Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Yesterday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ian Thomson, Andrew Watts, Sam Leith, Helen Barrett and Catriona Olding

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Ian Thomson reflects on his childhood home following the death of his sister (1:20); Andrew Watts argues that the public see MPs as accountable for everything though they’re responsible for little (7:40); Sam Leith reveals the surprising problem of poetical copyright (13:47); Helen Barrett reviews Will Noble’s book Croydonopolis and explores the reputation of a place with unfulfilled potential (19:48); and, Catriona Olding ponders moving on from loss to love (26:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Simon Parkin

Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad

Even before the 872-day long siege ended, both survivors and onlookers had already begun to refer to Leningrad – formerly and currently known as St Petersburg – as a city of heroes. Tales of bravery and self-sacrifice were enshrined in memorials, histories and memoirs, which between 1945 and 1991 were published in the Soviet Union at an average rate of one per day. But heroism is, of course, only a partial description of life within the starving city where theft, murder, betrayal and a million smaller acts of self-interest were just as prevalent as acts of valour. The idea that Leningrad was a city of heroes was in part a

Alan Judd

The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce

‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (1899-1991) was a legend in his own lifetime within MI6. Born in Odessa to an Austrian countess and a British trader representing Vickers, his cosmopolitan upbringing endowed him with English, Russian, German, Turkish, French and Polish. His real first name was Wilfred, Biffy being acquired through youthful handiness with his fists. Biffy played an important role in smuggling the Polish copy of the Enigma cipher machine to London Education and family connections made him intimate with prominent Levantine trading families such as the Whittalls, Keuns and La Fontaines. Members of each served with him in MI6 and two into modern times. Early in the first world war he

Emily Rhodes

A necklace for the Empress Josephine: The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier, reviewed

The latest book from Tracy Chevalier, author of 11 novels, including the bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, tells the captivating story of Orsola Rosso, whom we first encounter in 1486 as a young girl on Murano, the glassmakers’ island in the Venetian lagoon. Within a few pages, her father, the maestro at the family’s workshop, is dramatically killed by a shard of glass flying ‘like a hot dart straight into his neck’. Orsola’s lazy, impetuous brother Marco, less skilful than their father, must take over, but orders soon begin to dwindle. How will Orsola help her family recover and prosper? Glassmaking is traditionally a male concern, but the girl

Mathew Lyons

We’ll never know what treasures the Tudor Reformation robbed us of

In 1693, quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales. The scales themselves held a girl’s face and a globe of the Earth. The sculpture was donated to the Ashmolean, but experts there were baffled by it. Could it represent the goddess Astrea, one of them wondered. In fact, it represented the Archangel Michael, one of the most significant figures in the medieval church. Among other things, it will be

Mia Levitin

More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell. It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But Will Self is no stranger to outrageousness Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve

Helen Barrett

Never pour scorn on Croydon

‘So f-ing Croydon,’ was the worst insult David Bowie could think of to describe a person or thing that revolted him. ‘Less of a place, more of a punchline,’ was a recent swipe by Sue Perkins, the Croydon-born comedian who grew up at the tail end of the town’s golden era of rampant employment, ambitious cultural venues and well-endowed private schools. London’s outermost, southernmost, most populous borough is an easy target for condescension: too brash, yet too poor; too try-hard, yet too lethargic; too ambitious, yet not ambitious enough. As the Croydonian author John Grindrod has written, locals are accustomed to Croydon’s ‘very existence – our existence – provoking outrage’.

Bryan Appleyard

A world history of morality is maddeningly optimistic

The memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi will be with me for some time. Though wounded, he survived the Hiroshima atom bomb and returned to his home town, Nagasaki. Three days later, he survived another nuclear attack. He died in 2010, aged 93. This fat, complex, good-natured and intriguing book is full of such memorable material. Hanno Sauer is a German philosopher with an all-encompassing mind and a capacity to entertain. His arguments are sometimes clogged and improbable and I don’t find his primary thesis – basically that things can only get better – credible, but then I feel the same about most philosophers. The thesis is based on Sauer’s belief that

David Abulafia

Why are the sailors who first braved the Atlantic so often ignored?

It is easy to assume that there is not much to be said about the history of the Atlantic before 12 October 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas. In 2005, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn published a little book entitled Atlantic History: Concept and Contours which said absolutely nothing about what happened before Columbus, whom he barely mentioned. Atlantic history meant for Bailyn, and the growing mass of Atlantic historians, the story of modern contacts between the four continents that face the Atlantic, especially the nefarious slave trade linking Africa to the Americas. Earlier centuries were seen as the fishing-ground of fantasists, who looked for ancient Egyptians or Irish

Roger Lewis

What prompted Vivien Leigh’s dark journey into madness?

