Book review

Thursday

Sam Leith

Signifying Rappers, by David Foster Wallace – review

Since his suicide, David Foster Wallace has made the transition from major writer to major industry. Hence this UK issue of a slender work of music history got up for a small US press in 1990 by a young Wallace and his college friend Mark Costello. The premise: it’s the early days of rap, and two overeducated white kids who like it produce a sampler considering What It’s All About. That it’s dated doesn’t matter much. That it’s juvenilia does. Its cleverness is that of a writer in possession of an immense talent but not yet remotely in control of it: a learner driver doing doughnuts in a powerful car.

Andro Linklater

Uncle Bill, by Russell Miller – review

Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality in our senior commander: honesty. In other words, after blaming vainglorious politicians for precipitating us into war without adequate preparation or resources, it is reasonable to ask, how capable are our generals of admitting their own mistakes? Their persistence in two failed strategies — the application of Northern Ireland peace-keeping tactics to Basra and the dispersal of troops among forward posts in Helmand — does not suggest any culture of mea culpa, and ruthless self-examination has not been a distinguishing feature of the annual lectures delivered by the Chiefs of

Duncan Fallowell

The World According to Karl, edited by Jean-Christophe Napias – review

Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on to the outside that there is no longer any membrane between what he is, what he does and what he looks like: a macabre dandy for the electronic age, a Zen businessman as effective as Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or David Bowie in propagating product and persona as one. ‘I enjoy the luxury of being at the centre of this complete universe that’s mine,’ he says with the concentrated generosity of a narcissist who wants to thrill the whole world in order to make it his pool. The eternal

Caroline Moore

Multiples, edited by Adam Thirlwell – review

There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists feed in ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, press the button to translate it into Russian, and then re-translate it into English. It emerges as ‘The vodka is passable, but the meat is putrid.’ Our modern translating machine is Google Translate. It takes more than one transmutation to scramble the Biblical quotation: however, if you shift it through Russian, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hungarian, Tamil and Haitian Creole into French, you can get ‘J’aime la chair, elle était faible.’ Since the original is usually quoted by dieters reaching for

Jasper Becker

The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikötter – review

The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history. This is the notion, propagated in countless books and documentaries, that Mao’s regime started off well, deservedly coming to power on a wave of popular support and successfully tackling the evils left behind by the corrupt and incompetent Nationalists. Then, at the end of the 1950s, it all started to go wrong. There were terrible natural disasters, followed by famine; and, seemingly unaccountably, the brotherhood of brave revolutionaries fell out, creating the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. This is the version still served up to A-level students in Britain.

Owen Bennett-Jones

Narcoland, by Anabel Hernandez – review

It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on paper that’s all of them — face a total rout. To understand the scale of the defeat, all you need to know is that Barack Obama and David Cameron have both been unable to deny that they were once users. The US spends more than a billion dollars a year on international narcotics control and as a result, as a US official in Colombia once told me, has forced up the price of a gram of cocaine in New York by just a few dollars. That must have put drugs

James Walton

The Windsor Faction, by D.J. Taylor – review

In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now in The Windsor Faction, he brings us a counterfactual version. What would have happened in 1939 if Mrs Simpson had conveniently died three years earlier, leaving Edward VIII free to stay on the throne?  Would he have prevented war with Germany — perhaps even by treacherous means? Taylor explores these questions from a variety of perspectives. In big London houses, groups such as the Nordic League and the White Knights of St Athelstan meet to campaign against Britain’s involvement in a ‘Jewish war’, convinced that they have the king’s unspoken

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The Prince of medicine, by Susan P. Mattern – review

In the first draft of the screenplay for the film Gladiator, the character to be played by Russell Crowe (‘father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife’, etc) was named not Maximus, but Narcissus. Which might have made for a slightly different movie. One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) telling the beefy hero, ‘I’m entrusting the empire to you, Narcissus, because you’re loved by the soldiers, more gifted than my son Commodus, and also because you take better care of your skin than any general I’ve ever known.’ The reason for the original choice of praenomen was that the character was loosely based on a

David Crane

Why does Max Hastings have such a hatred for the British military?

One of the great problems for any historian writing of 1914 and the slide into conflict is that everyone knows the causes of the first world war and those of us who don’t still imagine that we do. It is clear that no historian can simply ignore the causes and get straight down to the fighting, but with the best will in the world it is hard not to feel like some poor Easyjet passenger, stranded on a Gatwick runway and sadly watching the precious take-off slot slipping further into the distance while the cabin crew go though the familiar old pre-flight safety instructions that they know perfectly well nobody

Thursday

William Gaskill

Olivier, by Philip Ziegler – review

Philip Ziegler is best known for his biographies, often official, of politicians, royalty  and soldiers. They include Harold Wilson, Edward VIII and Louis Mountbatten, whose correspondence he also edited. What has driven him to write about an actor — and one whose life has been fully covered in so many biographies, the most recent being Terry Coleman’s in 2005? I take it he knows little of theatre on the inside and has had to base his book on the notoriously unreliable gossip of actors, not the least of whom was Olivier himself, a supreme fantasist. I am not even sure that Ziegler is a theatre buff. But there must be

Simon Akam

419 by Will Ferguson – review

The term ‘419’ is drawn from the article in the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. However, it has transcended its origins in statute and become shorthand for trickery across West Africa. When I worked as a correspondent in Sierra Leone, 1,400 miles from Nigeria’s capital Abuja, the phrase was in widespread use. Deception is fertile ground for fiction, and Will Ferguson has produced a fine novel from the West African variant. He takes 419 in its purest form: the email scam. Nigerian hustlers persuade foreigners to part with their savings, often with the promise of a tranche of a fortune that just needs a western bank account to park

