Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Craig Brown

The problems of being a Bee Gee

For quite some time, the prospect of death has held a fresh terror. The British Heart Foundation’s step-by-step guide to cardiopulmonary resuscitation advises performing chest compressions ‘to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees’. This means that the last sound some of us will ever hear is ‘Stayin’ Alive’, with our chests as the drums: Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive!Ah! ah! ah! ah!Stayin’ alive! Stayin’ alive! Despite their success, the Bee Gees have always been regarded as naff. They are to pop music what Fanny Cradock was to cookery or Julian Fellowes is to the world of letters. Bob Stanley is

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Laura Freeman: Ways of Life

39 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the writer and critic Laura Freeman to talk about her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Laura’s book is the portrait of one of those figures who, without ever quite taking the spotlight themselves, was nevertheless hugely influential in kindling the love and appreciation of art in others – a man who knew everyone from Picasso and Brancusi to David Jones and the Nicholsons, and whose home-cum-gallery in Cambridge has been a sanctuary and inspiration to generations of undergraduate pilgrims. 

Tuesday

Mark Mason

Gruesome British folk sports – from cheese-rolling to Hare Pie Scramble

‘Two mobs of men fighting over possession of a ball in a freezing, muddy river in Derbyshire,’ writes Harry Pearson, ‘is the British equivalent of the Rio Carnival.’ He’s not wrong. Brazil may have the sun, but we’ve got the capacity for mindless violence. It’s a trait expressed in many of the folk sports covered in this highly entertaining book. The mass football games (such as the one in Ashbourne), which take place over pitches several miles long, aren’t quite as vicious as they once were. In a Georgian contest between the Men of Suffolk and the Men of Norfolk, nine players died. In Jedburgh, they used an Englishman’s severed

Francesca Peacock

A deadly game of chance: The Story of a Forest, by Linda Grant, reviewed

‘Like a child in a fairy tale’, 14-year old Mina Mendel walks into a Latvian forest one day in 1913. With her basket and shawl, she looks like Little Red Riding Hood, but the wolves she meets – Bolsheviks, ‘agents of the coming revolution’ – are anything but mythical. Linda Grant begins her sweeping, ambitious ninth novel The Story of the Forest with this accidental encounter. From Latvia to Liverpool – and Soho to World’s End – she tells the story of one Jewish family in the 20th century as they live through plots to overthrow the tsar, the trenches of of the Great War, the racism of Liverpudlian suburbs

Maggie Fergusson

The company of hens could be the best cure for depression

A friend of mine, an inspirational teacher, says that one of the best things parents can do is to allow children to believe that their dreams can come true. Arthur Parkinson met his first chicken as a toddler, growing up in a former mining town, and from that moment he longed for a brood of his own. So his father set to, building a handsome ark-shaped hen house, poring over Ad-Mag to find amusing poultry for sale, driving Arthur around country lanes at weekends in search of rare breeds. ‘If only you could bottle up the happiness of chickens, you’d be on to a groundbreaking antidepressant’ Parkinson also had doting,

George Berridge

Among the giants: Titanium Noir, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed

Roddy Tebbit is a quiet, tidy professor researching lake algae. His calendar is largely empty and his apartment has no family photographs. A colleague remembers him as ‘shy to the point of being rude’. Why somebody would put a bullet in his skull is unclear, yet this is how the cynical gumshoe Cal Sounder discovers him at the beginning of Nick Harkaway’s slick novel Titanium Noir. We soon find out that the dead man’s unremarkableness was deceptive. On the mortuary slab he easily clears seven feet end to end, and though he has the face of a man in his mid-forties, his driving licence puts him in at the start

Anna Aslanyan

Love in the shadow of the Nazi threat

The 1930s saw Walter Benjamin write The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marlene Dietrich rise to fame in The Blue Angel and Pablo Picasso paint ‘Guernica’. If history books mention these events, it’s usually as footnotes to the main European narrative of the pre-war decade. To shift the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Terror and other landmarks to the background, one could turn to the cultural history, or the micro-history. In his new book, the German art historian Florian Illies combines both genres to reconstruct the 1930s. Snippets from period documents, including private letters and diaries of notable figures of European and

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

How many black or Asian Britons feel a strong sense of European identity?

