Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Nick Spencer

The story of Noah’s flood will never go out of fashion

‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river. As Philip C. Almond shows in this impressively erudite book, the tale courses through two millennia of western thought with similar power. The story, found early in the book of Genesis, lurks in the half-remembered shadows of our biblically illiterate age. Fed up with human wickedness, God promises to wash

Andy Miller

Across the universe – John and Paul are in each other’s songs forever

The world’s love affair with the Beatles began, arguably, with the release in October 1962 of the group’s first single ‘Love Me Do’, full-blown Beatlemania following hard on its Cuban heels. Will we still need them, will we still feed them, when they’re 64? The answer appears to be a resounding and remunerative yes. Beatlemania is for life, not just for Christmas. Beatles books increasingly obtain to the condition of poetry, in that more people want to write them than read them. Yet still they keep appearing in bookshops. And every time a new volume about the group is published – like all those of sound mind, I have loved

Bart van Es

How Anne Frank’s photograph became as recognisable as the Mona Lisa

Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February 1945. Her last days were spent in the sick barracks caring for her sister Margot, who had a high fever and smiled contentedly, her mind already wandering. Anne, too, had been feverish, but ‘friendly and sweet’, according to witnesses. Her last recorded words were: ‘Margot will sleep well, and when she sleeps I won’t need to get up again.’  Ruth Franklin’s superb and subtle book pivots around this moment, which is described in a starkly titled central chapter, ‘Corpse’. Half her study tells Anne’s story up to the tragedy of her death. It traces her parents’ backgrounds and characters, her

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis

40 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and journalist John Lanchester, one of the contributors to Michael Lewis’s very timely new anthology of reportage on the United States federal government, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. Can the public learn to love a bureaucrat? John tells me why he thinks the workings of government are misunderstood and under appreciated, why we should marvel at the making of the consumer price index, and why he thinks Elon Musk has ‘the wrong handle of the shopping bag’.

Tuesday

Alice Jolly

Fight or flight?: 33 Place Brugmann, by Alice Austen, reviewed

In May 1940, as the Nazis invade Belgium, the residents of a sedate apartment block in Place Brugmann, Brussels, wake to find that their longtime neighbours, the Raphaëls, have disappeared. Alice Austen uses this moment as the starting point for her subtle debut novel about how a diverse group of Belgians react to the Nazi occupation. She tells her story in snapshots, writing in the multiple first-person voices of those who remain at 33 Place Brugmann and those who flee. Charlotte is a young artist who may not see colours, but has ‘vision’. Miss Hobert is a gossip with ‘a rabid imagination’. The courageous and pragmatic Colonel Warlemont resists the

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Why are we routinely buying disgusting bread in Britain?

‘Bread is simple. Or is it?’ That is the question David Wright poses about a keystone food that spans the globe and the whole of history. Breaking Bread examines the science behind the ur-loaf, the development of the Chorleywood method, the economics of selling the stuff, the role that it has played in religion and politics – and what its future might look like. The author is a third-generation baker. After a childhood spent in the Suffolk bakery his father owned and ran (Wright’s birth was announced in the bakery shop window: ‘I smelled bread, played with the dough, tasted it even before I have memory’), he left it all

Michela Wrong

The danger of becoming a ‘professional survivor’

It was a relatively minor episode in a period marked by the killing of two African presidents, months of massacres in churches, schools and sports stadiums, a biblical exodus by much of the Hutu population, a cholera outbreak in refugee camps established in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a rebel takeover of the country. But it mattered a great deal to Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, the author of this book, as she was one of the children evacuated in June 1994. At 15, she did not meet the criteria stipulated by the convoy’s organisers, so she and her mother hid under a tarpaulin sat upon by the smaller

Mike Jakeman

The sickness at the heart of boxing

There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for 30 years. But when he reimmerses himself in boxing he does not like what he sees. He finds a sport where bouts are controlled by gangsters; where famous boxers dope and lie about it; where fights still have inadequate safety protocols; and where the centre of power has shifted from Las Vegas to Riyadh, lured

Sara Wheeler

Who will care for the carers themselves?

When her brother Lionel was born in 1949, ‘the concept of neurodiversity didn’t exist’, writes Caroline Elton. The subtitle of her profoundly moving memoir, ‘A Portrait of My Autistic Brother’, is misleading. The book is really about the experience of being the sibling of a person who is not like you. Lionel was nine years Elton’s senior, so she draws on their mother’s testimony to relate his infancy and childhood, turning to her own recollections for the later years. He learnt to read before he could speak, played the piano faultlessly by ear (his mother taught him), and could tell you what day of the week a date would fall

Clare Mulley

The agony of making music at Auschwitz

Anita Lasker survived the Holocaust because, as a Berlin teenager, she had enjoyed her cello lessons. The Hungarian Lily Mathé’s violin performances had once impressed the man who became the Auschwitz concentration camp commandant. Alma Rosé, among Europe’s most talented musicians and the niece of Gustav Mahler, became the conductor who kept these young women and more than 40 others alive through ‘ferocious discipline’ and determination. In The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, Anne Sebba recounts these intertwined stories with great sensitivity. She also explores the ethical questions that haunted the survivors who were once forced to play melodies in the darkest moments of the 20th century. The ash from human

Helen Brown

A picture of jealous rivalry: Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock, reviewed

