Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Remembrance of Time Wasted

On the subject of not reading books, commenter Jim Barnett has an excellent idea: How about a new category: LR, for “Livres que je regrette d’avoir lus” – books I have regretted reading. I’d put Nabokov in that category – “The Gift” was just the sort of prissy, self-satisfied blather that I had always suspected Nabokov had produced. I should have known better and left it as an LE [a book you have heard discussed], but I foolishly took it on a trip and got stuck reading it.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Stephen Potter’s Guide to Reading

Megan links to the now almost famous Not Reading post and recalls a conversation we had: Me:  I’ve never read Camus in English. Alex:  That’s brilliant!  I’m going to use that. Me:  “I’ve never read Camus in English?” Alex:  No, like this:  “I’ve never read Camus in English” . . .   That way I don’t have to tell them I’ve never read Camus in French, either. Grand stuff. My recollection, however, is subtly different: Megan:  I’ve never read Camus in English. Alex:  That’s brilliant!  I’m going to use that. Megan:  “I’ve never read Camus in English?” Alex:  No, like this:  saying “I’ve never read Camus in English” carries the implication

The Spectator

Essential reading

There’s been a lot of hype – justifiably – around P J O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations Indeed, we posted on it weeks ago. But Coffee Housers should not miss out on Eamonn Butler’s splendid new guide, Adam Smith –  A Primer (IEA, £7.50), which is a thorough and well-written introduction to the thoughts of the great economist and philosopher. Given our new Prime Minister’s fascination with Smith, it is a book to keep at one’s side in the months ahead.

Sunday

Matthew Dancona

Why we’ll remain fully booked

Coffee House guru Seth Godin has a great parting thought on the Harry Potter phenomenon, why books are useless for keeping secrets, but why they’ll survive as a still-treasured medium in the digital age.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Beware the lie of the lips

Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press

Peter Oborne

A dark tale of insider dealing

For the most part political diarists are located on the fringes rather than at the centre of power. The two finest British journals from the 20th century were written by failures — Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Only rarely did they gain the sustained access they craved to the great figures of their day. They were looking in hungrily from outside, yearning for advancement which never came. Both journals gain a great deal of narrative pace and comic structure from this frenetic search for power and status. The reader knows, but the diarist does not, that the quest is doomed. Alastair Campbell, by contrast, was at the centre. His comparatively

Anita Brookner

Linked by an oblique sadness

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the

Jane Rye

The Painters’ Painter

‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died at the table. It beats Tracey Emin’s ‘I want my mum’ by a country mile, and, although for British artists in recent years the reverse may have seemed to be the case, Andrew Lambirth believes that Hilton’s standing as a painter has been affected by such outrageous episodes, there being ‘a lingering belief in the

Robert Stewart

Shakespeare got it wrong

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made Kingby Ian Mortimer Henry IV, in Ian Mortimer’s graceless (and sense-defying) words, is ‘the least biograph-ied English king to have been crowned since the Conquest’. No longer. Here is a full and richly detailed life. Not a deal more would need to be said were it not that Mortimer has invited us to look upon his book as representative of a new species of biographical history. In his introduction Mortimer argues against the traditional view that a lack of documentary evidence (chiefly letters) places limits on medieval biography. His book is intended to demonstrate that not only is a ‘personality-based’

Noble Frankland

The ebb and flow of war

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940–41by Ian Kershaw Britain’s decision to fight on in 1940; Hitler’s to attack the Soviet Union in 1941; in the same year, Roosevelt’s to wage undeclared war in the Battle of the Atlantic; Japan’s to attack Pearl Harbor and expand southwards; Hitler’s declaration of war against America and his decision for genocide of the Jews. These are the choices, together with a few related ones, plus Mussolini’s by comparison less important decision to enter the war on Germany’s side, that Kershaw sees as the keys that turned the lock of the second world war. Few would argue that he has not lighted

Philip Hensher

Cosseting a bestselling author

There was once a Greek called Herostratus, who, in search of enduring fame, set fire to the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. (A successful strategy, clearly.) It’s odd to think that the second John Murray’s permanent fame rests on such an act of destruction, since in undertaking it he was not, like Herostratus, trying to make his name remembered. He did it in all good faith to secure the reputation of what he was destroying. On 17 May 1824, six of Lord Byron’s friends, having read his two volumes of posthumous memoirs, decided to burn them as obscene and damaging to his reputation. Murray was only one of the group,

