Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Lynn Barber

Was Cat Stevens the inspiration for Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’?

Essentially this is a book of two halves –before and after Cat’s conversion to Islam in 1977 – and the first half is immeasurably the more engaging. He was born Steven Georgiou in 1948, the youngest of three children, to a Greek-Cypriot father and a Swedish mother, with a much older brother and sister. His parents ran a café, Moulin Rouge, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London’s West End, and the family lived above it. He went to a Catholic primary school near Drury Lane and then, having failed the 11 plus exam, to a secondary modern in the City. But he left school at 16 with only

Anne de Courcy

Paul Poiret and the fickleness of fashion

Such was Paul Poiret’s influence that he is the only couturier whose clothes are known to have caused several fatal accidents. At a time (1910-11) when fashion was loosening up he persuaded chic women into the hobble skirt, a garment so narrow round the ankles that only tiny, mincing steps were possible, with the result that several tripped over when stepping down from a pavement and one toppled from a bridge into a river where, unable to swim from the constriction around her ankles, she drowned.  In Mary E. Davis’s book, however, this dangerous garment gets only a brief mention. Instead, what we have is not so much a biography

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

A treasure chest of myths: The Poisoned King, by Katherine Rundell, reviewed

You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration,

Francesca Wade

The lonely passions of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’. Living, to Mansfield, was a challenge to be confronted head-on, a restless and active process of ‘shedding and renewing’. Her passion for life fortified her through a horrifying succession of troubles. It fed her art; it also exhausted her.  ‘Life’, in its most capacious sense, is the subject

The Spectator

Books of the Year I – chosen by our regular reviewers

Antony Beevor In Captives and Companions (Allen Lane, £35), Justin Marozzi has brought together a scholarly yet vivid history of slavery in the Islamic world in all its varied forms. Everything is covered, from the former slaves recruited by the Prophet, who achieved immense influence, to agricultural slavery, military conscription with Mamluks and Janissaries, the Barbary Coast corsairs who roamed the Mediterranean and the English Channel, and concubinage, right up to Daesh atrocities against Yazidi women. Slavery still exists in a number of countries and the dishonesty surrounding the whole subject has been clouded by the overwhelming emphasis on the Atlantic slave trade. It is a brave project, superbly researched

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Are Vermeer’s paintings really coded religious messages?

The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work. One foreign observer who did see a painting owned by a baker (probably handed over in security for a large overdue account) was incredulous at what the owner claimed was the value of a small picture by an unknown artist. After Vermeer’s death, and the sale of the collection for very little on the death

Christopher Akers

The Wall Street Crash never ceases to fascinate

When Winston Churchill dined with the crème de la crème of American finance in New York on 28 October 1929, a facetious toast was made to ‘friends and former millionaires’. Despite a 13 per cent drop in the Dow after another day of market turmoil, the assembled banking titans felt they wouldn’t just survive the maelstrom, they would make more money from it. Churchill, whose finances were perennially chaotic, had caught stock market fever and lost today’s equivalent of almost $1.5 million. On returning to England, he declared the Wall Street crash ‘only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people’. In the end, US stocks

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

A celebration of friendship – by Andrew O’Hagan

When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was: Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort of deliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your ambition, your hopes and your thoughts in a way that family can’t always do. I mean what is family but a lovable collection of prejudices, some in your favour and some not? Although I agreed with him, I was intrigued that someone who was both a parent and a sibling would feel this way. The

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Peter James: Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed

40 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the crime writer Peter James. Peter has contributed the introduction to a new edition of the classic thriller The Eagle Has Landed, which is 50 years old this month. He tells Sam what it was that made Jack Higgins’s novel so groundbreaking, about what it takes to make you root for the bad guys, how thrillers and detective stories differ – and about his own history with Jack Higgins. Plus, he tells me about his own new novel The Hawk Is Dead — which comes, more or less, by Royal Appointment…   

Tuesday

Simon Ings

Thrilling tales of British pluck

December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no resources left to prevent the Turkish empire from expanding into India.  Edward Noel, an aristocratic Catholic political officer who is supposed to be in Persia, sends a telegram to his betters from the city of Baku, perched on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and the source of half the world’s oil. He wants

Nicolette Jones

Farewell to Lyra: The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman, reviewed

In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust novels is how much they make us feel – about the tie between characters and their daemons, the fear of Lyra’s sinister mother Mrs Coulter, the love between Will and Lyra, the protectiveness of the courageous pot boy Malcolm Polstead… The driving emotional force that carries us through The Rose Field is our

Guy Stagg

The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen

In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While

Susie Mesure

Trouble in Tbilisi: The Lack of Light, by Nino Haratischwili, reviewed

For a newly independent Georgia, the 1990s were a dark time literally and figuratively, as civil war raged, criminality flourished and the power stayed off. The Lack of Light, Nino Haratischwili’s fourth novel to be translated into English, turns that darkness into a gripping story about the power and pitfalls of female friendship that seeks to unpick the horrors of that decade. The narrative opens, briefly, in Tbilisi in 1987. The four protagonists – Keto, Dina, Nene and Ira – are on a schoolgirl mission to hang out in the Botanical Garden after hours. The escapade introduces the girls, who are all neatly – too neatly – ascribed various characteristics.

