Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Sarah Ditum

The enduring miracle of human birth – a history

One of the most compelling artefacts described in this history of human birth is a stone carving discovered at an ancient temple site in what is now Turkey. The Gobekli Tepe totem pole, 11,500 years old, 6ft 3in tall and weighing 1,100lb, shows successive generations giving birth: a faceless figure at the top delivers a woman, who delivers another woman, who delivers a man, who is ‘proffering his phallus’. The exact meaning and function of this object is long lost, but it is clear that it has something to do with fertility. For as long as humans have had a culture, that culture has been – understandably – concerned with

Christian Wolmar

Starry starry night: the return of the sleeper train

The railways have survived into the 21st century by constantly reinventing themselves. Written off all too frequently by parsimonious politicians as a 19th-century invention made redundant by the car and the aeroplane, trains have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. Most happily, the sleeper has made a comeback, despite the fact that towards the end of the past century the mostly state-owned rail companies decided it was too much hassle to provide couchettes and compartments on trains running through the night. These trains got in the way of essential track maintenance; their use tended to be seasonal, and much of the rolling stock was well past its sell-by date. Budget airlines and

Jonathan Boff

Clerical skulduggery on the far borders of 1830s Germany

Königsberg is no more. Now known as Kaliningrad, it forms part of a small Russian exclave surrounded by Lithuania and Poland. It is probably here that the third world war will start. Before it was bombed flat and ethnically cleansed, the historic Baltic city formed one of the main centres of the German province of Prussia. Old Königsberg was a port and a -meatballs-and-potatoes kind of place, but also one of the battlefields of the Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born, lived and died there. One of the questions he struggled with was how to reconcile the claims of human reason with the need for faith in the divine.

Philip Hensher

Christopher Marlowe, the spy who changed literature for ever

Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of being approached in the 1990s by a screenwriter who wanted to make a Shakespeare -biopic. Greenblatt repeatedly told him to forget Shakespeare and look instead at his predecessor Christopher Marlowe. The screenwriter knew what he was about and ignored Greenblatt’s advice – the result was Shakespeare in Love. The fact of the matter is that Marlowe’s life is the sort of thing that people assume would make a good film but in reality it was just too full of violence, passion and secret plots. By the time he was murdered at the age of 29 in 1593, Marlowe was enmeshed in far too much

Wednesday

Max Hastings

Max Hastings Live: D-Day, Trial by Battle

32 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest for this week’s Book Club podcast is Max Hastings. Max joined Sam earlier this year for a live recording to discuss his new book Sword: D-Day, trial by battle, which tells the story of the individual stories who risked their lives as part of Operation Overlord. The discussion was arranged to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day. On the podcast Max tells Sam about why he was drawn to chronicle war, why it is important to remember all victims and not just the ‘traditional heroes’, and whether there was an alternative to D-Day at the time. Plus, how serious a moment does he think we face today,

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

Lives upended: TonyInterruptor, by Nicola Barker, reviewed

‘Is it any good?’ a friend asked when he saw I was reading this book. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s full of wankers.’ By that stage I was only up to page 24, but the remaining 184 pages did nothing to fundamentally alter my view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The works of, say, Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen, not to mention thousands of others, would be considerably poorer if all the tiresome people were filtered out. But it does make it hard to read TonyInterruptor for more than 30 pages at a stretch. One has to pinch the bridge of the nose and go for a little

Peter Parker

The enigma of C.P. Cavafy

C.P. Cavafy, who had a very high opinion of his own work, would no doubt be gratified to learn that he is now one of the most admired poets of the 20th century. This is all the more remarkable because during his lifetime (1863-1933) he did not allow a single volume of his poetry to be published, preferring to circulate privately printed sheets and pamphlets among his admirers. He was also disinclined to co-operate with those who wanted to translate the poems from their original Greek into other languages; but in English alone there have now been more than 30 different volumes of his complete or selected poems. Even so,

Susie Mesure

An ill wind: Helm, by Sarah Hall, reviewed

To read something by the Cumbria-born Sarah Hall is to enter a dizzying, earthy and often dystopian world where the elements rule and nature is blood red. Her nine previous short story collections and novels straddle life’s peripheries, often scratching at the limits of what it means to be human. ‘Mrs Fox’, one of her best known stories – and one of two for which she has won the BBC Short Story Prize – is a visceral tale about a woman who turns into a fox. In her 2021 novel Burntcoat, a virulent virus made Covid-19 look almost benign. Helm is a different beast again, one she has been working

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Art and moralising don’t mix

Against Morality is not against morality. But it is against moralising. Which is a start. Anti-cancel culture, anti-identity politics, Rosanna McLaughlin’s small book of essays is the first insider-artworld publication to condemn the Savonarolan turn within culture. A cause for celebration, you might think. Her argument is perfectly sound. ‘Morality has become the central pillar, the justification for art, the bar by which we measure whether something is good or bad’, and it’s been a disaster. Forcing art to ‘communicate clear and approvable messages’, cleansing the canon of bad behaviour, conscripting artists as ‘empathetic social workers’, has impoverished art, flattened it to such an extent that the work of the

Allan Mallinson

The greatest military folly of modern times

I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow. In 1914, a decade after the signing of the Entente Cordiale, the War Office fell hook, line and sinker for the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre’s doctrine of Attaque à outrance (attack to the extreme limits) and ludicrous Plan XVII. By April the following year we’d lost most of the regular army. In 1939 we again sent an expeditionary force to France and in May 1940 we fell for the Conseil’s ‘Dyle Plan’. This involved abandoning the field defences constructed during the winter and

