Book review

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

A toast to beer, from Plato to Frank Zappa

‘He was a wise man who invented beer,’ said Plato, although I imagine he had changed his mind by the following morning. Beer: A Global History (Reaktion, £9.99, Spectator Bookshop, £9.49) is the latest addition to ‘The Edible Series’, following Cake, Caviar, Offal, Wine, Soup and, rather shockingly, Hot Dog into the catalogue. As reading about food and drink is second only in pleasure to consuming it, this might be one of the most ingenious publishing ideas of all time. Gavin D. Smith, author of several books ‘on drink-related topics’, traces brewing history from the neolithic peoples of Asia Minor to beer’s current pre-eminence: global consumption has increased every year

John McEwen

What’s eating London’s songbirds?

This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity, because it is a thorough and entertaining history; the first to cover the entire London area within a 20-mile radius of St Paul’s, from the earliest record, in Roman times, to the present. A chronology lists the date when the 369 species were first recorded, from the red kite in the 2nd century AD to Bonaparte’s gull and the buff-bellied pipit in 2012. The last named illustrate the recent rise in esoteric sightings following the postwar birth of the bearded-birder brigade, with their competitive box-ticking and ever more hi-tech equipment.

Wynn Wheldon

The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis’s best for 25 years

‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,’ wrote Hannah Arendt of Adolf Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Eichmann was certified as ‘normal’ by half a dozen psychiatrists. On more than one occasion in Martin Amis’s troubling new novel one of its main characters, the fictionalised commandant of a thinly disguised Auschwitz, declares himself ‘completely normal’. He also happens to be an oaf, a clown. We are dealing, then, with the banality of evil. Set in the months from August 1942 to April 1943, when it became clear that the Germans were going to

Alastair Smart

The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill

Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few decades earlier and worked in the Victorian age, when statues of the builders and defenders of empire were erected proudly and prolifically across the land, he’d surely have received no end of garlands. As it is, Roberts-Jones (1913–96) found himself constantly battling against artistic fashions and today is barely even talked about. Born in the Welsh border town of Oswestry, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools and Goldsmiths College (the latter’s fame as a breeding ground for conceptual excess still a long way into the

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s Englishing of Proust — widely and immediately agreed to be one of the greatest literary translations of all time — very nearly didn’t happen. Scott Moncrieff only suggested the project to his publisher after they rejected a collection of satirical squibs in verse (sample: ‘Sir Philip Sassoon is the Member for Hythe;/ He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe.’). Like any good hack, he had another suggestion up his sleeve: there was this character Proust just starting to be published — making a bit of noise in France. Constable didn’t immediately see the value: ‘They replied that they did not see much use in publishing a

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

Interviews with the great, the good, the less great and the really quite bad

The TV chat show, if not actually dead, has been in intensive care for a while now, hooked up to machines that go bleep. But the long-form interview, as pioneered by John Freeman’s Face to Face in the 1960s, is a tougher customer. Laurie Taylor’s In Confidence series on Sky Arts has featured the great and the good, the less great and the really quite bad, all of them attracted by the professor’s gentle sociological probing and the show’s reliably modest viewing figures, which suggest that no one will notice if it all goes terribly wrong. This book is Taylor’s artful distillation of more than 60 interviews, shaped according to

Ranjit Bolt

Soviet greyness, literary mediocrity and hot dates

Right at the outset of this autobiographical novel — in fact it reads more like a memoir — Ismail Kadare sets up his stall as a lover of women. His lust even permeates his similes: ‘… that particular path, like some women who, though not beautiful, possess a hidden charm…’ and that’s only the walk to the post office. It’s a clue, and romance plays a big part. He starts with an encounter — Brigita, a beautiful Latvian at summer camp in Riga — and in Moscow he seems far more interested in the lovely Lida than his writing. But girls don’t hog all the imagery. Kadare has an almost

Martin Gayford

Reynolds produced some of the finest portraits of the 18th century – and a few of the silliest

On Monday 21 April 1760 Joshua Reynolds had a busy day. Through the morning and the afternoon he had a series of sitters. Each of these stayed for an hour in the painter’s premises on St Martin’s Lane and was no doubt ‘greatly entertained’ — as another of Reynolds’s clients recorded — by watching the progress of their portraits in a large looking-glass strategically placed behind the easel so the subject could view the artist at work. However, Mark Hallett suggests in this masterly and pioneering new study of Reynolds at work, the most interesting hour of the day would have begun at one o’clock. That was the time at

Miranda France

The Jane Austen of Brazil

When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951, she expected to spend two weeks there and ended up staying 15 years, a time of emotional turbulence and creative productivity. Bishop wrote poetry and prose and translated Latin American writers, including Octavio Paz, but this project, suggested by friends as a way to improve her Portuguese, is something completely different. It’s a teenager’s diary, written between 1893 and 1895 in the remote mining town of Diamantina, the highest town in Brazil. It’s a delightful, funny and revealing memoir, a little bit of Austen in the Americas. Helena’s real name was Alice Dayrell, (the pseudonym came from her English

Andrew Barrow

Falling in love with birds of prey

Is it the feathers that do the trick? The severely truculent expressions on their faces? Or is it their ancient origins? Or the places where they live? Whatever their secret, birds of prey have exercised an extraordinary hold on human beings for tens of thousands of years. In the bad old days, their fans ranged from ancient Teutonic kings to Hitler’s right-hand-man Hermann Göring. Today, it seems to be artistic types and country-lovers who keep the flag flying. Or, do I mean keep the tail feathers fluttering? In this exhilaratingly honest and passionately broadminded book, the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Macdonald combines her ‘sorry story’ of hawk addiction with