‘Vivien was barking mad from the word go,’ Laurence Olivier reflected in later life, and Lyndsy Spence’s biography would fully concur with the summing-up. At best, the actress was ‘suspended in a dream world’, unable to separate herself from the classic characters she played – Scarlett O’Hara, with her dark hair and flashing eyes, or Blanche DuBois (‘she is a tragic figure and I understand her’). At her worst, Leigh was, in her own words, ‘a thing, an amoeba, at the bottom of the sea’. Where Madness Lies is a sympathetic description of Leigh’s ‘perturbing nature’; an analysis of her numerous breakdowns, when she was in the grip of manic-depressive

Boyd Tonkin

Nordic dream or nightmare?: The Mark, by Frida Isberg, reviewed

Imagine a society, a high-minded psychologist tells his curmudgeonly father, ‘in which people are like cars. They have to go in for inspection once a year’ in order to assess their emotional fitness for the shared highway of life. As for the ‘psychopathic percentage’ whose ‘moral disorders’ lead them to fail this spiritual MoT, never fear: state-funded therapy will get them on the road again. And should they refuse? Surely, as we learn later in The Mark, everyone longs to stand ‘on the right side of history’. The Nordic dream of close-knit, high-trust, mutually supportive welfare societies has always had its internal critics: mavericks, naysayers and backsliders, who prize autonomy

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Amy Jeffs: Saints

46 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, artist and historian Amy Jeffs. Her new book Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic aims to recover and bring back to life the wild and fascinating world of medieval saints. She tells me what we lost with the Reformation (all the good swearing, among much else), what was the difference between magic and a miracle, and how what washes up on the Thames foreshore can give us the entry point to a whole vanished imaginarium. 

Artemis Cooper

The great French painter who had no time for France

In 1855, Paul Gauguin’s widowed mother Aline returned to her husband’s family in Orleans after seven years in Peru. She brought back her daughter Marie, eight-year-old son Paul and her collection of pre-Columbian artefacts. They had no commercial value but those strange objects, sprouting the heads of birds and animals, had a power that the westernised world had lost touch with. They sank deep into the imagination of her wild, headstrong boy, who often described himself as ‘a savage from Peru’. After the sensory overload of South America, France and school were grey, cold and miserable. With education over, Gauguin insisted on going to sea and served in the navy

Saturday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Joan Collins, Owen Matthews, Sara Wheeler, Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Tanya Gold

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Joan Collins reads an extract from her diary (1:15); Owen Matthews argues that Russia and China’s relationship is just a marriage of convenience (3:19); reviewing The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering by Daniel Light, Sara Wheeler examines the epic history of the sport (13:52); Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks at the life, cinema, and many drinks, of Marguerite Duras (21:35); and Tanya Gold provides her notes on tasting menus (26:07).  Presented and produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939, from the archives

25 min listen

The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September. Until then, and ahead of the 85th anniversary of the start of World War Two, here’s an episode from the archives with the author Ian Sansom.  Recorded ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019, Sam Leith talks to Ian about September 1, 1939, the W.H. Auden poem that marked the beginning of the war. Ian’s book is a ‘biography’ of the poem; they discuss how it showcases all that is best and worst in Auden’s work, how Auden first rewrote and then disowned it, and how Auden’s posthumous reputation has had some unlikely boosters in Richard Curtis and

Tuesday

Sara Wheeler

The quest for the world’s highest peaks

What makes men and women climb high? Most commonly, according to Daniel Light, ‘the prosecution of science or the advancement of empire’. It might also be general flag-waving or just personal fulfilment, as in the case of ‘private traveller’ Godfrey Vigne, who opened his English eyes to the wonder of the Karakoram in the baleful 1930s. London-based Light – ‘a keen climber, not a serious mountaineer’ – has produced a colourful survey of mostly 19th-century mountaineering across the globe, starting with the geographer and natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt and his five-year expedition to South America. The baron came back convinced he had got within 1,000ft of the highest point

David Honigmann

Some uncomfortable truths about World Music

Joe Boyd’s masterly history of what some of us still defiantly call World Music – more on which later – takes its title from Paul Simon’s ‘Under African Skies’, but is really less about the roots of rhythm than its routes. A typical chapter will start with a song from a particular geography, then wind the clock back to the country’s history, then forward again to show how that history has contributed to the development of its music, and finally move outwards, following the trade winds as they carry the sounds around the world. The Argentine singer Carlos Gardel urges the young Frank Sinatra to turn from crime to music Thus

Marcus Berkmann

Will there ever be another cricket captain like Richie Benaud?

Some books have good titles. Many books, sadly, have terrible titles. But a few rare books have the perfect title – the one that tells you briefly what the book is about, and also whether you want to own it. Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes is one such. If that title grabs you, you should go out and buy it now, because the book is brilliant. If it doesn’t, you have probably stopped reading this review already and turned over to Melissa Kite. Either you love Blofeld’s ‘My Dear Old Thing’ eccentricities or you want him slowly roasted over an open fire Harry Ricketts is a poet and critic who

Andy Miller

The greatest British pop singer who never made a hit single

This is a magnificent book, regardless of whether the reader knows who it is about. I state this bluntly at the outset because I am keenly aware that many more people are ignorant of Lawrence’s career and achievements in the field of popular music than will be familiar with them; and that I will need to use up a significant number of words attempting to explain a figure who has repeatedly proven inexplicable to the public at large. So here goes… Has the indefatigably eccentric Lawrence led a charmed life or a cursed one? Lawrence Hayward may be the greatest British pop star never to have enjoyed a hit single.

Chris Mullin

Six politicians who shaped modern Britain

‘All political careers end in failure,’ said Enoch Powell. Maybe. But just occasionally our imperfect political system throws up someone whose impact on our way of life, for good or ill, outlives them. In a series of elegant essays, Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, examines the careers of six politicians – three from left of centre, three from the right – who, in his view, changed the political weather of modern Britain. Only one, Nigel Farage, is still alive.  First up is Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing firebrand who, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the mighty, vested-interested British Medical Association, presided over the creation of