Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

Lynn Barber

Meghan and Harry have never grasped the notion of ‘only connect’

In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him they should do a cover story on Meghan Markle, the star of Suits. Carter had never heard of Markle, but then nor had most people. In her own eyes she was a huge Hollywood celebrity, but actually she was mainly unknown outside Canada, where Suits was filmed. She wasn’t even the star of the series; she was about sixth in the billing. But Sarkin knew something else about her: that she was rumoured to be marrying Prince Harry. Markle happily agreed to the interview, but said, of course, she could

Michael Hofmann

Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.) It was this mostly rarefied background, seething with Lowells and Starks and Winslows and Devereux (though both his parents, like himself, were only children, so they feel like an unhappy nuclear family in the embrace of a clan), that the poet tried many times to elude: by

Michela Wrong

The butcher of Chad who died in a private Senegalese clinic

Recent years have not been kind to the campaign for universal justice. The notion that some crimes are so serious that perpetrators should be hunted down and prosecuted irrespective of where the atrocities were actually committed has taken something of a beating since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened for business in the Hague in 2002. Just this August, William Ruto, a politician once charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC, was voted president of Kenya, wresting power from Uhuru Kenyatta, who had faced identical charges before the same court. A lawyer accused of witness-tampering in their cases then died in what looked very like a poisoning. So much

Roger Lewis

The utter vileness of Richard Harris

Brawling, boozing and womanising, those vaunted hell-raisers of the 1960s – Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and, of course, Richard Harris – were all frightful bores. Because their professional lives involved dressing up and wearing mascara and silly wigs, it was essential for them to show what he-men they were: how hard. Like Stanley Baker (another one), Harris boasted to columnists: ‘I’ve got great contacts with the underworld,’ especially the Krays. He never had anything to say about the artistic merits or meaning of any of his films. His stories were exclusively about his prowess as a bully. Crushing an apple, he typically said to one of his directors:

Andrew Neil

David Dimbleby turns out to be a bit of a closet republican

In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts on broadcasting for media studies students to pore over (andthe book is all the better for that). As the face of the BBC’s coverage of our most important national events over the decades, from general election nights to every major royal ceremony, Dimbleby has been authoritative, well-informed, impartial and appealing. These middling memoirs – more

Tuesday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The house in Ghent haunted by Hitler

In 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of Verhulst had kept a bust of Hitler. The fact that Hertmans would use this as a springboard to write a work of auto-fiction seems inevitable, given that his International Man Booker longlisted novel War and Turpentine (2016) and his later novel The Convert (2019), have their roots respectively in notebooks belonging to his grandfather and

Craig Raine

Eliot’s ‘wretched old’ typewriter looms large in an analysis of The Waste Land

In 2018, the ferocious American poet-critic William Logan took time off from routinely, invigoratingly eviscerating contemporary poets to write Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past – a study of classic poems in their historical contexts. It was an informative, interesting exercise, prefaced by this significant reservation: ‘Knowledge of the circumstance is not ipso facto knowledge of the poem.’ Ezra Pound eliminated the weaker passages of The Waste Land, some of them, surprisingly, downright bad Matthew Hollis attempts something similar: an immersion in the verité, the lost circumstances of composition. His subtitle, ‘A Biography of a Poem’, is a brilliant piece of marketing, a hook, an

Rodric Braithwaite

How the West misunderstood Russia’s military capabilities 

Books about Putin’s war against Ukraine are like the No.11 bus: you wait for ages, then a whole bunch turn up at once. Owen Matthews and Mark Galeotti are among the first. They will eventually be superseded by the scholarly histories. Meanwhile they bring clarity to a picture confused by instant comment in the media. Both are prolific and engaging writers, long-standing and reliable observers of the Russian scene. Both pepper their accounts with illuminating comments by their innumerable Russian and Ukrainian contacts. Matthews’s involvement in the story is deeply personal. His mother descends from a Mongol who defected to Moscow five centuries ago. An ancestor was appointed by Catherine

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The year’s best children’s books, featuring animals real and imaginary

It’s not often that my tastes are validated by Netflix, but Jonathan Stroud’s brilliant series about teenage ghost hunters, Lockwood & Co., is being turned into a series. If you haven’t read it, give it a go. The mordant talking skull alone is worth it. Stroud has already embarked on another series about a tough nut sharp-shooter, Scarlett, and her amiable sidekick, Albert Browne, who, handily, can read or sieve minds.   The Notorious Scarlett & Browne: Being an Account of the Fearless Outlaws and their Infamous Deeds (Walker Books, £7.99) is the second in the series, and the subtitle gives the gist. Here they carry out an impossible heist, complicated

Nick Paget-Brown

Emma Dent Coad’s ‘love letter to Kensington’ is nothing of the sort

Few places can rival the London borough of Kensington in diversity. In the 19th century, new mansions sat alongside the cholera-ridden slums around the piggeries and brick claypits. A speculative racecourse came and went. More recently, postwar slum clearance created new housing divides and Portobello Road became a key London destination. Racial tensions erupted in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, and in the 1970s the Westway motorway sliced through the north of the borough, reinforcing its landlocked character and poor transport links to the rest of London. In 1965, following a major reorganisation of London’s government, Kensington was combined with Chelsea to create a new borough. In 2013, I