Though wokeness is a vile thing, it has contributed to our culture in one fortunate way – by inspiring brilliant books which refute it. The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side has thrown into gloriously sharp relief the difference in the intellectual firepower between those who believe in free speech and those who resemble Veruca Salt after joining the Stasi. We have Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans and Remi Adekoya’s Biracial Britain; they have Laurie Penny’s Sexual Revolution and Jolyon Maugham’s Bringing Down Goliath – the latter category comprising unintentionally hilarious scribblings which will soon be up

Jesse Norman

Daily life at the 18th-century Bank of England

The England cricket team was once greeted at an Ashes test by an Australian banner with the immortal words ‘WOTHAM IS A BANKER’, the simple genius of the line being that you knew Wotham was being insulted before you had worked out quite who Wotham was, or what exactly he was being accused of. But, as Anne Murphy reminds us, the word ‘banker’ was not always just a word of abuse; it could also denote personal probity, sobriety, a certain nitpicking stolidity of thought, above all a preoccupation with credit and public confidence. It was not automatically oxymoronic to think of ‘virtuous bankers’. Amid all the financial crises of the

Houman Barekat

The dark side of racing: Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan, reviewed

Kathryn Scanlan’s second novel Kick the Latch is adapted from the transcript of an interview with a family friend in her native Iowa. Its narrator, Sonia, looks back on her years as a racetrack hand in a series of vignettes. She recounts run-ins with violent men, a freak accident that put her in a coma, and interactions with assorted rural eccentrics, such as Bicycle Jenny, a notoriously pongy gardener who owns 70 chihuahuas, and Johnny Block, who keeps a pet crow and ‘some ferrets’. Animals ran amok on the trailer parks where she lived: ‘As soon as you stepped out your door the goose would come and – bam! –

Declan Ryan

Fun and games at the TLS

‘When everyone appears to be of one accord in thinking the right thing, go the other way.’ This was, broadly speaking, the maxim by which J.C. wrote his weekly N.B. column for the Times Literary Supplement, after inheriting it from David Sexton in 1997. Tonally different to the rest of the paper, N.B. under J.C. became a place where a contrary spirit found its expression in a series of ongoing, in-joking set pieces. From updates on the latest grammatical or linguistic dicta in the (mythical) TLS Reviewer’s Handbook, ‘perambulations’ among bookshops in search of forgotten or out-of-print works, and a set of satirical prizes, such as the Jean Paul Sartre

Emma Smith

Shakespeare sceptics are the new literary heroes

Let’s start with the basics. Despite widespread disinformation, including in Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies, there is in fact ample historical evidence from the period that a) attributes the plays and poems to William Shakespeare, b) registers the same William Shakespeare as an actor and shareholder in Lord Chamberlain’s, later King’s Men, and c) connects this William Shakespeare with the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Only if you believe that all this evidence is fabricated does the authorship question become a question. And once the question is admissible, all that mass of documentation is no longer sufficient to answer it. Anti-Stratfordians operate almost entirely outside the academy of professional

Tuesday

Camilla Cassidy

Will we ever know the real George Orwell?

While George Orwell was staying with his family in Southwold during the 1930s, figuring out how to become a writer, the town pharmacist was busy shooting ciné footage. On the edge of a crowd watching a circus parade, he captured a tall man smoking at a street corner. It’s impossible to identify this brief glimpse as Orwell, but D.J. Taylor sees the self-conscious figure holding himself apart as a possible sighting. It doesn’t seem all that revealing, so why does it matter? It feels somehow symbolic of a wider effort to grasp something tangible and candid of a writer who can too readily be obscured by his own myth. This

Houman Barekat

Double trouble: August Blue, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

The narrator-protagonist of Deborah Levy’s August Blue, an elite-level concert pianist called Elsa, is going through a difficult time. She recently walked off stage after messing up a Rachmaninoff recital in Vienna. More worryingly, she has just dyed her hair blue. At a market stall in Athens, she becomes entranced by a pair of novelty mechanical horses, but they’re snapped up by another customer with whom she becomes fixated. Elsa keeps noticing ‘the horse woman’ out and about, and starts to think of her as ‘a sort of psychic double’. She is deeply impressed when she sees her smoking a large cigar: ‘It was a poke at life. A provocation.