‘Your muse or your wife’ is quite the ultimatum to throw at an artist. But that was the choice Henri Matisse faced in 1939 when his wife of 30 years (you might know her as ‘Woman with a Hat’, 1905) had had enough of Lydia Delectorskaya (‘The Pink Nude’, 1935). It’s a dilemma which forms the crux of Sophie Haydock’s deliciously immersive novel about these two extraordinary women. A former journalist, Haydock is making it her mission to breathe life into women whose faces we know from famous artworks. Her gripping 2022 debut, The Flames, animated the tangled tales of the women who stripped naked for the troubled German artist

Allan Mallinson

The importance of honouring the enemy war dead

There are several dozen graves from the second world war (and some from the first) in churchyards near my village on Salisbury Plain, but all of them British or Commonwealth ones. Nor have I seen any enemy graves elsewhere, although some 4,500 Germans died on British soil during the last world war, and a far smaller number in the Great War. Until 1962 they lay in many hundreds of cemeteries throughout Britain, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. But in 1959 the German equivalent of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (IWGC), the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK), was given leave to rebury the dead of

Frances Gibb

Controlling AI is the great challenge of our age

In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM computer system called Deep Blue. It had defied all expectations, exploring some 300 million possible moves in one second. The most that skilled chess players can contemplate is about 110 moves at any given time. It was a seminal moment in the advance of artificial intelligence – even if not fully understood, writes Richard Susskind in How to Think About AI. People did not wholly grasp the impact of the exponential power of computers, nor that new ways would be found to develop systems that could achieve human expert-level performance. Fast forward to 2016 and to AlphaGo,

Lisa Hilton

The dogged women on the trail of Dr Crippen

On 18 November 1910, 300 women marched on the Houses of Parliament to demand the right to vote. Their protest was met with shameless brutality: punches, kicks, beatings and sexual assault from policemen and male bystanders. Three weeks earlier, a young woman named Ethel Le Neve had been tried for her part in the most sensational crime of the new century, the ‘London Cellar Murder’. The portrait of Le Neve presented by her barrister had been one of ‘perfect Edwardian feminine innocence’, docile, gentle, lacking in agency – a reassuring contrast to the strident, determined suffragettes, whose refusal to conform to societal expectations were to culminate in the attacks at

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

The adventures of the indomitable Dorothy Mills

When Dorothy Mills disappeared to Haiti to research a travel book, the British press led with the headline: EARL’S DAUGHTER GOES TO SEE BABIES EATEN IN BUSH. Mills was never out of the news in the interwar years. She wrote nine novels as well as six travel books, all of which sold briskly, and in 1928 she was the only woman in the starry line-up at London’s Explorer’s Week (Ernest Shackleton’s skipper, Frank Worsley, spoke alongside her). She was born Dorothy Walpole, in 1889.Her father, Robert, became the fifth Earl of Orford when she was five. Her ancestors included Britain’s first prime minister, another Robert. The young Dolly travelled widely

Stuart Ritchie

The vagaries of laboratory experiments

One usually likes to think that scientists know what they’re doing. Here’s something that might shake your confidence. In bio-medical research, scientists often use cell lines. These are in vitro cells, originally taken from a human or animal donor, which can be experimented on to help develop new drugs or treatments. The problem is that, according to one review, in ‘at least 5 per cent’ of studies, the scientists have totally mixed up where the cells came from. This means that in at least one in 20 studies that were sent off for peer review the scientists were completely confused about the most basic element of their research. They thought,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Anthony Cheetham: A Publisher’s Memoir

26 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the publisher Anthony Cheetham, one of the biggest figures in British publishing through the second half of the twentieth century and into this one. In his new book A Life in Fifty Books: A Publisher’s Memoir, he looks back on his career. He tells me why he had a soft spot for Robert Maxwell; how he launched Ken Follett’s career on the top deck of a bus; how losing a press-up competition changed the landscape of publishing (and upset his then wife); how publishing has changed – and how it hasn’t; and why Confessions of a Window-Cleaner has a special place

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

The unfairytale life of two European princesses

This hefty book is more about context – the turbulent years of mid-19th-century Europe – than it is about its two protagonists. Details of the many popular uprisings of the time, plus the jockeying for position of the main players and the battles and intrigues involved, are so packed into its pages that teasing out the stories of the two empresses is not always easy. The early married life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, sounds appalling. Her older sister had been groomed to marry the young Emperor Franz Joseph, but the moment he saw Sisi, then only 15, she was the one he wanted. It was impossible

Jude Cook

The soldier poet: Viva Byron!, by Hugh Thomson, reviewed

In 1821, while Byron and Shelley briefly shared what they high-mindedly called an ‘artist’s colony’ in Pisa, along with Mary Shelley and Byron’s current squeeze Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, they both impulsively decided to commission the building of boats in order to explore the gulf of La Spezia. While Shelley, in deference to his friend, named his Don Juan (the boat in which he would perish, aged 29, the following year), Byron christened his The Bolivar,in honour of Simon Bolivar, who was then attempting to liberate South America from the Spanish. No stranger to noble causes, Byron would eventually go off to support the Greek War of Independence, dying ignominiously, aged

Susie Mesure

The mystery of the missing man: Green Ink, by Stephen May, reviewed

Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in Edwardian London sent May’s imagination hurtling back through the decades. The result was Sell Us the Rope (2022), his sixth novel, which imagined what Koba, the Georgian then better known as Joseph Dzhugashvili, got up to in 1907 while attending the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party. May mixed the real with