Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Peter A. Coclanis

This is an original UK Article

This is an original UK Article Streeting, who was down last night to do this morning’s media round, was furious at both the substance and timing of these stories. He has told the BBC today that it’s ‘categorically untrue’ that he’s plotting a coup against Starmer. ‘Whoever has been briefing this has been watching too much Celebrity Traitors.’ On Sky, he said that ‘trying to kneecap one of your own team’ is ‘self-defeating and self-destructive behaviour.’ He added, ‘I also think whoever did this doesn’t speak for the Prime Minister. I speak for the Prime Minister.’

Thursday

Clemmie Read

The furious tug of war between 18th-century Whigs and Tories

A foul-mouthed fantasist with a chin like an ironing board starts a wild conspiracy theory about the King’s brother. An alcoholic racing fanatic turns his gambler’s eye to the ballot box. A maniacal preacher gives such a polarising sermon that he paints himself as a second Christ and tours the country as a sex symbol. These are not the inventions of William Hogarth or Jonathan Swift; they are the figures who divided our political system in two, as George Owers tells us in his delightful new history of the birth of party politics. The Rage of Party traces the fevered rise of Whigs and Tories during the reigns of William

Charlotte Hobson

In Putin’s Russia, feminism is an ugly word

The excellent Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe’s first book recounts a well-known slice of Russian history from a fresh perspective – that of the mighty Russian woman who, it’s said, can ‘stop a galloping horse and run into a burning hut’. And how superhumanly brave and resilient they have had to be. Women were granted sweeping rights following the Revolution, then watched them dwindle for the rest of the century, in law but mainly in practice. What remained was the Soviet obligation to work regardless of gender, which created a country of professional women in every sphere: engineers, cosmonauts, judges, professors and 70 per cent of doctors by the 1970s. Ioffe

Oliver Soden

The making of William Golding as a writer

It is hard to believe that the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature would have been awarded to the author of titles such as The Chinese Have X-Ray Eyes, Here Be Monsters or – yes – An Erection at Barchester. But if William Golding had had his way, so it might have proved. Charles Monteith, his loyal editor at Faber & Faber, saved him from himself; and thus it was that those books were called instead Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible and The Spire. For whatever reason, Golding thought himself a monster and his journals seethed with self-disgust Even Golding’s first and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), started life

Julie Bindel

The simple flatbread that conquered the world

Pizza is the Italian food that has conquered the world. From Brussels to LA, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, pizzerias are everywhere. But what are the origins of this food, and how did it become so popular? Reading Luca Cesari’sbook made me hungry not only for a thin crust margherita but also to digest the wealth of information about this simple dish. The margherita gets its name from Queen Margherita of Savoy, who, in 1889, on a visit to Naples, summoned Raffaele Esposito, the celebrated pizzaiolo (pizza-maker and hawker) to the palace to try his wares. She so liked the one with tomato, mozzarella and basil (made to represent the

Wednesday

Charlotte Stroud

The reluctant spy: The Predicament, by William Boyd, reviewed

According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, male writers have daddy issues. So keenly do they feel the oppressive influence of their forefathers that when they take up the pen it is to use it as a sword. To produce something new, they must engage their predecessors in a writerly duel to the death. Bloom’s examples are all very highbrow – Blake vs Milton, Keats vs Shakespeare – but the theory applies across the literary spectrum. When William Boyd sits down to write a new spy novel and, removing his pen from its sheath, looks up to assess the field, it is (among others) the faces of Ian Fleming and

Marcus Berkmann

A feast for quiz-lovers: Christmas gift books

The Christmas gift book market is a fascinating thing. Things come into fashion, other things drop out, although the desire to amuse and/or make the mind boggle is pretty much constant. This year’s book that performs both tasks admirably is The History of Art in One Sentence (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by Verity Babbs, which I am assured is her real name. She is an art historian and a comedian, an unusual combination in academe and a very effective one here. Her task is to guide us through 50 art movements from the past 500 years, one sentence at a time. Each short chapter asks ten judicious questions about the movement, then

Ambra Edwards

Serenity and splendour: a choice of gardening books

This year marks the centenary of Britain’s National Pinetum at Bedgebury in Kent, originally founded to rescue the smog-ravaged collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and now part of a global conservation effort: one third of all conifer species are currently threatened with extinction. To celebrate the birthday, we have Bedgebury Florilegium by Christina Harrison and Dan Luscombe (Kew Publishing, £18), featuring 20 botanical paintings by Bedgebury’s Florilegium Society. This is a group of volunteer artists dedicated to documenting the Pinetum’s remarkable collection of more than 12,000 specimen trees. But perhaps the most beautiful book to cross my desk this year is Melbourne Hall Garden by Jodie Jones (Frances

Sara Wheeler

Faith – and why mountains move us

Sylvain Tesson’s White unfolds the story of a gruelling ski journey across the Alps during which the author aims to fulfil ‘a long-held dream of transforming travel into prayer’. Born in Paris in 1973, Tesson is a well-known adventure writer whose previous books include The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga, which won awards on both sides of the Channel and was made into a film. As a public figure associated with the far right, Tesson remains divisive in his homeland. His political views do not seem to have dented book sales or literary coverage: one wonders if the same would be true if

