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Book reviews
Book review: All That Is by James Salter
IF AN aged, once-eminent author, close to the end, ekes out one almost-certainly-last novel, and it’s of an indifferent standard, or worse, should it be published out of respect for his or her more glorious past?
Book review: Inferno by Dan Brown
ONE of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spiky-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.
Book review: The Devonshires by Roy Hattersley
A PUNCH cartoon, two dukes at a party, one whispering into the other’s ear: “Don’t you think it must be just terrible being an earl?”
Book review: Grace And Mary by Melvyn Bragg
OVER the years, Melvyn Bragg’s writing has attracted a degree of (jealous?) teasing, but the dissenting voices compete with a louder chorus of praise in which he is favourably compared with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.
Book review: Dial H: Volume 1, Into You by China Miéville
To my mind, China Miéville is one of the most interesting literary writers currently working in Britain, an accolade undiminished, though perhaps sometimes obscured, by his wholehearted commitment to genre.
Book review: Between Friends by Amos Oz
In 1954, aged 14, Amos Klausner changed his name to Amos Oz, leaving behind him his home and father, exchanging city life for the relative privations of the desert, cutting his teeth (and his new identity) on life in an Israeli kibbutz.
Book review: The Lion Rampant by Robert Low
With The Lion Rampant and its vivid, imaginative and blood-curdling account of Bannockburn, Robert Low, one assumes, has concluded in splendid bravura style, his sequence of novels on the Wars of Independence.
Book review: Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley
Quickly described, Clever Girl, the new novel from Tessa Hadley, is the story of a woman’s life, from childhood to middle age. Like that John Lewis advert of a few years ago, it moves briskly through 50 years, touching down on experiences that will be very familiar to white, first-world women born during the second half of the 20th century.
Book reviews: The Fragile Empire| Sweet tooth| The Faithful Executioner
A roundup of the latest book releases
Book review: Perilous Question by Antonia Fraser
Eighteen thirty-two used to be a well-known date in British history. It was the year of the Great Reform Bill, when an outdated political system gave way to a wider franchise allowing a number of middle-class men to vote for the first time. Antonia Fraser’s latest book is a spirited attempt to bring the controversy and passion of the era to a new audience.
Book review: The Society Of Timid Souls: Or How To Be Brave, Polly Morland
IN THIS fascinating rumination on the nature of courage and cowardice, there’s a chapter titled “Crime And Punishment” in which, among other things, Polly Morland has frank conversations with two armed robbers, now reformed.
Book review: Dear Lumpy, Roger Mortimer and Louise Mortimer
A DEFTLY witty collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer to his wastrel son Charlie, Dear Lupin was one of the surprise hits of last year.
Book review: The Round House, Louise Erdrich
LOUISE Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many of her novels and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin.
Book review: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Vol 1, Charles Moore
Sir Malcolm Rifkind hails a biography of Thatcher that finally offers an authoritative voice on the woman behind the legacy
1 commentBook reviews: Churchill’s First War| The Serpent’s Promise | Scots Who Enlightened the World
A roundup of the latest book releases
Book review: The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas
There’s an interesting collision in Ruth Thomas’s second novel between comedy and reality. In her award-winning short stories, too, she demonstrates this same quiet humour that looks at the world from an angle that is ever so slightly askew yet somehow also comforting.
Book review: If Hitler Comes By Gordon Barclay
As German troops swept through Europe in 1940, it was reasonable to expect that the United Kingdom would be their next target. The main base of the British Home Fleet in Scapa Flow was, after all, only two hours’ flying time from Stavanger and the Nazi army was in Norway. Intelligence suggested that an invasion had already been planned.
Book review: Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy
There used to be a common complaint that the subject of the typical middle-class English novel was adultery in Hampstead or, perhaps, Islington. The charge was exaggerated of course; there was more variety in the English novel, even 40 years ago.
Book review: Superman and Philosophy: What Would The Man Of Steel Do?
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical? This series of books, edited by William Irwin, laudably use popular culture to explain philosophical concepts.
Book review: Margaret Thatcher The Authorised Biography Volume One: Not for Turning
WHEN Margaret Thatcher died, the nation broke satisfyingly into factions. Both clashing armies agreed that the lady with the handbag had been personally responsible, if not for everything, then for a prodigious number of things in Britain between 1979 and 1990.
Book review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
They were, arguably, the first celebrity couple of the Jazz Era. She was a precocious, spoiled Southern belle and bad girl; he was a Midwesterner and Princeton dropout who had turned his experience into the novel This Side of Paradise.
Book review: The Bonobo And The Atheist, Frans de Waal
IN THE opening scene of Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planete Des Singes, two pampered space travellers, coasting the interstellar tides in a space-skiff, discover an interplanetary message in a bottle.