Alexander Larman

I actually feel sorry for Prince Andrew

‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more conventional career as a biographer of John Buchan and Guy Burgess to the self-appointed role of royal botherer-in-chief. After earlier, similarly scabrous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he now finds his first contemporary targets, and the results are predictably marmalade-dropping. Prince Andrew’s decline in public popularity over the past

Michael Arditti

A summer romance: Six Weeks by the Sea, by Paula Byrne, reviewed

After Jane Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra destroyed the majority of her letters.  This act, often interpreted as an attempt to preserve Jane’s reputation, has had the opposite effect of fuelling fervent – at times prurient – speculation about what the letters contained. While Cassandra may simply have wished to shield her relatives from the lash of Jane’s sharp tongue, later writers, drawing on the author’s fiction and family lore, have surmised that the missing correspondence concealed evidence of a love affair. Such an affair formed the basis for Gill Hornby’s fine 2020 novel Miss Austen and now inspires Paula Byrne’s pleasant if unremarkable Six Weeks by the Sea. Byrne

Paul Levy

A sensory awakening: the adventures of a cheesemonger

Food memoirs, as distinct from cookery books, and from the relatively new genre of ‘biographies’ of ingredients, used to fall into three rough groups: foraging, hunting or gathering food; producing or cooking food; and eating. Like the restaurateur Keith McNally’s recent I Regret Almost Everything, Michael Finnerty’s The Cheese Cure adds a fourth category, memoirs of those who sell or serve food. These foodie books often blur at the margins and merge at the borders but usually share the characteristic of being narrated in the first person – and if recipes are given they are often incidental. (Of course, many of these authors also write cookery books.) There is a

Frances Wilson

‘My ghastly lonely life’ on the Costa Brava – Truman Capote

‘I can’t write books drinking all day and going to every soiree in Manhattan,’ Truman Capote complained. In order to write In Cold Blood, his ‘non-fiction novel’ about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, Capote and his partner Jack Dunphy therefore went to Palamos, a fishing town on the Costa Brava. Leaving New York in April 1960, they sailed to Le Havre, then drove across France with two dogs, one cat, ‘25 pieces of luggage’, and 4,000 pages of notes and transcripts. The killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were on death row. Their executions, Capote hoped, would take place later that year, at which point he

James Campbell

‘I’m tired of your ridiculous lies’ – the wrath of Muriel Spark

Few among Muriel Spark’s circle of friends would have disputed the judgment of Storm Jameson when recommending Spark to the publisher Blanche Knopf in 1963: ‘I warn you, or remind you, that you are taking on a tartar. She has worn out two Macmillan directors already.’ Even tartars are forgiven, however, when they exhibit a touch of genius. ‘On the credit side, she is a good writer.’ Spark was a good writer of letters, too. They were often a joy to receive, as this fascinating first volume of her correspondence shows. (Jameson to Knopf is quoted in an editor’s note.) On the very day on which she was due for

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

From the Bible to Tolkien: the risks & rewards of collecting rare books

27 min listen

The Bible is widely said to be the most published book of all time. Despite this, many older versions of the Bible are still sought after. This is because, as Tom Ayling tells Damian Thompson on this episode of Holy Smoke, there is a great deal of diversity amongst the editions precisely because it has been so widely published. Tom, a young antiquarian bookseller who set up his own business, joins the podcast to talk about the risks and rewards behind collecting rare books. Tom explains why, for him, books are ‘most than just a text’; takes us through the various religious books in his collection, from old editions of

Thursday

Zoe Strimpel

How can Gwyneth Paltrow bear so much ridicule?

There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as Nineties as the next girl living in provincial Massachusetts and when I first saw Shakespeare in Love in 1998, Paltrow’s first and only Oscar-winning role as the late-16th-century actress-in-male-garb Viola de Lesseps, I’d never enjoyed anything as much in my life. And in 2025, Paltrow’s career’s Take Two fascinates the early middle-aged woman who finally

Chiara Thumiger

The enduring pathos of Wound Man

‘Full of strokes and blows/ broken, pitifully wounded’, the man, naked, or almost so, stands full frontal, legs and arms parted, one limb sometimes slightly bent to signal the beginning of a movement. His body is punctured by lesions and wounds, with small depictions of their material causes attached almost as adornment – knives or weapons aimed at cutting and bruising, but also accidental instruments of damage to the skin such as thorns or nails or even living agents – a rabid puppy with sharp teeth. Scratches, buboes and insect bites are also visible. The image of the ‘Wound Man’ (or rather, images with variations) first emerges at the end

David Vernon

Culture clash: Sympathy Tower Tokyo, by Rie Qudan, reviewed

Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year’s prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood’s vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s. The Olympics took

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The woman I’m not – Nicola Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has all the usual things she wants to achieve in her memoir: rumours to scotch, a legacy to spell out, and so on. But the most important thing to the former first minister seems to be telling her readers that she is in fact not Nicola Sturgeon. The ‘seemingly confident, combative woman who dominated Scottish politics for more than a decade, unnerved the Westminster establishment, helped lead Scotland to the brink of independence and steered it through a global pandemic’ (her words) is in fact an outfit that the real author of Frankly has been wearing for a very long time. She seems quite keen to cast it