Book Reviews

This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here. In our everyday spaces.’ Switching effortlessly and with relish between history, science and anecdote, the author selects ten creatures to represent Britain. Hedgehog and fox are polled highest as ‘the nation’s top animal’. Her other choices may surprise: sheep, pigeon, newt, herring, stag beetle, flea, black dog and plesiosaur.  The largest fox ever recorded, reported by the Daily Mail in 2012, was in Moray, Aberdeenshire, weighing 17 kilos. Foxes mate for life. One

Richard Ellmann’s acclaimed life of James Joyce was published in 1959, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in 1982. The first edition, the work of an ambitious young American academic, received what Ellmann’s editor at Oxford University Press described as ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. Ellmann’s work would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’ wrote Frank Kermode in The Spectator, a prediction described by Zachary Leader as ‘if anything, too cautious’. By the time of the second edition, Ellmann had become a lionised Oxford don and the image of Joyce he had fixed was starting to chafe. Post-structuralism was

As a subscriber-only special, get exclusive access to The Spectator’s Book Club Live: an evening with Max Hastings. Join The Spectator’s literary editor, Sam Leith, and the military historian and former Telegraph editor-in-chief Max Hastings, to uncover the real story of D-Day. They will be discussing Max’s new book, Sword: D-Day – Trial by Battle, which explores – with extraordinary vividness – the actions of the Commando brigade, Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions at Sword beach in June 1944. It will also be an opportunity to celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Following the discussion, attendees will have the opportunity to put their own questions to Max – and perhaps discover the

As a young child in the mid-1960s, Cécile Desprairies listened hour after hour to her mother Lucie dreamily recalling the 1940s, dwelling on a past peopled by undefined heroes and ‘the bastards’ who murdered them. Names were rarely mentioned or hastily passed over. In the fashionable Paris apartment there were daily gatherings – her mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother twittering like birds, obsessed with fashion and cosmetics. Between trying on clothes, there was endless looking back at a lost golden age and lamenting the disasters that followed. Lucie was always in charge, her second husband Charles, Cécile’s father, casually excluded. There was gossip about acquaintances, women with Jewish names described

Any consideration of Stefan Collini’s subject has surely to address a major recent issue. The academic study of English, both at school and university, has fallen away significantly, with the numbers opting for it greatly diminishing. Anecdotal evidence from even the most serious institutions suggests that many students are now finding previously accessible texts impossible to read or understand – because of their length (Charles Dickens), their complexity of meaning (Alexander Pope) or remote sensibility or politics (Joseph Conrad). Collini has been given a generous amount of space to write his history. Despite this, he has chosen to end it more than 50 years ago. His subtitle is quite misleading.