Julie Bindel

The disturbing allure of sex robots

By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have granted those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse by enabling victims to sue both the producers and the distributors of porn. The inspiration for this was Linda Lovelace, the star of

Andrew Hankinson

Few people are as dangerous as an insecure man mocked

‘I have had more direct clinical experience than almost any other forensic psychiatrist of assessing and managing lone-actor perpetrators of massacres,’ writes Paul Mullen, professor emeritus at Monash University in Australia, in his introduction to Running Amok. He’s got non-clinical experience, too. In 1990, when he lived near Aramoana in New Zealand, he was disturbed by gunfire one night. It turned out that the neighbour of one of his patients was busy killing 13 people. Afterwards, Mullen supported the survivors and his patient, who felt ‘anguish’ at not spotting the red flags to prevent the massacre. Mullen summarises what she told him about the killer: His mood was marked by

Thursday

Scott Bradfield

Funny, absorbing and as noir as noir can be: Thomas Pynchon rides again

Thomas Pynchon is so well known for being out of the public eye that he often seems to be hiding in plain sight, much like Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘purloined letter’. He is famous for avoiding the camera and the few extant photos of him – especially one from his high school yearbook – are paraded at every mention of his name or one of his books, usually accompanied by a rude remark about his ‘rabbity front teeth’. Many of his efforts to escape the limelight, such as sending the rumpled ‘Professor’ Irwin Corey to accept on his behalf the 1974 National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow gained him more renown

Christopher Bray

Revelling in illusion: the French sociologist-cum-philosopher who hit peak absurdity back in 1991

‘What is he talking about?’ Marine Baudrillard would sigh whenever she read her husband’s work. Anyone who has studied for an arts or a social-science degree over the past few decades will know what irked her. A sociologist-cum-philosopher’s prose is to thought what mud is to a windscreen. ‘There is no more hope for meaning,’ Jean Baudrillard wrote with unconscious exactitude in Simulacra and Simulation. ‘This is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, though, are immortal, invulnerable to nihilism. This is where seduction begins.’ In their admirably brief critical biography, Emmanuelle Fantin and Brian Nicol praise Baudrillard’s writing for its ‘enigmatic verve’. One might as well commend Bruckner’s 8th

Allan Mallinson

When, why and how came the fall – the success and sorry decline of the British Army

I wonder how many people appreciate what a remarkably capable army we had for the first three decades of this book’s range – and how incapable that army has become. Forward defence in Germany during the Cold War (56,000 troops); keeping the peace in Northern Ireland; bringing Rhodesia/Zimbabwe back into the fold; liberating the hostages at the Iranian embassy in London; retaking the Falkland Islands; ejecting the Iraqis from Kuwait; bringing order to the Balkans; halting the civil war in Sierra Leone – the ‘rise’ part of Ben Barry’s book is indeed inspiring. Since the Royal Artillery has given all its guns to Ukraine, it’s hard to see how even

Robert Potts

Everything and the girl: a lit-crit dissection of the Swifty world

Stephanie Burt is a Harvard professor of English, a poet and a literary critic who recently created and taught a course on ‘Taylor Swift and Her World’. This not only attracted an unusually high degree of student engagement but also international media attention, with, one suspects, greater measurable benefits for Burt and Harvard than for Swift. Now Burt has produced Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift. The thesis is that Swift is a hugely successful artist because her songs are both ‘relatable’ and ‘aspirational’ The title suggests the sort of literary and musicological analysis that has been devoted to singers such as Morrissey (most brilliantly by

Genevieve Gaunt

When two worlds collide: Well, This is Awkward, by Esther Walker reviewed

Esther Walker, an established journalist and writer of non-fiction, opens her debut novel in the business world but segues into the concerns of balancing children and career. It’s a page-turner, silly yet serious; and, as with many good comedies, the humour comes from pain. Mairéad Alexander is a childless 44-year-old social media exec in London, caught in the hamster wheel of corporate work, hair bleaching and ‘buzzkill’ bad dates, when her life is tripped up by the unexpected arrival of Sunny, her 11-year-old niece. When we meet Mairéad she has recently sold her social media business for a packet and is now a consultant for the company that bought it.