Friday

The Spectator

Talking about Harry’s generation

I am of the “Harry Potter Generation”, but truthfully, the massive hype really puts me off the whole thing. I wish I could escape it. Inevitably there are some of my friends who are proud of their Harry Potter obsessions, but not many. It’s for kids and ‘big kids’, right? It’s not very cool. I actually agree, but I have a problem. I’ve been hooked since 11. I genuinely like the books. I like the characters and combinations of all the great things that have made good stories for ages. I think JK Rowling can write; I’m engaged enough to keep reading. So far, I’ve managed to read them all,

The Spectator

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hype

Writing on the eve of the most over-hyped book release in history (dare I mention the title), I find myself lost. Never in history has such overexcitement surrounded a book franchise. So what happens when I, a 16 year-old boy, am surrounded by Harry Potter gossip? How do I respond? With a blank expression and a shrug of the shoulders. I am of the opinion that we’ll never see anything like it again. I see the Harry Potter series as just another marketing ploy to extract money from us young’ens. It was preceded by the boy band craze in the 90s, and likely to be superseded by something just as superficial,

Thursday

The Spectator

The scoop on Harry Potter

Amidst all the talk about file-sharing sites having copies of the new Harry Potter book, it is somehow reassuring to find that the newspaper that has the first review (it’s here, but don’t read it unless you want to have a strong idea of how the story ends) got hold of their copy the old fashioned way: it walked into a bookshop and paid retail for it. Here at Coffee House we’ll be respecting the embargo, but we’ll have a review up first thing on Saturday morning.

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Back in the dark and the rain

In 1931, a Belgian pulp-fiction writer living in Paris and churning out four titles a month using various noms de plume decided to publish a series of detective stories under his own name. His publisher had to ask him what his real name was;everyone in Paris knew him as ‘Sim’. Georges Simenon, as he identified himself, proved to have a flair for publicity: he had already made a small fortune from his pulp fiction and he could afford to launch the new series with an all-night party in a club in Montparnasse. The vulgarity of this gesture was mocked in Le Canard enchainé but the party — attended by gossip

Blair Worden

Man with a mission | 14 July 2007

There has not been an abler or more decent prime minister than Sir Robert Peel, and peacetime has not produced a more courageous one. Perhaps none has assembled a more gifted ministry or commanded Cabinet more effectively. Before and during his premiership he made huge choices and implemented them with skill and resolve. Like Attlee or Thatcher he stamped the future. Yet what chance would he have stood before our feral media, or with the public which indulges them? Viewer-friendliness would have been beyond him. ‘Such a cold, odd man’, Queen Victoria found him. He won her round, but such adjectives as ‘chilly’, ‘frosty’ and ‘frigid’ have adhered to him

George Osborne

Right for his times

Visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, high on a hill overlooking Simi Valley, California and you are greeted at the door by a bronze statue of the former president dressed as a cowboy. For many on the Left in Britain that is exactly how they saw the 40th president of the United States. They should read his diaries and think again. Reagan was no Pepys, or even an Alan Clark — he was far too close to the action to be a wry observer — but his daily entries provide a fascinating insight into a presidency that saw the end of the Cold War and a resurgent belief in the

Interconnect

The chthonic nub of things

Don’t imagine this book by a 42-year-old Englishwoman who has been in her time an English undergraduate at Oxford, a digging-in anti-roads campaigner and a lonely depressive in her London flat, is anything resembling your average expedition into the wild. The usual elegant reflections on wilderness and its transcendent emptiness are absent here. Instead, there is an encyclopaedic, energetic, plunging, anarchic, intensely sexualised, often wildly written and over-written journey, filled with a mayhem of influences and references, from anthropology to English religious history, the European classics and the big OED (her favourite book), through five of the earth’s biomes-cum-elements: Amazonia for earth itself, Greenland for ice (seen as a fifth

William Brett

Lessons from the father of lies

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January this year, was a literary-minded reporter. As the Polish Press Agency’s only foreign correspondent for most of the 1960s and 1970s, he would prepare for his journeys to Africa, Asia and the Americas by reading extensively. Later, he used his exotic experiences as material for what might best be described as literary journalism. He wrote beautifully phrased books on, among other things, the Iranian revolution (Shah of Shahs) and the court of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie (The Emperor), using these topics to construct anti-authoritarian allegories that passed unnoticed by the censors in Poland. But in writing these stories with the assumed authority of a foreign