Anne Chisholm

Almost English, by Charlotte Mendelson – review

Novels about growing up have two great themes: loss of innocence and the forging of identity. With this sparky, sharp-eyed and  often painfully funny novel, her fourth,  Charlotte Mendelson (winner of the Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes and now on the Man Booker longlist) explores both through the story of a girl and a family openly based on her own experience. Marina Farkas is a small, round, dark-haired half-Hungarian girl of 16 (as the author was in 1988 when the novel is set). She lives with her fair, freckled, nervous English mother, Laura, in a small, hot flat in Bayswater; they have been taken in by three elderly

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Danubia, by Simon Winder – review

Why do we know so little about the Habsburg empire, given that it is the prime formative influence on modern Europe? Its pomp gave us the art, music, literature and pageantry of our high culture; its relationship with the Ottoman East and burgeoning European protestantism drew our religious and our political maps; its collapse fomented the nationalisms that shaped the 20th century across Europe. A popular abbreviation on the internet is ‘tl; dr’. It stands for ‘too long; didn’t read.’ There’s space for another one that would come in especially helpful for the Habsburg empire: ‘tc; du’ — ‘too complicated; didn’t understand’. It’s much easier to teach schoolchildren about Our

Christopher Fildes

The Downfall of Money, by Frederick Taylor – review

In Germany in 1923 money was losing its value so fast that the state printing works could not keep up. The work had to be contracted out to 130 different printing firms, all churning out marks with the lifespan of mayflies. Only ten years earlier, the mark had been as good as gold. Then Germany had set out to fight a short war and send the bill to the losers. This had worked well the last time round: after the 1870 war, France had handed over 5 million gold francs, not to mention two provinces. But the 1914 war turned out to be longer and far more expensive, and Germany

Christopher Booker

E.O. Wilson has a new explanation for consciousness, art & religion. Is it credible?

His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work of Edward O. Wilson’s legendary career’. As emeritus professor of biology at Harvard, Wilson, now 84, is revered across the world as the doyen of Darwinists. And in announcing that he will offer a new answer to those three cosmic questions scrawled in the corner of a Gauguin painting — ‘Where have we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’ — he leads us to expect some profound new insight into how a billion years of evolution have made us a species unique on earth. Wilson introduces his

Philip Hensher

Salinger, by David Shields – review

This biography has somewhat more news value than most literary biographies. Its subject worked hard to ensure that. After 1965, J.D. Salinger, having published one novel, a volume of short stories and two pairs of novellas, withdrew permanently from public life. His last publication, a long story entitled ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, was never printed in hard covers. Subsequently, he went to some effort to control what was known, and could be written, about him. He retired to Cornish, New Hampshire, living comfortably on the immense, ongoing sales of his single novel, The Catcher in the Rye. From there, information occasionally leaked out. A fan might extract a couple of rebarbative

Justin Marozzi

The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor – review

Sound the trumpets. Let rip the Byzantine chorus of clattering bells and gongs, the thunder of cannons, drums and flashing Greek fire. Raid cellars and let champagne corks fly. Eighty years after Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic trudge across Europe, 20 years after the death of his long-suffering publisher Jock Murray, ten years after the passing of his wife Joan, and two years after his own death, the elusive third volume that so tormented him is published at last. The travel trilogy is complete. It is, as John Murray reminds us, the literary event of the year. But for those who admire Paddy’s densely beautiful prose, can this awkward, unformed orphan

Thursday

Andrew Barrow

Chaplin & Company, by Mave Fellowes – review

The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful name Odeline Milk. Utterly friendless, she dislikes both humans and animals, but she has one huge, far-reaching private passion. She wants to be a mime artist — like the great Marcel Marceau. To launch her career, she has sold her mother’s house in Sussex and bought a scruffy old canal boat called Chaplin & Company, currently moored in Little Venice. In the flashbacks that follow, we learn about Odeline’s miserable childhood — albeit lit up by a few eureka moments — along with the history of her new floating home

Peter Parker

Francois Truffaut, by Anne Gillian – review

Almost 30 years after his death, François Truffaut remains a vital presence in the cinema. Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson are among maverick directors who have acknowledged their debt to him, while Noah Baumbach’s recent Frances Ha is in part an hommage à Truffaut in a way the French director would have appreciated: for example, the quick succession of scenes establishing the friendship of Frances and Sophie is borrowed from Jules et Jim (1962), Jean Constantin’s music from Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) appears on the soundtrack, and a poster for L’Argent de poche (1976) is glimpsed on a wall just in the way significant posters and pictures appear in

Malcolm Deas

Raymond Carr by María Jesús Gonzalez – review

This is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of an English historian of Spain. In doing so, as the historian in question is the extraordinary Raymond Carr, still with us at 94, María Jesús González also writes about the rural West Country of his childhood, the English class system, educational opportunities in the 1930s, social mobility, Wellington College, the Gargoyle Club, Rosa Lewis at the Cavendish, four Oxford colleges, Giraldo and his orchestra, G.D.H. Cole, John Neale, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A.J. Ayer, John Sparrow, A.L. Rowse, Oswald, Diana and Nicholas Mosley, Isaiah Berlin, Margaret Thatcher and even the Queen. In academia and society — mostly high — here