Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Tibor Fischer

Ignorance, madness or folly – what exactly constitutes stupidity?

Best remembered now in the English-speaking world as a lyricist, Friedrich Schiller is often quoted for his line: ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.’ I was waiting for that observation in A Short History of Stupidity. It didn’t appear, but Stuart Jeffries assembles an impressive team of thinkers who have come to the same conclusion. You can’t win: imbecility will always ace you. The great crime for Socrates was ignorance – something often mistaken for stupidity There is of course the question of what exactly constitutes stupidity. It’s a hard thing to pin down and the definition strays into many areas. Jeffries offers a learned, picturesque ramble through

Nicholas Lezard

Sebastian Faulks looks back on youth and lost idealism

I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of that noted gentleman of letters, Sebastian Faulks. I once invented a novelist named Julian Sensitive, whose only claim to fame was an autobiographical novel called, after T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘My Trousers Rolled’. That was a crude joke compared with the hilarity inspired byFaulks’s title. As it turns

Alex Clark

Courage and humour in the face of unimaginable grief

In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for a fortnight. ‘Did you have much trouble deciding what to wear?’ he asked as he left his ham sandwich uneaten at a family lunch. Afterwards, he made his way to the railway tracks. A dozen years later, Miriam’s older sister Marjorie died by suicide in the same manner the day before her 52nd birthday. Toews

David Wootton

Alchemy – the ultimate fool’s errand

Alchemy, astrology and medicine (before the triumph of germ theory): three worthless intellectual systems which provided a good living for many into the 18th century and even beyond. Alchemy turned into chemistry; astrology was divorced by astronomy; and medicine (which might have become Pasteurism or Listerism) somehow kept its old name while abandoning all its old therapies. There have always been people with the good sense to say that alchemists and astrologers were charlatans, and doctors were more likely to kill you than cure you, but few listened. After all, all three could claim to be ancient, respectable forms of learning. And all three were too good to be true.

Jamie Collinson

The joyless rants of Andrea Long Chu

Andrea Long Chu is the poster girl critic of the American progressive left. Writing primarily for New York magazine, she made her name with takedowns of celebrated novelists such as Hanya Yanagihara, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reviews that ‘scrutinise authors as well as their works’. Refusing to separate art from artist is, of course, central to both critical theory and wider progressive politics. ‘If that makes me an ideologue, so be it,’ Chu writes. Authority is a compilation of these pieces, two new essays, and others that Chu published between 2018 and last year. ‘Why shouldn’t a book review

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Andrew Bayliss: Sparta – The Rise and Fall of An Ancient Superpower

43 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrew Bayliss, author of Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower. Andrew tells Sam what we know — and don’t know – about these much-mythologised figures from the Ancient world and tells the story of how a tiny city-state punched above its weight, until it didn’t. This is Sparta. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Graham Robb

There’s something about Marianne – but can French identity be defined?

In October 2018, Andrew Hussey, the convivial and courageous observer and analyst of the political and social travails of modern France, was cycling back to his office after lunch through the rather staid and un-bohemian environs of the Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank in Paris. To the ‘middle-aged man who already has a heart condition’, the scene into which he pedalled near the Montparnasse cemetery was terrifying, but to the veteran historian of the fractious Fifth Republic not particularly unusual. Parisians were sitting on café terraces and queuing for ice cream while just around the corner ‘a mini-civil war’ was taking place. Sandwiched between a phalanx of armed police

Rachel Clarke

Will we resist the bacteria of the future?

Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time she’d presented to A&E, a recent graze to her leg was causing such disproportionate pain that her family had been forced to carry her. When the surgeons opened up the limb, they found carnage. Group A streptococcus – a bacterium that benignly colonises the throats and skin of millions of us – had burrowed from

Michael Gove

What this new history of Brexit gets right

Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches a debate which has polarised politics and shattered friendships with disciplined, but never anaemic, detachment. It is hard to think of many books which leave one admiring both Edward Heath and Enoch Powell more. McTague has set himself a formidable task in seeking to explain the two most consequential decisions of British postwar politics. That

Sarah Ditum

Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?

At some point in the past ten years, trauma became a joke in my household. Should any Ditum suffer a minor mishap, the correct reaction is to adopt a wounded expression, bob your head to the side and whimper: ‘My trauma!’ Not because trauma is funny, but because what Darren McGarvey refers to as the ‘trauma industrial complex’ has become so consuming, the only option is to laugh about it. By ‘trauma industrial complex’, McGarvey means the culture that treats trauma, and those who have been traumatised, as commodities. He’s a good person to write this book because he personally has been commodified in this way. His first book, 2017’s

Genevieve Gaunt

Hell is other academics: Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang, reviewed

‘Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.’ R.F. Kuang’s latest novel is a promising adventure story full of magic and maths but let down by florid prose. When Alice Law, an American postgraduate student of ‘Analytic Magick’ at Cambridge, learns of the death of her chauvinist thesis supervisor Professor Grimes, she and her peer, Peter Murdoch, must rescue his soul from the eight courts of hell. Their journey comes with the debt of half a lifetime. But without Grimes, Alice is stuck in academic limbo on Earth, so she must pay this penalty and ‘beg for his life back from King Yama the Merciful,

