Book Reviews

There are three ways of knowing Patricia Highsmith. First, of course, she was the author of 22 novels and several story collections published between 1950 and 1995, the year of her death. Then the woman herself: Mary Patricia Plangman, born in Dallas in 1921, long-term resident of New York City, when young a socially and sexually active lesbian, later in life a mostly solitary literary figure in almost constant movement around Europe. Much biographical work has been written about her. And, finally, a revelation: she was the keeper of not only an intimate diary for most of those years, but also workbooks she called ‘cahiers’, all now published in a

If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs in Amazônia (Taschen, £100) does so in the most spectacular way imaginable. Not only are they ravishing in themselves; they show us sights that very few have ever seen. To take these shots, Salgado trekked deep into the rainforest, sailed the rivers, visited remote tribes and flew over the vast terrain in the helicopters of the Brazilian air force. During those flights he saw immense vistas over trees, billowing cloudscapes and snaking rivers covering an area larger than the EU. The resulting pictures, all the more powerful for being in

For all its faults and foibles, its busts and bailouts, modern market capitalism demonstrates a remarkably bullish resilience. We don’t always love it. We might not even trust it. But, like a cranky old spouse, we doggedly stick with it. It’s not hard to guess why. Look around, and people today in the main are better off. More importantly, the alternatives seem doubtful. As Bill Gates once put it: ‘Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.’ Even so, there’s a nervousness afoot in the epicentres of free enterprise. Inequality is growing, executive pay is spiralling, high street favourites are disappearing, employment terms are worsening. Forget levelling up;

We live at a time in which we could (until recently) travel without difficulty and take for granted access to cultural treasures. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case, and minds were shaped by what possibilities were available. The Belgian painter René Magritte is a good example of huge talent pushed through a very narrow opening. His art has now become an exemplar of the striking image that commerce can feature. Advertising regularly uses his paradoxical visual combinations of faces replaced by apples, of skies in the shape of doves, of roses filling rooms and, supremely, the conundrum of the pipe demurely labelled ‘Ceci n’est pas une

Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting chronic skin condition. Sergio del Molino, a Spanish writer and journalist, slowly guides us into his world of intense physical discomfort (most treatments of psoriasis only deal with its symptoms, rather than healing its immunological causes), but combines this private hell with provocative reflections on fellow sufferers. It’s a surprise to learn that Stalin shared something with Cyndi Lauper, John Updike, Pablo Escobar and Vladimir Nabokov. The result is by turns macabre and compelling, with Del Molino using his affliction to put himself in the shoes of his pantheon of

Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled herself from childhood on her godmother and namesake, Elizabeth I. The young daughter of James I plucked her hairline to imitate her father’s predecessor, the great Tudor queen. Aged ten, she was painted with a vivid red wig, dripping in jewels recognisably inherited from her godmother. She even practised her signature until it was almost indistinguishable from Elizabeth I’s famous flourishes. At 13, grandeur got the better of her when she signed herself ‘Elizabeth R’, her most exact copy yet of the queen’s mark. The surviving document shows that someone