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Book review: Cities Are Good For You, Leo Hollis
LEO Hollis opens his latest book by asking readers to close their eyes and imagine a place where they feel most happy. The chances are, he points out, this won’t be an urban scene but beaches, meadows, mountains, villages.
Book review: The Humans, Matt Haig
IN THE acknowledgments at the end of his latest novel, Matt Haig reveals that he first had the idea for this story in 2000 while he was in the middle of a breakdown.
Book review: A Place In The Country, WG Sebald
When WG Sebald pays his dues to the ghosts of his literary past he reveals why his own legacy will endure, writes Stuart Kelly
Book reviews: Leviathan | Democracy in Retreat | Renaissance Emir
SUCH was the spectacle at the races on the Epsom Downs, wrote Daniel Defoe in the 1720s, that “I think no sight, except that of a victorious army, under the command of a Protestant king of Great Britain, could possibly exceed it.”
Book review: 1913, The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson
NINETEEN-thirteen was the last full calendar year of what the late, great historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the long nineteenth century”.
Book reviews: The Look of Love | Mick Jagger | Midnight in Peking
SOHO, 1960. A man is auditioning a young woman in his strip club, the Raymond Revuebar.
Book review: Love Sex Travel Musik by Rodge Glass
“Stories for the EasyJet generation” blazons the message on the front cover.
Book review: The Garden of Eros by John Calder
IN THE past, there was a strange alliance between pornographers and radicals.
Book review: CS Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath
LAST night I read a nine-year-old boy a chapter of The Magician’s Nephew, CS Lewis’s prequel to the Narnia books.
Book review: The Enchanted Wanderer & Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov
THE first sentence of the inside cover sleeves boldly declares: “Nikolai Leskov is the greatest Russian writer most of us have never heard of.
1 commentBook review: Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris
I’VE always found honesty, like Kate Bush, to be over-rated, but David Sedaris clothes his candour with such delicious style, wit and self-deprecation that every little story is a treat that leaves you craving more.
Book review: Strictly Bipolar by Darian Leader
‘I REMEMBER when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind.” Gnarls Barkley’s hit Crazy was the soundtrack to early 2006, a sinuous, insistent, ironic paean to the pains and pleasures of mental illness. Its hook line, “it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough.
Book review: Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air by Richard Holmes
THERE must be something in the air, something lonely as a cloud.
Book review: Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver spoils her deeply personal tale of sibling struggle with fake accents and make-believe, writes Hannah McGill
Book review: Grace and Mary by Melvyn Bragg
IT’S the prospect before so many of us now: a twilight existence, memory wandering and failing, dementia gripping harder, and eventually extinction.
Book reviews: Northern Ireland | Napalm |
“FOR God’s sake bring me a large Scotch – what a bloody awful country,” said Reggie Maudling: English exasperation has been one of the great constants of the Irish conflict.
Book reviews: Lost At Sea | Every Contact Leaves A Trace | The New Few
JON Ronson is extremely funny, and in this collection of his stories you’ll see that he’s funny precisely because he is such a sharp reporter.
Book review: Burnt Island by Alice Thompson
WHAT makes a book happen? Where does literary inspiration come from? These are some of the underlying questions asked by Alice Thompson’s deliciously creepy tale that is almost an homage to surreal horror stories such as Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and John Fowles’s The Magus.
Book review: Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air by Richard Holmes
AS Richard Holmes shows in this typically erudite and entertaining book (would we expect anything else from the best biographer of Coleridge and the author of The Age of Wonder?) it is not just the preponderance of cheap air flights that has cast a romantic glamour over the idea of hot-air ballooning.
Book review: GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
WE SHOULD have seen this coming. When Mary Roach wrote Packing for Mars, her 2010 book about the bodily experiences of astronauts in space, she seemed especially interested in the feeding, digestive and excremental issues with which Nasa had to deal.
Book review: Kurt Vonnegut: Letters edited by Dan Wakefield
THE first Kurt Vonnegut novel I ever read was Cat’s Cradle, and I was knocked sideways by its alloy of science fiction, philosophical wisecracking and gentle subversion.
Book review: Annie’s Loo by Raymond Young
“DESERTS wi windaes” – we’ve all read Billy Connolly’s withering description of the massive, amenity-free council schemes that still characterise urban Scotland.
Book review: The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory by Deborah Alun-Jones
THE Anglican rectory is often assumed to be a bastion of rectitude, but as this book reveals, there’s another side to them.
Book review: Capturing The Light: The Birth of Photography by Roger Watson & Helen Rappaport
MOST of us are too busy using gadgets and smart inventions to have time to think about who discovered them or how the originator first got the idea.
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Tuesday 21 May 2013
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