Bryan Appleyard

The word ‘artisanal’ has lost its meaning and dignity

‘Artisan’ is now a word attached to coffee, candles, paper, clothes, rugs etc. It is used to raise prices by giving consumers a warm feeling of being pampered with the solid, ancient virtues of the handmade. It is, of course, a lie. If you want to know about Britain and yourself, read this book. James Fox is an academic and broadcaster. His book is a history of the true artisans that made Britain – the carpet-weavers of Kidderminster, the hatters of Luton, the Chilterns bodgers with their Windsor chairs, the potters of Stoke and the brewers of Burton. The strong, proud feeling of craft locality meant that every town was

Adam Begley

The ‘idiot Disneyland’ of Sin City

In italics at the very end of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion spills the beans: ‘Writers are always selling somebody out.’ It’s hard to improve on that, but we can at least specify that she had journalists in mind, not poets or novelists, though probably she looked on all scribblers with a cold eye. Six years later, Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne published Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which isn’t really a memoir, more a queasily auto-biographical novel. Or, as he puts it, ‘a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined’. A time and also a place – Las Vegas, Nevada, in

Andrew Taylor

Whitehall farce: Clown Town, by Mick Herron, reviewed

It’s good to be back in the unspeakable awfulness of Slough House, the decaying London office block in which the security service’s rejects do battle not only with the nation’s enemies but also with each other. Clown Town is Mick Herron’s ninth novel in the series, though he has explored different aspects of Slough House’s skewed universe in seven other books. It follows on from its series predecessor, Bad Actors. The office is looking underpopulated these days. River Cartwright, the nearest thing the series has to a juvenile lead, is recovering from life-threatening injuries sustained in the line of duty and hoping against hope that they will not mean the

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Lea Ypi: Indignity

48 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Albanian-born political philosopher Lea Ypi, whose new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined reconstructs the story of her grandmother’s early life amid the turbulence of the early and mid twentieth century. She talks to me about using the techniques of fiction to supply the gaps in the archive, about Albania’s troubling position as a tiny power among great ones, why the fight between Kant and Nietzsche remains a live one — and how online trolls sparked her quest for a restorative account of her beloved grandmother’s life. 

Thursday

Sam Mills

Dirty work: The Expansion Project, by Ben Pester, reviewed

The Expansion Project, Ben Pester’s debut novel, builds on the satire of corporate culture that he previously explored in his short stories. It centres on Capmeadow, a business park that proliferates with offices, wellness gardens, chalets, convenience stores and even a temple carved with reliefs of ‘collaborative working practices’. Shrouded in creepy mists, it seems to ‘reproduce itself’ with a will of its own, like ‘a -living community fabric’. Tom Crowley, who writes briefs for fire safety protocol, endures a stressful journey taking his eight-year-old daughter, Hen, to his office, mistakenly believing that it is ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work’ day. She seemingly goes missing. But then Tom is shown

Anne de Courcy

The grand life writ small: a history of modern British aristocracy

One of the facts that emerges from this detailed study of ‘modern British aristocracy’ is that the divorce rate among peers is roughly twice that of the rest of us, although the old unwritten adage that it didn’t much matter how you behaved provided discretion prevailed has long held good among many. Witness the 10th Duke of Beaufort, one of whose many mistresses, Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, would even boss the servants and change the menus when she stayed at Badminton. Most of these lady loves attended his funeral – but then, as Eleanor Doughty points out, the Duke’s relationship with the cuckolded husbands suggests ‘that embarrassment was not a

Clinton Heylin

Music to some ears: how 20th-century classical music led to pop

It was Sir Hubert Parry who in 1899 complained about ‘an enemy at the doors of [real] music… namely the common popular songs of the day’, ten years before he put a William Blake poem to music and came up with the most famous classical/pop fusion of all time, ‘Jerusalem’, which even featured on a mid-1970s number-one album by ELP. I did assume that a book subtitled How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop would reference such synergies. It does not. Elizabeth Alker’s is instead a competently written, entertaining if scattershot history of avant-garde electronic music, but presented as if some musical chasm separates John Cage from Sonic Youth. In fact

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Brideshead Revisited, 80 years on: from the archives

43 min listen

This week’s Book Club podcast marks the 80th anniversary this year of the publication of Brideshead Revisited. This conversation is from the archives, originally recorded in 2020 to mark its 75th anniversary. To discuss Evelyn Waugh’s great novel, Sam Leith is joined by literary critic and author Philip Hensher, and by the novelist’s grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press’s complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh’s career, what did it mean to the author and how did he revise it? And why have generations of readers, effectively, misread it?

Tuesday

Maggie Fergusson

No stone unturned: the art of communing with rocks

At the age of 13, when some girls become passionate about ponies, Anjana Khatwa developed an infatuation with rocks. Growing up in a Hindu family in Slough, she had a moment of epiphany on holiday in south-east Kenya when she walked across an ancient lava flow and felt convinced that the rock beneath her feet was ‘an animate entity… alive with stories that needed to be heard’. From then on, rocks have been, well, her rock. More than a geologist, Khatwa calls herself an ‘earth scientist’. So, while there is plenty of geology in this book, some of it mildly challenging (‘Along with other silica-rich microcrystalline rocks such as obsidian