Book Reviews Archives

Thursday

11 Aug 2022

Guy Stagg

How the travel industry convinced us we needed holidays

In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to a company that had lasted 178 years and survived both world wars. Founded by a Baptist preacher who began organising railway trips to Midland cities for local temperance societies, the company grew into one of the largest travel agencies in the world, thanks to the transformation of tourism from an activity for the idle rich to an experience open to all. This opening up of travel is the story Lucy Lethbridge tells in Tourists, taking the reader from the last years of the Grand Tour to the first years of

Ian Thomson

The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed

Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart of Emeric Pressburger’s 1966 novel The Glass Pearls, was devoted to the furtherance of so-called ‘science’ under the Führer. In the interests of research he cut up the brains of a number of concentration camp inmates. His chosen victims – Jews and other ‘useless mouths’ – were crematorium fodder. Yet Braun sees himself as a decent, God-fearing family man. Undoubtedly he had to carry out unpleasant work, but does that mean he has no conscience? Pressburger, a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré, had reason to dislike the Germans: his mother and other

Wynn Wheldon

It’s thrilling to learn that the rebellious Urien actually existed

Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about the Dark Ages that deliberately parodied a sub-Tolkien mysticism of tone. ‘Little is known,’ his opening sentence ran, ‘about those shadowy twilit years twixt 400 and 600 AD.’ Our teacher was particularly enraged by the word ‘twixt’. In Dom’s defence, he was just reacting to a challenge that still confronts medievalists today. When there’s barely any evidence, what is there to say? The response of this intriguing book by Thomas Williams is to lean into the problem. In Lost Realms, he makes a beeline for the very darkest part of

Andrew Watts

We do love to be beside the seaside

In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of a goodly pumpkin. In the middle, where the stalk would be, there is a hole filled with rusting iron. The day I moved in, a neighbour told me that the hole was drilled and filled with molten iron to attach a hook, long since rusted away, to make a ‘sinking stone’. Smuggled cargo could be submerged just off shore if there were any danger of meeting King George’s men, to be harvested when the coast was clear. About a year later, another Cornish neighbour saw it and told me that,

Jon Day

Fleeing paradise: eden, by Jim Crace, reviewed

Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should all be thankful. Craceland is a compelling place to visit, full of hazy yet broadly recognisable locations (Tudoresque England in the IMPAC award winning Harvest; a vaguely Mediterranean town in Melody) and spanning indeterminate times (the post-apocalyptic future in The Pesthouse; the end of the Stone Age in The Gift of Stones). The specific non-specificity of his fiction reflects Crace’s view of himself as more of a storyteller than a novelist, and his sense of history as a largely unwritten – and therefore often forgotten – phenomenon. In this, eden

Artemis Cooper

How Alice Prin conquered bohemian Paris

This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and Man Ray, the decade of their creative collaboration and the cafés and nightclubs of Montparnasse, immersing the reader in a world where everyone was pushing their creativity in unimaginable directions. Emmanuel Radnitzky, the Jewish tailor’s son from Brooklyn who turned himself into Man Ray, the painter and photographer, saw himself as the equal of Picasso, Duchamp, Picabia, Léger and the other artists who were being talked and written about with such excitement. Yet people found him more interesting as an innovative photographer than a painter, and while photography was definitely

Diana Hendry

Three men on a pilgrimage: Haven, by Emma Donoghue, reviewed

I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of view, namely eternity. The Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue doesn’t entirely qualify as a Catholic writer, even though she’s on record as saying she’s currently obsessed with Catholic theology, specifically Purgatory, but there’s a thread of Catholicism (particularly the Irish variety) in many of her books. Also, it has to be said that she’s frightfully good at suffering and endurance. I thought this when reading her 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars, set in the 1918 flu epidemic, and Haven is no exception. This must surely be her most Catholic

Sam Leith

Our long, vulnerable childhoods may be the key to our success

The central question in Brenna Hassett’s book, put simply, is: why are our children so very useless for so very long? Or: ‘What is the possible adaptive value of teenagers?’ If we consider maturity, or adulthood, to be the point at which an animal can play its own role in the evolutionary process – i.e. have its own babies – why is it that we have evolved to mature so slowly; and, even when mature, to delay having children until many years after we’re first physically capable of doing so? The framework in which Hassett sets out to answer this is one to do with investment and return on investment.

Wednesday

10 Aug 2022

Sam Leith

Andrea Wulf: Magnificent Rebels

48 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Andrea Wulf to talk about the birth of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century. Her new book Magnificent Rebels tells the story of the “Jena set” – a staggering assemblage of the superstars of German literature and philosophy who gathered in a small town and collectively came up with a whole new way of looking at the world. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, the von Humboldt brothers – and their brilliant and daring wives and lovers… their intellectual fireworks were matched by a tangle of literary feuds and hair-raising sexual complications. Here’s a piece of the

