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The man for the hour

At the turn of 2007, the United States was facing defeat in Baghdad. Shia and Sunni were on killing sprees, the supply line from Kuwait was under constant attack, and F-16s were in action on Haifa Street, less than a mile from the fortified US embassy. Yet commanders in Iraq, and civilians from Defense Secretary

Rome on the skids

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy The Ruin of the Roman Empire, by James O’Donnell These two fat, well-sourced books about the decline of ancient Rome run, until they limp, in relay. Adrian Goldsworthy begins his leg from the end of the second century AD, the term

Whistling in the dark | 21 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela Wrong Once, when I was crossing Mali by bus, it took three days to go 100 yards. This was not because of the condition of the road, but because three sets of officials — the army, the police and the douaniers —

Order out of chaos

What got into them? For two decades in the middle of the 17th century, English- men transformed their world, overthrowing and eventually executing their king, abolishing bishops and the House of Lords, and incidentally slaughtering each other — and from time to time their Scottish and Irish neighbours — on a scale that approached the

The mother’s tale

‘I’m sick of this story of yours, this idea that it’s about drugs. If you want that to be the story then go away and write one of your f***ing novels about it, OK?’ says the angry son towards the end of The Lost Child, which goes nowhere slowly, despite the rollercoaster ride of publicity

A poisonous legacy

A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, by Norman Rose Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948, by David Cesarani The second epigraph in Norman Rose’s eloquent, comprehensive and even-handed book, A Senseless, Squalid War, says it all, from Palestine in the late 19th century to Gaza right now.

Wit and wisdom | 14 March 2009

Judicial biography is out of fashion: Lord Chancellors apart, the lives of the bewigged great and good are confined within the narrow boundaries of the Dictionary of National Biography. Judicial autobiography is too often driven more by the self-esteem of the authors than the intrinsic interest of the subject. Anthony Lentin convincingly establishes his subject’s

Member of the In and Out

Most MPs who start writing diaries do so in order to prove to themselves how central they are to the political process. But by the time the diaries come to be published, they tend to prove the opposite. The effect is either comic or tragic, depending upon one’s point of view.     Who wrote this,

The wide blue yonder

Toby Litt begins the titles of his books with consecutive letters of the alphabet and takes delight in shifting style and genre. He has now reached J, and science fiction. There has been a flurry recently of ‘literary’ writers trying their hands at SF. For the most part, the complaint raised against these efforts is

Sympathies and empathy

The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music. The composer James MacMillan, in a letter

Introducing the new Spectator Book Club

Peter Hoskin celebrates The Spectator’s rich literary tradition and welcomes bibliophiles across the world to a new online home The Spectator offices at 22 Old Queen Street are a bibliophile’s paradise. Books are, quite simply, everywhere: in bookcases; on top of filing cabinets; on the floor; and in the recesses where fireplaces should be. The

The invisible man

Bleak, bleak, bleak. Anita Brookner’s new novel, Stran- gers, is unlikely to inspire resolutions to self-improvement or even cathartic tears. But its main character, a retired bank manager called Paul Sturgis, is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect. Sturgis, 72 years old, is in

Red Star Over Russia

Winston Churchill’s cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, gazes up at her bust of Trotsky, made during a trip to Moscow in 1920. Her subjects were leading Bolsheviks including Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB, Lenin and Trotsky. While she worked, she asked Lenin, via a translator, if Churchill was the most hated man in

Heroes and villains

This book falls into two distinct parts. The first is the author’s account of his own life until he left Oxford in disgrace. John Joll- iffe, the son of Lord Hylton, passed his childhood and youth at Mells, in Somerset, the home of the Asquith family, and at neighbouring Ammerdown, the seat of the Hyltons.

Architect of his own misfortune

Tom Coraghessan Boyle, in some 20 books, has energetically demon- strated his enthusiasm for turning the bio- graphies of figures from early 20th-century American life into quasi-historical fiction. After writing the story of the sex-obsessed researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey and the rare tale of the inventor of the cornflake, Will Keith Kellogg and his health

More gossip with less art?

To say that this first volume of Samuel Beckett’s collected letters is a puzzle and a disappointment is to suggest that one might have had specific expectations of it. Where did this cryptic and poetic writer come from? What did so very affectless an author sound like when he was talking in his own voice

Pure, but never simple

Here at last is a novel informed by exceptional intelligence. The blurb states that the author, Simon Mawer, was born in England, but it seems likely that his ancestry was Czech, since he is acquainted with the language and the customs of pre-war Czechoslovakia and has learned of its travails during the German and Russian