Book Reviews

Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by class, gender and race, there can be no civilised argument against the preservation and enjoyment of great architecture and art from the past. But ‘heritage’ is not quite that simple. There’s something else going on. A la recherche of what precisely? Our troubled world accommodates, even embraces, heritage tomatoes and heritage paint. The former reaches back into agricultural history to find an uncontaminated source of perfect taste; the latter, chalk-dense, impure colours popularised by Farrow & Ball, elevates ordinary cottage woodwork to gentility. And these two poles of misplaced desire

The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I describes his 1826 voyage from America to England to set in motion the great task – which would take 11 years – of fundraising for the printing of his mighty double elephant folio book in four volumes, The Birds of America. Part III is devoted to his 1833 seabird searching expedition to Labrador. The well chosen excerpts are introduced and meticulously annotated.  Audubon’s innate love of birds grew into a grand ambition to observe, record and publish life-size images – never previously attempted anywhere – of all the birds of

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation. The dictator didn’t last as long as that. Fatos served 17 years, partly in Spaç, partly in other camps.  It wasn’t difficult to get on the wrong side of the

Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’. While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving from Buenos Aires to Berlin, the seven stories depict displacement (there are a lot of boxes) and disturbance. A woman sneaks around mansions to rearrange them; a man worries about his children staying with his nudist parents; a woman is unmoored after moving back from Spain. One of the most unsettling stories, ‘An Unlucky Man’,

One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts. Even so, Dickens and Prince is as strange as it sounds: an extended essay yoking together a 19th-century British novelist and a recently deceased African-American popstar. At the start, Hornby says he won’t be looking for ‘uncanny similarities’ between the two – which might make you wonder why they’re in the same book. Or at least it would if

Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that sets things straight and pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me… Because what exists on the record has no bearing at all on the truth.’ Fair enough – but how come the book is only being published now, when Newman died in 2008? The answer seems to be that the material was lost for many years. In 1986, Newman asked his closest friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, to collect accounts of his life from his family and friends. He said he might use them one day to