More from Books

Divinely reticent

Earlier this year The Spectator published an article in celebration of Evensong — the nightly sung service of the Anglican Church. Attendance, it seems, is not just up but dramatically so. While church visitor figures across the UK have fallen steadily and substantially since the 1960s, congregations at sung services have swollen up to ten

The spirit of Christmas past

This book, an excellent history of Christmas, made me think of a Christmas cartoon strip I once saw in Viz magazine. There’s a couple. It’s Christmas Eve. The man goes out to buy the woman a present. On the way, he steps into a pub for a few drinks. Much later, drunk, having missed the

The ice was all around

‘We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.’ Ernest Shackleton’s lines unscroll through both these complementary books. David Grann’s The White Darkness is all-man, the gripping story of mighty but quite straightforward struggles. The Library of Ice, brimming with men, women, ships,

Black and white and read all over

In 1956, after Penguin Classics had published 60 titles, the editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, William Emrys Williams, wondered: ‘How many more titles in the classical literature of the world are there?’ As a case study in heroic shortsightedness, this measures up to Bobby Charlton’s question to his brother Jack after England’s World Cup victory in

A short step from cradle to grave

Between 1300 and 1900 few things were more dangerous than giving birth. For poor and rich, the mortality rate was high. If the birth itself didn’t kill you, then puerperal fever very well might. Privacy was non-existent. If you were Marie de Medici, there was such a press of people in the lying-in chamber that

Love your enmities

Grudges make the world go around, according to Sophie Hannah. They are ‘an important and fascinating part of human experience’, which ought to be ‘protective, life-enhancing and fun’. I think this overstates the case somewhat, as I can’t see any pleasurableness, though I am aware that my own ability to harbour resentments is possibly pathological

Another tale of star-crossed lovers

It’s hard, in Britain, to imagine a popular museum devoted to a single poem. The Polish city of Wrocław hosts just such a shrine. It celebrates Pan Tadeusz, the verse novel written in his Parisian exile by the poet, dramatist and freedom fighter Adam Mickiewicz in the early 1830s, and now taught as a keystone

A definition of glamour

‘Dark Star’ is a suitable enough title in itself, but the definition makes it a brilliant one: ‘A Dark Star’, we are told in this book, ‘is shadowed, often detectable by its gravitational effect on other bodies. It is often a component of a binary star and can cause the brightness of its visible partner

Could they have tried harder?

Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched man on 20 July 1944. Hitler was at a briefing in his Wolf’s Lair, a secret forested redoubt, when Stauffenberg entered the room with his briefcase bomb (containing British plastic explosive), placing it beneath the

Invasion of the bread-snatchers

Little Toller Books, in Dorset, aims to publish old and new writing on nature by the very best writers and artists, in books of the highest quality at affordable prices. This offering, neat enough to fit an overcoat pocket, ticks every box. Its author, Tim Dee, co-editor of The Poetry of Birds, has been a

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

I like a book where you don’t think you’re going to be interested in the subject, but then find it’s so vigorously and engagingly written that you’re enchanted. This is one of those. I’m not a skier —I’m quickly bored when coffee-drinking mothers start recounting their children’s latest achievements on the piste — so I

Sins of the fathers | 13 December 2018

‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of Owl-Light. Stephen Dedalus puts it differently in Ulysses: ‘A father is a necessary evil.’ But later, he qualifies this: ‘Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son

Vanished without trace Zoë Apostolides

From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely hearts’ killer. By the time he was apprehended, France’s answer to Jack the Ripper had swindled his way to contact with almost 300 women, using a variety of aliases, and murdered ten of them at

Flights of fancy | 6 December 2018

In the opening pages of Turbulence, a woman in her seventies, who is visiting her sick son in Notting Hill, thinks how easy ‘it was, these days, to acquire a plane ticket’. Instead of a ticket to take us around the world, we have David Szalay’s novel, which takes us across continents in a series

A hero to worship

If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will. But if you know who Messi is and you’ve got at least a 2:1 in English, comp. lit. or similar, you are going to absolutely love it. This is definitely one for the football aficionado

Commies and comics

Its Booker-longlist nomination meant that Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) was the comic that everyone has heard of this year, even if it’s also the one most likely to give them post-traumatic stress. Drawn in deliberately bland colours and small, often wordless panels, this story about the human aftermath of a grisly American killing takes

The pursuit of beauty

Michelangelo seems never to have travelled to Turkey to advise the Sultan on a bridge to span the Golden Horn, but he was asked to provide an architectural drawing after the design of his great rival, Leonardo da Vinci, was rejected. An ‘Author’s Note’ to this enigmatic novella references a sketch attributed to Michelangelo ‘recently

Too clever by half

This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker who has settled in the West, leaves his rich American wife of two decades when he falls hard for a Russian prostitute he meets in London (‘the first and last love of my life’). Andrei