Taking a Walk: The valley of the River Sence, Leicestershire

I see Sence in Leicestershire

An alluring name on the map is as good a reason for a walk as any. As my eyes prospected over the charted wilds of Leicestershire, they alighted on the River Sence. Here, surely, was a gift for The Oldie’s headline-writers.

I considered the valley’s Forest Park, wooded and full of paths to the east of the stream and, to the west, the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood. This was the largest wood in the National Forest, a new treescape which has taken shape across the Midlands over the last 27 years. And nestled in between was the village of Heather – what a pretty name!

My primary-school headmaster, Mr V K Bale, grew up in Leicestershire and, exiled to bleak Norfolk, waxed lyrical in morning assembly about the overlooked rolling hills and meadows of his home county. It has taken me 40 years to heed his advice and take a walk there.

His county may have been bucolic during his 1920s childhood but, by the time of my boyhood, this bit of the Sence was a vast, open-cast mine. I tried to picture the barren scene that was the former life of Sence Valley Forest Park, but my vision was overwhelmed by the present – an immutable-looking deep green woodland of tall birch and Scots pine. And yet there was a sense that something had happened here and the land was just settling down again.

The speed of recovery in nature matches our own rooting up of it. I took a wiggly path down the side of the former open-cast mine, where green woodpeckers cackled and dragonflies whizzed. The path was fringed by an attractively shaggy mix of dogwood, hazel, sallow and hawthorn, skilfully arranged to conceal a less comely Forestry England conifer plantation beyond.

Along a woodland track were the best blackberries I’d ever seen. It was a stuffy, muggy day, and Horseshoe Lake, where the eight millionth tonne of coal was dug up from the mine, was brimming with bulrushes and ducklings and tantalising blue-green water. The temptation was intensified by the ‘No swimming’ notices and additional signs warning that the lake was under investigation by the Environment Agency for imperilling the lives of innocent dogs.

This was torture. I was desperate for a swim. Oh, to feel some cooling water on my brow. You know those comic characters who walk around with a little black rain-cloud hovering over their

patrick barkham

heads? Who hum Travis’s Why Does It Always Rain on Me? For the previous three months, I’d had a personal sun shining above my head. I’d travelled the length and breadth of Britain – and wherever I wasn’t received cool precipitation. Even parched Norfolk, my home, received its summer entitlement of 2 mm of rain on a day I wasn’t there.

I headed north, crossing the little Sence, twinkling attractively in its bed of soft green weed, and crossed open fields before reaching the Diamond Jubilee Wood. Here was an even newer wood, dominated by fast-growing silver birches, as elegantly lanky as teenagers.

My hazy maths put the wood at 20 years old before I realised it was barely ten. This was staggering! This place was exploding with life, artfully messy (we’ve got better at naturalistic planting) and already gaining some self-willed chaos, as self-sown oaks, sallow and birch roared up to compete with the rowan and hawthorn.

Suddenly, something weird happened. The summer of no rain began to deliver a light mizzle from the darkening sky. By the time I reached Heather Church – where the Heather Hut community larder offered free food to the cashstrapped (I knew it was a nice village) – it was raining properly.

By the time I returned to the Sence Forest Park, it was pelting down. The trees dripped and I danced in the road with several baby toads.

Ecstatic, I sat in the car, writing this, as the rain tapped out the most glorious melodies on the roof. I gave thanks for the rejuvenating, restorative forces of our planet – and a wet walk in Leicestershire.

Sence Valley Forest Park (parking £1.50) LE67 6NW. Head north, take footpath north-west to Heather Lane. First right up Bowers Brook to the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood, follow easterly edge and footpath along Normanton Lane into Heather and back up into the Forest Park (3 miles)

el sereno

Across

1 Taking driver, for example, prepare to shoot birdie! (8) 5 Girl in fast car will be a greedy type (6) 9 European singer’s fantastic time with Italian (5,3) 10 Love to annoy, welcoming old singer from America (6) 12 Duck down following this (5) 13 One might call for a sharp note (9) 14 Extremely pleased to be dressed for the part (4,2) 16 High flyer from faction on the extreme left (7) 19 Bird found by ring road with loads of money (7) 21 Shed tears over heart of city flyer (6) 23 Sigh, and feel a different sort of creature (4,5) 25 Long for Conservative party (5) 26 Popular cult food for 9, maybe (6) 27 Mephistopheles, full of wrath returned dressed in uniform (8) 28 Person who believes he must replace women in dance (6) 29 Singer with passion has audience (8)