Leyla Sanai

The danger of making too many friends

Elizabeth Day has found her niche as an astute, approachable social anthropologist, observing emotions and behaviour we are reluctant to discuss – such as failure – and draining them of their stigma. Her new book tackles the subject of friendship, which she points out has been far less analysed than romantic relationships. Her honesty and her ability to listen make her an endearing narrator and charming interviewer. She examines why friendship has always been so important to her. Admirers of her previous book, How to Fail, will recall that her childhood involved a stint at a Belfast boarding school where she was bullied, an experience she touches on again here.

Philip Marsden

The amazing aerial acrobatics of swifts

It happens usually in the second week of May, between about the 8th and 12th (this year it was earlier, the 2nd): a distant sound, building as it approaches, and then the doppler dip as the first of the returning swifts screeches past the roof of our Cornish farmhouse. It’s the opening bracket of the summer months, one that closes with their departure just 12 weeks later. But it is a reminder, too, that while we might think of our house as home to two adult humans, two teenagers and a dog, it is also the habitat for several nesting swifts, swallows, house sparrows, pipistrelle bats, mice, occasional winter rodents

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

When violence was the norm: Britain in the 1980s

In middle age you’re supposed to feel nostalgia for your youth, but I finished this book marvelling at how dreadful the 1980s were. The decade hit rock bottom in May 1985 when, within 18 days, 56 football fans died in a fire at Bradford City and 39 in crushes before the Liverpool-Juventus match at the Heysel Stadium. All through, though, the 1980s lived up to one of Roger Domeneghetti’s chapter titles, named for The Barracudas’ song of 1981: ‘We’re living in violent times.’  The author, a journalist and academic, has an ambitious premise: sport is the key to understanding what really happened to Britain in the 1980s. The book doesn’t

Jude Cook

Unholy row: The Choice, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

Michael Arditti’s 13th novel The Choice is full of tough moral conundrums. The central dilemma facing Clarissa Phipps, the rector of St Peter’s Church in Tapley, Cheshire, is particularly knotty. Should she remove the church’s panels depicting a troublingly sensuous Eden, painted by the degenerate artist Seward Wemlock in the 1980s, or leave them to stand? Can, in short, an artist’s life ever be disassociated from their work? This is a hot potato, one with which Arditti grapples using endless reserves of theological nuance. By juxtaposing Clarissa’s choice with others she has to make in her life (and the original choices made by Adam and Eve in eating the forbidden

Andrew Rosenheim

A gruesome discovery: Death Under a Little Sky, by Stig Abell, reviewed

The journalist Stig Abell has such a versatile CV – moving from the Sun to editorship of the TLS and then to his present morning slot on Times Radio – that it’s no surprise he has dipped a toe into the crime-writing waters where so many semi-celebrities increasingly swim. What may be surprising, given the rigours of the genre, is how well he’s done it. Death Under a Little Sky sits on the cusp of cosy crime. Jake Jackson is a police detective in London whose life changes when an oddball uncle dies, leaving him a large house deep in a nameless part of England, complete with acreage and a

Juliet Nicolson

Polly Toynbee searches in vain for one working-class ancestor

Polly Toynbee’s fascinating, multi-generational memoir comes with a caveat to a Spectator reviewer. While her book is written with ‘self-conscious awareness’, Toynbee predicts, with a cautionary wag of the finger, that it will be reviewed in publications where ‘introspection is inconvenient’. Not a page goes by without a reference to the iniquities of class, accent, snobbery or patriarchal dominance Of course, introspection drives her narrative. Toynbee, a self-confessed ‘silver-spooner’, was born into a family of towering academic and literary influencers who, while enjoying connections and lifestyles as posh as they come, almost consistently resisted and campaigned against conservative elitism and privilege. As with all families, these ‘crusty old relations’ contain