Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

The conspiracy against women’s football

The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC beat St Helens 4-0 at Everton’s Goodison Park in front of 53,000 paying spectators, a sellout crowd. That was too much for the men at the Football Association. Hysterical at the sight of women running about as they liked and scared of competition from the female game, they banned it a year later. ‘The game of football is quite unsuitable for females,’ its ruling explained. From then on, the FA barred men’s clubs from letting women use their fields. Female players were condemned to jumpers for goalposts in parks. In

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Simon Jenkins: The Celts

41 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club is Simon Jenkins. His new book The Celts: A Sceptical History tells the story of a race of people who, contrary to what many of us were taught in school, never existed at all. He tells me how and why ‘Celts’ were invented, what it has meant and continues to mean for the nations of the Union, and where he thinks we need to go next… Produced by Oscar Edmonson and Matt Taylor.

Thursday

Margie Orford

Ethel, Ella and all that jazz: the soundtrack of a Chicago childhood

Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so the Pulitzer Prize-winning author makes both forms new. Hers is a wry, intimate portrayal of a passionate and intellectual woman coming to maturity: ‘Older women’s tales… are hard to pull off,’ she writes: ‘They risk being arch.’ But Jefferson is never arch. Her eye is too keen and her aim too true. She turns her clear gaze and razor-sharp intellect on America past and present, where freedoms are skewed and limited by race and gender. The book is about the second half of a life, which is where the real

Caspar Henderson

Fish that swim backwards – and other natural wonders

In the Zhuangzi, a collection of tales attributed to the eponymous 4th-century BC Chinese philosopher, a frog that lives in a well boasts about its comfortable way of life to a visiting sea turtle. When the turtle describes its own existence in the vast expanse of the ocean, however, the frog has no idea what to make of it. The story is, of course, a humorous parable about typical human limitations and the possibility of stepping beyond them. But it could serve almost as well as an introduction to Ed Yong’s new book, which confirms in rich detail what Zhuangzi intuited: the nature and range of different forms of animal

Alan Judd

People of little interest: MI5’s view of left-wing intellectuals

If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they thought you were a spy. Nor even that you were especially interesting. Files were a means of storing and retrieving information. They could be general subject files or personal files (PFs) relating to individuals. Some PF holders were secretly investigated, but many were merely monitored – i.e. information about them was collated until it was clear there was no need for further investigation. Following their seizure of power in Russia in 1917, the avowed mission of the Soviet government was to foment worldwide revolution in order to impose communism. MI5

Leaf Arbuthnot

An immorality tale: Lapvona, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed

Has there been a better novel this century than Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation? There might not have been. The book was a hit when it came out in 2018 and had a second wind during the pandemic, when readers found themselves ‘resonating’ with its cabin-fever plot. Not that there was much plot: the novel follows a beautiful young woman marooned in her New York apartment, where she mainly watches TV and pops pills like they’re Pringles. There’s more plot in Moshfegh’s latest novel Lapvona. We’re not in contemporary America any more but in somewhere like medieval Europe, and the characters aren’t ‘prettier than Sharon Stone’ but

Caroline Moorehead

The unimaginable horrors confronting the Allies in 1945

No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what they would find. The discovery by the Soviets of the extermination camp of Majdanek in July 1944, and Auschwitz in January 1945, had not really registered, not least because they had been partly emptied and demolished by the retreating Germans. In any case, no one – not the International Committee of the Red Cross, nor the Vatican, nor the British and American governments – had been able, or wanted, to believe what they had been told. The scenes of slaughter and horror that awaited the British, Canadian and American troops

Philip Mansel

The emperor as ruler of heaven and Earth

Geography, climate, economics and nationalism are often seen as decisive forces in history. In this dynamic, original and convincing book Dominic Lieven considers emperors and their dynasties as motors of events. Defying constrictions of time and space, ranging from Sargon of Akkad, the ruler of what is now northern Iraq (r. 2334-2279 BC), to the Emperor Hirohito of Japan (r. 1926-89), he believes that ‘for millennia, hereditary sacred monarchy had been the most desirable and successful form of polity on Earth’. (Inhabitants of city states, from Athens to Venice, might not have agreed.) Emperors could create and extend states more easily than impersonal forces, as Lieven shows in chapters on

Peter Parker

‘That little venal borough’: a poet’s jaundiced view of Aldeburgh

‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but few people today talk about this Suffolk-born poet or indeed read him. This makes Frances Gibb’s slender but thorough account of George Crabbe’s life and work all the more welcome. In his time he was considered a leading, though controversial, figure, who wrote with stark realism about the spiritually and morally impoverished lives of East Anglian villagers and townspeople, in particular the inhabitants of the ‘little venal borough’ of Aldeburgh, where he was born in 1754 and spent an unhappy youth. After failing in his first career as an apothecary-surgeon,

Chris Mullin

We let Hong Kong down: Chris Patten on the end of colonial rule

After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory MPs to lose his seat in 1992. Had he been re-elected he would probably have become chancellor of the exchequer. Instead, he found himself in the wilderness. But not for long. Within months he had been appointed governor of Hong Kong, tasked with the tricky business of presiding over the transfer of the territory to communist China. It was a lucky break. Had he been chancellor, the odds are that his political career would have come to a sticky end the following September, when the pound fell out of the

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Philip Mansel: King of the World

44 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Philip Mansel. We talk about his new biography King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV. He tells me what really drove the great megalomaniac, whether he was a feminist avant la lettre, how his depredations in the Rhineland anticipated Putin’s in Ukraine – and why, if he hadn’t revoked the Edict of Nantes, the first man on the moon might have been speaking French.