Down

1 Noted German wit never forgetting victory in Europe (6) 2 Finished rough plan getting help from bank (9) 3 Two queens supply what is needed (5) 4 Church’s one sound of satisfaction lifted noise from 9 perhaps (7) 6 Intercity flights brigadier organised (3,6) 7 Girl raising Independent complaint (5) 8 Study those people keeping nothing on record (8) 11 Vehicle carrying Zulu leader once (4) 15 Provides proof that vices need to be regulated (9) 17 I married one - a vet - it turns out to be not the real thing (9) 18 Disagreement sees prisoner, female, soundly beaten (8) 20 Greeting Goth, disheartened and out of it (4) 21 Sort of mottled food container? (3,4) 22 Put in a bid being sensitive (6) 24 The girl to go to court about silicon implant (5) 25 Half of each beer served up in lobster claw (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 19th October 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15. NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 418

Across

1 Two score (5) 4 Masticated (6) 9 Entourage (7) 10 Vicious, callous (5) 11 Small whirlpool (4) 12 Feared greatly (7) 13 Beam; fish (3) 14 Skin condition (4) 16 Fool, hoodwink (4) 18 Large snake (3) 20 Instalment; occasion (7) 21 Mark of injury (4) 24 Contentious topic (5) 25 Scandal (7) 26 Straight, reliable (6) 27 Cheerful (5)

Down

1 Rummage; polecat (6) 2 Valued, assessed (5) 3 Jerk (4) 5 S.American ranch house (8) 6 Like a coiled spring (5,2) 7 Deceive (6) 8 Prepared, willing (5) 13 Gets better (8) 15 Bright red (7) 17 Enjoy; chutney (6) 18 Beneath (5) 19 Blood vessel (6) 22 Wheel immobiliser (5) 23 Engrave (4) Genius 416 solution

Winner: Gib Fitzgibbon, West Kilbride, North Ayrshire Runners-up: Nic Orchard, Deal, Kent; Richard Hillier, Lewannick, Launceston, Cornwall

Moron 416 solution: Across: 1 Garda, 4 Nurse (Gardeners), 8 Low, 9 Innumerable, 10 Embargo, 12 Least, 13 Saddle, 14 Chatty, 17 Eager, 19 Annoyed, 21 Advertising, 23 Air, 24 Dated, 25 Guest. Down: 1 Guile, 2 Ran, 3 Admiral, 4 Narrow, 5 Rebel, 6 Elegantly, 7 Swiftly, 11 Bodyguard, 13 Special, 15 Hunting, 16 Sacred, 18 Rivet, 20 Digit, 22 Ice.

There is no doubt – you should declare differently according to the quality of the defence. Plan the play in 6♥ on ♣Q lead versus (a) good quality opposition, and (b) ‘weakies’.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable

(1) Showing a game-forcing heart raise – the excellent Jacoby convention. (2) Above minimum opener with (normally) six hearts (holding a minimum, South jumps to 4♥). I do think South is too strong for 4♥ – give partner, say, ♠AQxx, ♥Kxxx, ♦Ax, ♣Kxx, and there are 13 top tricks (assuming hearts are not 3-0 the wrong way). (3) Practical leap.

Versus quality defence, your best bet is to take two finesses – a 75-per-cent chance. Win the club, draw trumps finishing in dummy and play a spade to the jack. Here, the spade finesse succeeds and you are taking the diamond finesse for the overtrick. Making six.

Versus ‘social players’, a better line is available. Win the club, draw trumps and eliminate the black suits (king of spades, jack of spades to the ace, ruff a spade – then similar in clubs). Now lead a diamond towards dummy. West is likely to play second hand low (as players are wont to do in ‘second hand plays low autopilot mode’). You insert dummy’s eight and are guaranteed success. Here, East wins the nine but must lead either a second diamond round to dummy’s ace-queen, or a black card giving you ruff-and-discard, enabling you to ruff in one hand and shed a diamond from the other.

This second line is technically inferior, as the expert West hops up with the jack of diamonds in second chair, ruining your plans – East beats the queen with the king and returns the ten. Gauging the quality of your opposition – more specifically how often West will rise to the occasion on the first diamond – is a real skill.

Note: change dummy’s diamonds to A Q 9 (swapping the nine and the eight with East) and now the elimination line is 100 per cent. If West hops up with the jack this time, you can cover with dummy’s queen. East may win the king, but a second diamond will not help this time, as dummy’s ace-nine will be promoted. ANDREW ROBSON

West ♠ 10 8 5 2 ♥ 7 ♦ J 7 5 ♣ Q J 10 9 2 North ♠ A 6 3 ♥ K Q 4 3 ♦ A Q 8 ♣ K 6 3

South ♠ K J ♥ A J 9 8 6 2 ♦ 6 4 2 ♣ A 4 East ♠ Q 9 7 4 ♥ 10 5 ♦ K 10 9 3 ♣ 8 7 5

The bidding South West North East 1♥ Pass 2NT(1) Pass 3♥ (2) Pass 6♥ (3) end

TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 284 you were invited to write a poem with the title Difficult Delivery. Speeches, babies and post each had their advocates, while David Shields focused on a cricket ball. Father Christmas in Peter Hollindale’s entry complained, ‘My clients expect just-intime delivery,/But global outreach makes the day a misery.’ Sylvia Sellers’s narrator escapes from a cave and then ‘a noise he’s never heard before startles him./His first cry.’ Hilary Caine’s birthday parcel from abroad was held captive by customs officials. From Con Connell came memories of how one of the students ‘working on the post’ gained the nickname Dog Lewis. Commiserations to them, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom win £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to I White.

