn’t get

For those who haven’t leafed through a copy, or read the extracts in the Guardian this week, Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s new book is effectively an extended diatribe against the Unjust Rewards of those who, say, work in the City, or who went to Oxbridge universities.  It’s a one-note attack – with scant room for subtleties – and Giles Coren mercilessly lampoons it in today’s Times.  Here’s my favourite passage in the Coren piece, in which he takes on the book’s description of Oxford: “Not only did the word ‘spires’ appear twice in the same short extract, but the lawns, bless them, were ‘manicured’. Except they’re not, Polly. They’re just mown. Same as everywhere

Owen Matthews

Russia’s ignorant still hate Solzhenitsyn

In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of good and evil. But it is in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov that Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression. Russians look to their writers not just to think but to live more deeply than ordinary mortals; the best ones end

John De-Falbe

Good length delivery

This short novel was first published in a tiny edition at the end of last year. Since then it has won the McKitterick Prize (for the best first novel by an author over forty), and now it is reissued with a glossy picture on the cover and a quote by Mick Jagger saying that he loved it. Good for him: it is superb. It is narrated by a woman who is having an affair that reaches a crisis during the five days of a Test match. Her focus swings between her husband, who keeps trying to explain the rules of cricket, her lover (‘the loss-adjustor’ — we never learn his

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 9 August 2008

Andrew Taylor reviews a selection of recent crime novels  The Murder Farm (Quercus, £8.99) is Andrea Schenkel’s first novel and has been hugely successful in her native Germany and elsewhere. Based on a real case, it is set in the 1950s and deals with murder of a farmer, his wife, daughter, grandchildren and maid. It is a short book with an unusual structure — an account of the case which seems to be compiled by a narrator from outside the area is intercut with witness statements giving glimpses of events, people and relationships in this isolated rural setting, and also with a handful of impassioned prayers. Gradually the reader, who