Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

Cressida Connolly

Double trouble and strife

Is there anyone, hearing a story about bigamy, who does not feel a tiny jolt of admiration, even envy, for the wrongdoer? How many of us can say that, if we could suffer no ill consequences, we wouldn’t rather like to have a second household, with different plants in the garden, different curtains, a different — perhaps more exotic or sympathetic — spouse? Like walking a circus tightrope, bigamy requires daring, agility and a certain amount of dash: the onlooker cannot help but gasp at the feat. This is one of the reasons why stories about it hold such fascination. Another is that secret lives are always exciting, whether it’s

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dropping himself in the soup

One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they were mineral water, but even sober he was always accident-prone. He bloodily cracked his forehead getting into a motor-car, he stopped serving soup at White House dinners after spilling it down his shirtfront, and, when asked to look in on a Cabinet meeting by Harold Wilson, President Nixon upset an inkwell on the hallowed table

Wednesday

The Spectator

The author’s Faulks, Sebastian Faulks

The news that Sebastian Faulks has written a Bond novel says a lot about the status 007 has achieved in the culture. On the big screen and through a ruthless process of reinvention, Bond remains a player at the multiplex. Poor Pierce Brosnan thought he was doing just fine, being tortured in Korea to the strains of Madonna in Die Another Day….and then along came Daniel Craig to make Pierce look about as modern as a Robin Reliant. In the new Spectator which hits the newsstand tomorrow, Tim Walker has a terrific interview with Rupert Everett who speculates that a gay actor could never play Bond. But who knows? The

Monday

The Spectator

Reading the Campbell diaries, Part II

January 24th, 2001 on Peter Mandelson’s second resignation, over the Hinduja passports-for-favours affair: “I went back up and TB looked absolutely wretched. Peter looked becalmed. TB said he had made clear to PM he had to go and that though he wasn’t sure, over time he would see why it had been necessary. TB seemed much more emotional about the whole thing than Peter….Peter was far less emotional than first time, much more matter of fact. I said he was a good thing, and he didn’t deserve this happening to him again.” Comment: Reports at the time insisted that it was Campbell who in effect forced Mandelson’s on the spot

The Spectator

Reading the Campbell diaries

Anthony Browne, director of the think-tank Policy Exchange and prior to that the chief political correspondent of The Times, is plucking out the most interesting passages from the just published Alastair Campbell diaries for Coffee House. June 30th 2003 on going for BBC over Andrew Gilligan’s report that he sexed up the “dodgy dossier”: “I went up to see TB, who said he didn’t want it going beyond next week. He lacked the killer instinct. His rationale was that he didn’t want every single media organisation against him.  I said we had to get it absolutely proven that we were right and use that to force a rethink of the

The Spectator

More Mole than Machiavelli

Well, Alan Clark he aint. The publication today of Alastair Campbell’s diaries looks set to be a colossal damp squib. I haven’t read the 794-page book, but judging from the extracts he’s posted on his website Campbell’s observations are almost comically uninteresting. Here he is, for example, on meeting the Princess of Wales in 1995: “She’s standing there absolutely, spellbindingly, drop-dead gorgeous, in a way that the millions of photos didn’t quite get. “She said ‘Hello’, held out her hand and said she was really pleased to meet me, so I mumbled something back about being more pleased. “‘It would make a very funny picture if there were any paparazzi

Saturday

Allan Massie

Interest still accruing

Galsworthy is one of those writers who obstinately survives. Critical opinion wrote him off long ago. His plays are rarely staged. Most of his novels have sunk below the horizon. Yet the three which make up The Forsyte Saga have rarely, if ever, been out of print, and continue to be read — not only on account of the famous TV dramatisation — and A Modern Comedy, the trilogy he wrote as a sequel, perhaps also, even if his grasp of the world after 1918 was uncertain, sketchy, journalistic. The Saga itself was not conceived as such. The Man of Property was published in 1906, In Chancery not till 1920,

Anthony Daniels

The commonsense approach

Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or three times higher than it was in 1960 nonetheless). Atul Gawande is a surgeon at one of the world’s greatest surgical centres, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As such, he is committed to medicine’s noblest ideal, the dedication of science to the cure of disease. It seems almost unfair that he should also

Edward Harrison

The price of defeat

This substantial and fascinating book looks at the aftermath of the Third Reich in the German-speaking regions of Europe. The Allies ‘came in hate’, their memories of Nazi atrocities refreshed by the liberation of concentration camps like Auschwitz, where the Soviets found more than a million items of clothing, and Buchenwald, where the piles of corpses made the ferocious General Patton physically sick. The Archbishop of Cologne protested in 1945 that ‘the whole nation is not guilty, and that many thousand children, old people and mothers are wholly innocent and it is they who now bear the brunt.’ Women in particular suffered at the hands of the victors. When the

Harriet Waugh

A beastly upbringing

Minotaur in Love is Fraser Harrison’s second novel. His first, High on the Hog, published in 1991, set around a family Christmas in the country, was funny and moving. Minotaur in Love is altogether odder. Written in epistolary form, the Minotaur of the title is Bruno, a publisher, who tries to explain his strangeness to a female former colleague. He does this in a journal, starting with his birth shortly after the accidental death of his five-year-old sister. He has the distinct feeling that his father dislikes him, and he attributes this to his father’s unassuageable grief. Their estrangement becomes obvious when the ten-year-old Bruno, on his brand- new birthday