Chloë Ashby

The secrets of a master art forger

Tony Tetro’s memoir starts with a bang – or, rather, a bust. On 18 April 1989, 25 policemen spilled into his condo in Claremont, California, confiscated the $8,000 he had just been paid in cash and proceeded to search the place, slicing through wallpaper, pulling up carpets and emptying drawers. The scene is pacy, thrilling, a bit silly. It reads like a Hollywood film script; which, if I’m being cynical, is probably the point. The pièce de résistance: If you pressed #* on the cordless phone, a full-length mirror would pop open and reveal my secret stash of special papers, pigments, collector stamps, light tables, vintage typewriters, certificates of authenticity,

Scott Bradfield

Tales of old Hollywood are always entertaining – even when they’re apocryphal

Despite being known as a visually driven town, Hollywood has a rich oral history. This may be due to the fact that it is (like most literary communities) a small, gossipy village in which everybody knows everybody else and what everybody is saying about them. It also testifies to the fact that while Hollywood’s ‘players’ may often produce stupid films, they aren’t actually stupid themselves. Most of the time they know exactly what they’re doing – which is what makes them so perplexing. According to this hefty book, which assembles more than half a century’s worth of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute, Hollywood’s early days weren’t as glamorous

Wednesday

Declan Ryan

Shirley Hazzard – so in love with Italy she spoke in arias

Shirley Hazzard’s ‘untimeliness’ is a recurrent aspect in most descriptions of her, both the writing and the person. She came to represent ‘a vanished age of civility’: there is something Victorian about her novels, despite the last of them, The Great Fire, being published in 2003, by which time she was starting to resemble ‘an exotic bird blown off course’. This first biography, by Brigitta Olubas, an academic who has already written a monograph on Hazzard and edited her collected short stories, gives us a portrait of the self-created artist throwing off the ‘suffocating gentility’ of postwar life in her native Australia, its ‘tyranny of distance’ from what she saw

John Gimlette

The world’s best wrecks and ruins

Ruins, shipwrecks and lost cities are endlessly intriguing. I once went to Kolmanskop in Namibia and found myself wondering quite what it was that was so alluring. At one level it’s just a rather dowdy German town out in the desert, abandoned in 1956. But what’s special there is the sand and the way it has sifted through halls and kitchens and up the stairs. It’s as if a little bit of our history had somehow ground to halt and got left behind. Fordlandia, built in the heart of Amazonia in 1928, is now quietly crumbling away as the forest returns The travel writer Oliver Smith has a neat phrase

Genevieve Gaunt

Neo-gothic horror: Strega, by Johanne Lykke Holm

In Johanne Lykke Holm’s neo-gothic novel Strega, Rafaela, claustrophobic in her parents’ ‘yellow’ and ‘dusty’ flat, dreams of working as a maid at the mountain-nestled Olympic Hotel. She luxuriates in a bath with a brochure, mesmerised by photographs of ‘girls in pearl-white aprons, girls eating ruby-red apples straight from the tree’. It’s a foreshadowing of the post-lapsarian limbo she is about to enter. Rafaela arrives with eight other girls at the remote and unheimlich alpine hotel: the proportions seem ‘off’ and there’s a ‘smell of dust and water and burned hair’. Even the lake feels carnivorous, claiming lives every year. The book lies in the shadowlands of great gothic works

Paul de Zulueta

The courage of the Red Devils

At Goose Green during the Falklands campaign, the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment forced the surrender of more than 1,000 Argentinian soldiers. It was an extraordinary feat of arms. The battalion numbered 650 men, far fewer than the accepted ratio of 3:1 when attacking a defensive position. The Parachute Regiment had upheld the old tradition: ‘fast, far and without question.’ In June 1940 Churchill ordered the formation of a parachute force. He had been taken aback and quietly impressed by the success of the German parachute forces, the Fallschirmjäger, in the Battle of the Hague the previous month. Their success in seizing crucial bridges in coup de main operations had

Martin Gayford

A choice of art books – from Carpaccio to David Hockney

David Hockney once remarked that he wasn’t greedy for money, but was covetous of an interesting life. Then he added that he could find excitement ‘in raindrops falling on a puddle’. There are no puddles in My Window (Taschen, £100), previously only available as a limited edition, but Hockney finds ravishing beauty in such sights as the roofs of neighbouring houses, a street lamp or a distant crane. This huge and sumptuous volume is a visual diary: it consists of what Hockney saw as he lay in bed and looked out at the world each morning between 2009 and 2011. His view was much like anyone else’s, nor is there

Philip Womack

A dangerous gift: The Weather Woman, by Sally Gardner, reviewed

The Weather Woman is the children’s writer Sally Gardner’s first novel for adults under her own name (previously, she used the pseudonym Wray Delaney). Spanning the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, the story describes an England trembling at the French Revolution and haunted by the threat of Napoleon while aristocrats gamble and roister. Gardner’s sense of atmosphere is acute. The frost fairs, the grand ballrooms, the stinking alleyways all come alive. The novel’s major theme is the subjugation of women; its secondary, the border between rationality and intuition. Our thoughtful, unconventional heroine is Neva Tarshin. Her mother, a genius chess player, was forced to

Sara Wheeler

Celebrity photographer and conservationist: Peter Beard’s life of extremes

In 2005 the photographer Peter Beard invited me to his Thunderbolt Ranch in Montauk on the tip of Long Island. I was writing a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen’s lover, and Beard had known Blixen at the end of her life. When Graham Boynton began this biography he telephoned me, and I told him about that weekend I spent alone with Beard. At the end of my story, there was silence. Then Boynton said: ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever heard of he didn’t make a pass at.’ Born in New York in 1938, Beard was a trust-fund Wasp, Yale-educated. Having started as a fashion photographer, he became