Roger Lewis

‘I could turn very nasty – I was an egotistical brute’, says Anthony Hopkins

It’s a good job Anthony Hopkins is only an actor, as think what he’d be like as a dictator or grand inquisitor. ‘I could turn very nasty,’ he tells us in his memoir. Doing National Service: ‘I was beginning to enjoy the fisticuffs in my life.’ Encountering a Scotsman: ‘I felt a surge of hatred and anger. I head-butted him and smashed his nose so hard I heard it crack.’ To a director who’d annoyed him: ‘Learn some manners… or I’ll change the shape of your face.’ Mickey Rourke was told: ‘Touch me like that again and I’ll smash your face right into the back of your head.’ Hopkins is

The Spectator

Books of the Year II – further recommendations from our regular reviewers

Philip Hensher I have a theory that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels are an ingenious variation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. If, in a future episode, River Cartwright ascends to his kingdom renouncing Jackson Lamb, and if Catherine tells us of Jackson/Falstaff’s death offstage, don’t be surprised. In any case, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) is a magisterially accomplished novel and Herron a master of vivid voice, showing himself in a plot of shining, machine-like efficiency. The other novel I adored was Tash Aw’s The South (4th Estate, £16.99) – a ravishingly written account of a brief, obsessive passion between two teenagers during a boiling hot Malaysian summer. The Guardian tried

Thursday

Alan Judd

The Belgian resistance finally gets its due

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the White Lady – la Dame Blanche – whose appearance was said to herald the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, the Kaiser’s dynasty. The name was adopted by a network of 1,084 Belgians who spied for MI6 against the country’s German occupiers during the first world war. According to MI6’s authorised history, this ‘became the most successful

Henry Jeffreys

Beaujolais – a refuge for impecunious wine lovers

With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine wanker’ who ran the London marathon, stopping every mile to taste a wine blind and guessing most of them right. Now we have the inevitable book; and while Gilbey isn’t an elegant prose stylist in the manner of Oz Clarke, Thirsty: 100 Great Wines and Stories (Square Peg, £20) is an enormously entertaining read. It’s

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Nat Jansz: Comet in Moominland turns 80

36 min listen

Nat Jansz joins Sam Leith to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Moomin novels. The first of these, Comet in Moominland, was revised by author Tove Jansson a decade after the original publication date. To celebrate the anniversary Sort of Books, co-run by Jansz, is publishing this revised edition for the first time in English. Jansz discusses why she finds the books so compelling, the influence of the war on author Jansson and why she feels Jansson’s ‘quest for the truth’ was written in a way that was easy for children to understand. For Jansz, the Moomin novels had a mix of light and dark which broke the mould of

Tuesday

Charlotte Stroud

Even as literate adults, we need to learn how to read

Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white rhino might feel a little smug. Anyone seeking a glimpse of this endangered reader could be forgiven for thinking that a university English department was its most likely habitat, but they would be wrong. Behind the brown office doors where academics labour, one is more likely to find the common squirrel, hoarding information and burying

Hugh Thomson

How the terrorists of the 1970s held the world to ransom

At the end of the 1970s, the Illustrated London News printed a special edition to commemorate the decade. What did it focus on? Music, from David Bowie to Bob Marley? Some of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, from The Godfather on? Political crises, such as Watergate and the end of the war in Vietnam? No, there was only one headline: ‘The 1970s: The Years of Terrorism.’ We forget – and perhaps we want to – quite how brutal and random that time could be, with plane hijackings, the Munich Olympics atrocity and bombs going off from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore, where the Japanese Red

Travis Elborough

Unhappy band of brothers: the Beach Boys’ story

Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

What drove the German housewife to vote for Hitler?

‘It happened, therefore it can happen again,’ warned the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, explaining why witnesses to the horrors of Nazism and genocide must be listened to, and why it is important for future generations to stay vigilant against a repeat of such atrocities. The underlying assumption is that the Nazis’ rise to power and the terrible crimes that followed were preventable. We believe that German democracy need not have died; that Hitler could have been stopped from plunging much of the world into a horrific war and from eradicating the vast majority of European Jews. Yet, despite the widespread conviction that studying these events inoculates future generations against totalitarian

Sarah Ditum

Will the ‘bunny boiler’ tag continue to haunt single women?

Even if you’ve never seen Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, you’ll know what a ‘bunny boiler’ is. When Alex (Glenn Close) slaughters her lover Dan’s family pet and leaves it simmering on the stove, she invented a universal shorthand for the obsessive, unstable woman who can’t take romantic rejection. In the film, Alex is portrayed as the destroyer of domestic happiness: an embittered career woman on the wrong side of 35, who is made literally sick when she spies on the contentment shared by Dan (Michael Douglas), his wife and his daughter. Audiences loathed her. Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash, reported cries of ‘Kill the bitch!’ and ‘Punch

Ian Thomson

Zadie Smith muses on the artist-muse relationship

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us from her beloved Kilburn High Road (Afro-wig emporia, pound shops) to an appreciation of a Stormzy concert at Glastonbury. This fourth essay collection is unfailingly interesting: Smith is uniquely placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Some of the greatest essayists of the 20th century were American. (Only a wordy journal