Steven Poole

Slavoj Zizek: the philosopher who annoys all the right people

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason alone be cherished. He once enjoyed a high degree of pop-philosophical notoriety, being blamed by pundits who had clearly never read his books for the scourge of pomo relativism that threatened to undermine the ‘moral clarity’ of those who deemed it an excellent wheeze to invade Iraq. Such was his leftish celebrity a decade ago that he shared a stage with Julian Assange and was forced to deny rumours that he was having an affair with Lady Gaga. ‘My friends said, “You’re stupid. You should have said: No comment”.’ Since

Tuesday

9 Aug 2022

A. N. Wilson

Larkin at 100: a tribute (1985)

This piece is taken from The Spectator’s fully digitised archive. There are many ways of judging poets. One sure test of their personal appeal is how many lines of their poetry you can remember. Not only can I remember a lot of Larkin, I find that it has sunk very deep, and become part of my private language. This is true both of his funny stuff – My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps To come and waste their time and ours… and also the jokey sadness of What else can I answer When the lights come on at four At the end of another year? Give

Thursday

4 Aug 2022

Jay Elwes

Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life

In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European research body, was upgrading its particle collider to create what it called the Large Hadron Collider. This underground apparatus ran beneath the French-Swiss border and it was so vast that its diameter equalled that of the Circle Line. Two beams of subatomic particles called protons would be fired around this subterranean loop in opposing directions and smashed together at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light. The scientists’ aim was to prove the existence of a fundamental particle called the Higgs Boson, which they hoped would appear momentarily from

Christopher Bray

The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes

Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to kick him. Needless to say, the kid’s kick comes a cropper. ‘What was that?’, Lee sneers, clipping the lad’s ear. ‘An exhibition? We need emotional content, not anger.’ Even at 12, when I first read about this scene (in the poster magazine Kung Fu Monthly, whose first 26 issues are handsomely reproduced in Volume I of Carl Fox’s Archive Series), I thought it sounded like a load of chop suey hooey. An exhibition is precisely what I’d have wanted, if by some miracle I could have wise-guyed my way into

Stephen Bayley

Must we now despise colonial architecture too?

Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses the silhouette of an automatic weapon as its logo. This is a trigger warning. Jonathan Swift wrote: All poets and philosphers who find Some favourite system to their minds In every way to make it fit Will force all Nature to submit. So I give you Owen Hatherley, an architectural critic of the left, adept in the predictable tropes of Guardian-sprache, who exists in a world, as he often tells us, defined by concepts of colonial domination, exploitation and ocean-going misery. As Lionel Trilling observed, leftish people are always glum

Justin Marozzi

The Nazi influence in Egypt

The law of supply and demand is a powerful thing. In the aftermath of the second world war there were many thousands of suddenly underemployed German and Nazi rocket scientists, jet engine technicians, military leaders, chemical engineers, propagandists and other specialists on the international market. While many were snapped up by the Americans and Soviets, voluntarily or otherwise, there was no shortage left for countries such as Argentina and Egypt, which reckoned they could learn a thing or two from the market leaders in internal repression and weapons of mass destruction. As the government communications specialist and Middle East watcher Vyvyan Kinross reveals in this darkly gripping story, this wasn’t

Duncan Fallowell

Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed

Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled to Berlin several days before Russia attacked Ukraine. He writes phantasmagorias, as so many Russians do, because Russia is a nation that has never allowed its writers to examine society directly. Solzhenitsyn said: ‘Russian literature gives a poor notion of Russia, because after 1917 all truth was suppressed.’ But even in the so-called Golden Age, the Tsar’s censorship was brutal. Voinovich said: ‘Depicting reality as it is, it’s very alien to Russians.’ Gogol provided one way out – satire – but he escaped to Rome. Later writers escaped into the

Oliver Balch

Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?

In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the revolutionary zeal of everyday Cubans. Eighteen months later, he was sent packing. ‘We have nothing to hide,’ Fidel Castro, the leader of the country’s 1959 revolution, had supposedly told him. That wasn’t quite true: production targets were being missed, dissidents were being locked up and the US trade embargo was already beginning to bite. The project briefly – and unsuccessfully – passed into the hands of Boom-era author and friend of Fidel, Gabriel García Márquez. After that, the voices of Cubans vanished from the official record. Lots of vituperative denunciations

Stuart Kelly

Close to extinction: Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, reviewed

Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle. They are a bizarre bazaar of pizzazz. Some readers no doubt might find his form of literary hyperactivity exhausting. Personally, I find it exhilarating. In part this is because the novels do not just have propulsive plotting but the ideas are high-octane as well. Venomous Lumpsucker does not pause for breath, yet simultaneously induces a weary, melancholy exhalation. The venomous lumpsucker in question throws together two very different characters and works as an effective McGuffin for the novel. Mark Halyard is the environmental impact coordinator (Northern Europe) for the Brahmasamudram

Michael Henderson

In praise of burning pianos

How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, when Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, reconciles youthful ardour with the wisdom bestowed by experience. Learn from the masters, he tells the townsfolk, if you want to start afresh. It was a lesson absorbed by all the great modernists. Stravinsky, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Kandinsky and the rest of the gang understood thoroughly what had come before. Alas, it is a lesson as yet unlearned by Kate Molleson, whose pleading on behalf of ten musical misfits is unlikely to ‘open our ears’, despite her best intentions. For