Books

Lead book review

Sam Leith

The birth of modern Britain

‘Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?’ asked Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. ‘No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.’ Reading David Kynaston’s densely detailed new book

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A Time by the Sea, by Ronald Blythe – review

I first encountered Ronald Blythe at Benton End, a glowing oxblood farmhouse above the river Brett, poised on the edge of Hadleigh in Suffolk. This was the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, run by Lett Haines and Cedric Morris, and known locally as the ‘Artists’ House’ and for ‘every vice under the sun’.

Memoirs of a Leavisite, by David Elllis – review

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve

Thirteen and a half

Have you looked across the Sound? On the other shore life lies. Can you see it over there? The palaces, the esplanade? It only takes a little while to cross, A year or two at most, sometimes just days. In clear weather you’ll see boats leaving the marina, The scarlet awnings of the shops And

Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate;

Flappers, by Judith Mackrell – review

I’m never quite sure what the term ‘flappers’ means. How did these creatures flap, and why? Where did they flap? Did they flap all day, or only at night? Were theyin a flap, or being flapped, sad-flaps or flap-happy? Did they open flaps, or close them? Did they flap Jacks, or flip Jills, or both?

Bedford Park, by Bryan Appleyard – review

Nothing in Bryan Appleyard’s Bedford Park betrays the fact that it is his first period novel: not its deft characterisations, its virtuoso dialogue, its dry and economical wit, or its choice of a narrator and material quite outside the author’s own experience. The 19th century is closing and the 20th is opening in a London

A Place in the Country, by W.G. Sebald – review

Within a few years, and in four books — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001) — W. G. Sebald achieved a reputation as a major international author. He was tipped for the Nobel, seen to supply heartening proof that ‘greatness in literature is still possible’ (John Banville) and

Tales of Two Cities, by Jonathan Conlin – review

In Jonathan Conlin’s Tales of Two Cities the little acknowledged but hugely significant histoire croisée of two rival metropoles gets a long overdue airing. For, like it or not, London and Paris would be much duller places if neither had deemed fit to discover the other. Oddly, up until now no historian has ever explored

Consolations of the Forest, by Sylvain Tesson – review

In this book, the French writer Sylvain Tesson spends six months, mostly alone, in a log cabin in Siberia. ‘Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that tomorrow will be more valuable than gold,’ he tells us. So, Tesson grabs these things while they are still relatively cheap. He is, you might say, a modern-day Whitman