Thursday

Brian Martin

Connecticut connections: A Little Hope, by Ethan Joella, reviewed

A Little Hope, Ethan Joella’s debut novel, is about the lives of a dozen or so ordinary people who live in smalltown East Coast America. By helicopter over Connecticut ‘you wouldn’t notice Wharton right away’. Yet the problems its inhabitants face are universal. There is the seemingly American Dream family – Greg, Freddie, Addie the daughter and Wizard the dog. In line with the novel’s themes of ‘hurt’ and ‘hope’, Greg develops an aggressive blood cancer and is fighting for his life. Chemo and radiotherapy weaken him; ginger ale tastes like metallic fizz and the side-effects diminish his resolve. Freddie helps out as a seamstress at Crowley Cleaners, which Darcy

Frank Lawton

Piloting a Boeing Dreamliner can be less than dreamy

Mark Vanhoenacker dreams of my nightmares. Ever since he was a young boy, he fantasised about piloting airplanes. Ever since I was a young boy, well, let’s just say I’ve preferred to take the train. Of course I know that, statistically, flying is safe; but that knowledge doesn’t stop the unnerving sense that at some point the laws of physics will reimpose themselves and we’ll be punished for our former miracles. And let’s be honest, if God had wanted us to fly, would he really have invented airline food? Vanhoenacker has no such worries – which is handy, since he’s fulfilled his dream and now pilots Boeing 787 Dreamliners round

Iain MacGregor

Berliners were punished twice – by Hitler and by the Allies

‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’ Albert Einstein’s deft avoidance of the question put to him in 1929 – whether he considered himself a German or a Jew – was prophetic of what would happen to his country in the following decade. He was just one of the many stars of Berlin, Europe’s dazzling, decadent centre of the arts and culture, whose spark would be dimmed or extinguished by Adolf Hitler. Capturing the history, people and spirit of Berlin, arguably the beating heart of Europe, can be a tricky proposition, as I know. Sinclair McKay has wisely kept to analysing the city through the prism

Suzi Feay

The Victorian origins of ‘medieval’ folklore

I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of the Moon and Stations of the Sun, scholarly accounts of the history of modern witchcraft and the ritual year in Britain, no one writes more sensitively about their worldview. On the other hand, as an academic, Hutton assiduously seeks to saw off the branch on which many of their fondest assumptions sit. The paradox can be explained. Queens of the Wild returns to one of Hutton’s key themes: the debunking of the idea that pagan practices and beliefs survived intact in Europe from archaic times. With characteristic frankness he explains

Ferdinand Mount

What shape is the Treasury in now?

Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to zero. At most, you might hear the sound of a distant flute playing a courante by Lully. As Sir Howard Davies puts it in this insider’s view, which manages to be both authoritative and quite cheeky: The Treasury does not cultivate a warm and cuddly working environment. You may well not know if your immediate boss has a spouse or partner, and would certainly never meet them if they exist. Social events are at a premium. Yet this notoriously ascetic culture is not in the least hierarchical. Junior principals are

Ian Birrell

Abolishing slavery was no cause for smugness

When the 13 colonies of the United States declared independence in 1776, the first country to recognise the new nation was France. Other leading European powers, such as Britain and Spain, acknowledged its arrival at the Treaty of Paris, two years after a decisive victory by American forces. Yet when Haiti asserted independence in 1804, it was ostracised by Britain, France, Spain and the US. During its first fragile years as a fledgling state, that self-declared guru of liberty Thomas Jefferson even imposed a rigid blockade while president. Washington then took more than half a century to recognise its Caribbean neighbour. The reason for such contrasting attitudes towards the first

Lynn Barber

Jarvis Cocker measures out his life in attic junk

If you were hoping for an autobiography this isn’t it. Jarvis Cocker calls it ‘an inventory’ and insists: ‘This is not a life story. It’s a loft story.’ But anyway it’s as quirky and engaging as you would expect from Cocker and also the most beautifully produced book I’ve seen in years, designed by Julian House. And it does, in its circuitous way, tell us quite a lot about Cocker’s formative years in Sheffield. The MacGuffin is that Cocker is meant to be clearing out a loft where he’s been storing stuff for years and deciding what to ‘cob’ (chuck) and what to keep. Of course he has trouble cobbing

Frances Wilson

Was Jane Morris a sphinx without a secret?

William Morris was the son of a stock-broker and Jane Burden was the daughter of a stablehand. He was raised in a mansion in Walthamstow (now the William Morris Gallery) and she grew up in a hovel in Oxford. Had she not been talent-spotted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti when she was leaving the theatre one night, Jane would have become a college servant rather than an artist’s muse. She married Morris when she was 19, after he had reproduced her as ‘La Belle Iseult’, trapped in a room between a window and a bed, and put her through intensive elocution lessons as well as a crash course in music, art

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

How the Treasury maintains its power

Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to zero. At most, you might hear the sound of a distant flute playing a courante by Lully. As Sir Howard Davies puts it in this insider’s view, which manages to be both authoritative and quite cheeky: The Treasury does not cultivate a warm and cuddly working environment. You may well not know if your immediate boss has a spouse or partner, and would certainly never meet them if they exist. Social events are at a premium. Yet this notoriously ascetic culture is not in the least hierarchical. Junior principals are