James Mcconnachie

An invisibility cloak? You might just be able to see it on the horizon…

The best books by good writers — and Philip Ball is a very good writer indeed — are sometimes the ones that don’t quite work. This brilliant study of how occultists and scientists alike have attempted to see the invisible is very much that kind of fascinating failure. Its subject is just too large — and, well, it is just too hard to see its edges clearly. Ball begins with pseudo-medieval recipes for invisibility: Take a black cat and a new pot, a mirror, a lighter, coal and tinder. Gather water from a fountain at the strike of midnight… put the boiled cat on a new dish… then put the

Lewis Jones

James Bond’s secret: he’s Jamaican

Ian Fleming’s first visit to Jamaica was pure James Bond. In 1943, as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, he flew from Miami to Kingston to attend an Anglo-American naval conference and to investigate the rumour that Axel Wenner-Gren, a rich Swede and supposed Nazi, had built a secret submarine base at Hog Island, near Nassau. He was accompanied by his old friend Ivar Bryce, who was also in intelligence, and who put him up at a house his wife had recently bought. As they left the island, Fleming told Bryce, ‘When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica… swim in the sea

Thursday

James Walton

Murakami drops magic for realism in this tale of a lonely Tokyo engineer

When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in 2004, the questions weren’t always characterised by their pithiness. Many of his novels, the interviewer suggested at one point, are variations on a theme: a man has been abandoned by, or has otherwise lost, the object of his desire, and is drawn by his inability to forget her into a parallel world that seems to offer the possibility of regaining what he has lost, a possibility that life, as he (and the reader) knows it, can never offer. Would you agree with this characterisation? Murakami’s answer, in full, was ‘Yes’.

Harriet Sergeant

Banned – and booming: the strange world of Chinese golf

I was in Shanghai interviewing a Chinese film director and an actor. We were discussing government censorship. How did anyone manage in China, I lamented. The two men burst out laughing. I had not understood at all. ‘Because everything is forbidden, everything is permitted. You are free to do anything,’ they assured me. Dan Washburn in his book The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, uses golf and the business around it to pin down the paradox that is China today. Golf is his back door into understanding the last 20 years, as China has grappled with modernity and an unnerving speed of change. Corruption, rural land disputes, environmental

Andrew Taylor

Creepy, dizzying and dark: a choice of recent crime fiction

Philip Kerr is best known for his excellent Bernie Gunther series about a detective trying to survive with his integrity more or less intact in Nazi Germany. His latest novel, however, is a standalone thriller set in literary territory that might have appealed to Hitchcock. Research (Quercus, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.99) opens with the murder of the beautiful Irish wife of one of the world’s bestselling novelists in the couple’s luxurious Monaco apartment. Her husband, John Houston, has disappeared. He is the prime suspect. Houston researches and plans his thrillers but employs an ‘atelier’ of jobbing novelists to do the hard grind of writing what he describes as ‘books for

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Potato prints, paintings and the Soviet Union: the real Miss Jean Brodie

During the second world war, when not only food, but paper and artists’ materials were scarce, Peggy Angus made a virtue of necessity. Potatoes were one of the few foods not rationed, so she began cutting them in half, carving designs into the cut side and printing them onto old newspapers in repeated patterns of oak leaves, smiling suns, waves, chevrons and Welsh dragons. It was with these playful, naïve designs — which she later turned into tiles and wallpapers — that she made her name. Angus, like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, her contemporaries at the Royal College of Art, moved easily between media: potato prints, silkscreens, oil paintings,

Boris Volodarsky

The threat from Russia’s spies has only increased since the fall of Communism

‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin.  The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in fact Nikolai. ‘Nikolai Lenin’ was the party alias of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, a terrorist leader and psychopath whose ideas changed the history of the greater part of the 20th century. This era ended on 26 December 1991 with the collapse of the 74-year-old Soviet Union, founded by Lenin, who seven years after the Bolshevik revolution died of syphilis, only to be succeeded by Stalin. ‘Stalin’ was also an alias. The Soviet dictator’s real name was Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili, born into the family of a Georgian cobbler. His education, which he

Michael Paraskos

Like Birdsong – only cheerful

It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica during the first world war, and Sebastian Faulks’s similarly titled Birdsong. Whilst Faulks’s novel sits comfortably within the generally accepted narrative that the first world war was an unmitigated disaster, with lion-like Tommies led by donkey-like officers, Aslet has written what is effectively a panegyric to the officer class. Indeed, so casually heroic is every officer in the book it is almost as though Richard Attenborough’s version of Oh! What a Lovely War never existed. The Birdcage begins with the almost Wodehouse-inspired scene of the first ascent in a balloon

Roger Lewis

The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples. It is thus a tragedy that Dusty Springfield’s whole existence was blighted by her orientation, which explains ‘the silence and secrecy she extended over much of her life, and her self-loathing’. One glance at her chin should have revealed all — but the Sixties was not a fraction as liberated and swinging as people

Patrick Skene-Catling

The robber baron who ‘bought judges as other men buy food’

The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of wealth in the history of the United States, and none of them was less handicapped by moral scruples than W.A. Clark. He was up there near the pinnacle of acquisitiveness with Rockefeller but was not as legendary in popular imagination. While other pioneers were searching for gold, Clark developed copper-mining at the most opportune time, when there was a great and growing demand for copper for electrical wiring. The copper lode he discovered in Butte, Montana, produced 11 million tons and earned the town its nickname ‘The Richest Hill on