A proverbial twinkle in your daddy’s eyes, No doubt (although quite conceivably not), A spurt of lust and there you were, my pet –Begot!

And now – at last! – here you palpably are, Sweet, purple, pulsing little people-spawn, Wrinkled as an old plum, plucked from my womb –Newborn!

Sorry, for the difficult delivery But so glad you’ve now caught your baby breath, Ready for the next stage of life’s journey –To death!

Shhhh! I’m only telling you how it is –No reason for getting on your high horse; You’ll do the same to some little sucker, In due course. I White

Five years after posting it arrived: Postcard from America to say, ‘Having lovely time here.’ How I strived To find a post box. I recall that day, Hot as an oven, as I tried to send My message, as the sun lashed in my face, Blinding me, when someone, as a friend, Said, ‘Use the hotel desk. It’s not a race –It will get there soon.’ And so I did – unknown To me the devious path that it would take. Markings on it show that it had flown Down to Australia’s Perth, from there to make A U-turn back to Europe. Time went on, And now it’s here – but sadly you have gone. Katie Mallett The family have asked me so I must Attempt this daunting task and do my best. Perceived as friend, I’m humbled by their trust. I only hope my words lay him to rest.

A film star’s face, a sportsman’s build, and charm; Charisma oozed from every single pore. My tact hides hidden cruelty, thoughtless harm And wounded friends enduring scars they bore.

I, too, have been controlled and made to feel Completely worthless. God-like, he reigned to guide Inferior beings, like dogs, to stay at heel. How difficult to satisfy the truth and family pride.

Delivered of my burden, I relax. The few who mourn him slowly turn their backs. Sue Smalley

Good evening, mate – is this the right address? Your parcel’s here – it’s really quite a mess! Inside the box, something has been scratching –As if a clutch of demon eggs were hatching; Then silence, then a tinkling of soft bells –And then a load of gently wafting smells, Like lilies, roses, honey, frankincense –When I’m trying to drive – it made no sense! And all at once (I’ll tell you, it threw me!) Sweet voices calling, sirens in the sea: ‘Colin, Colin!’ (That’s my first name, you know?) ‘Pull over, Colin – let my spirits go! Open the parcel!’ Fevered visions whirled –Of sherbet fountains, silken dancing girls –‘More than my job’s worth!’ (Now I’m riled, a bit.) Anyway, mate – you’ll need to sign for it. John Clark

COMPETITION No 286 Like the swifts, summer pudding came and went. Now it’s the turn of the Christmas cannonball. You are invited to write a poem called Pudding, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 286’, by Thursday 20th October.

Overseas Travel

Motoring Bible Fellowship

Wanted Gifts

OLD POSTCARDS WANTED by private collector. Contact Grenville Collins. Tel: 020 7834 1852. Email: grenville@collins.safeserve.com

My travelphobic husband

QMy husband suffers from quite severe anxiety, which makes it impossible for him to travel beyond a radius of about 60 minutes’ drive from home, or to sleep away from home. He is content, having travelled widely in his working life. I would love to go away and spend time by the sea, but I am not good with my own company – and everyone I know has either a partner or a travel companion. I belong to a book group and also do voluntary work, so I do meet people. I would love to meet someone in a similar situation. Do you have any suggestions, please? Is there something like a dating site where people like me can get to know someone with a view to going on holiday with them? Perhaps have day trips out together before committing to sharing a room?

Name and address supplied

AHave you tried your local WhatsApp group? There might be some nice locals around who feel like you – and that would mean you had something else in common. There are, too, lots of websites for people in your position. So you should be able easily to find someone online. Or why not go on a cruise? Or a package holiday? You’d meet lots of people … and there’d almost certainly be the odd single you could team up with. Even if this would be your idea of hell (as it is mine), these are two good hunting grounds for likeminded singles, and for your next holiday you could go à deux. However, I suspect that once you started talking about going off on your own, your husband might get a bit more interested. As long as you did all the arranging, might his phobia lessen, do you think?

virginia ironside

Sex with someone I love

QSurely the correspondent seeking a gigolo (August issue) would be better advised to buy a vibrator? Much easier to find than a ‘very nice, kind, single man’ and very effective. She should learn the art of self-pleasuring before it’s too late!

C R, by email

AIt’s certainly worth a try, but many people find that a huge part of the pleasure of sex is not just the act itself, but the foreplay and sheer warmth and friendliness of feeling skin on skin and having a real human partner’s arms around them. But it’s certainly worth a go. And vibrators come in all shapes and sizes – apparently these days you can buy some that actually ejaculate!

Should I go under the knife?

QI’m 80 and I have been told by my optician that I should have cataract surgery. I have argued that I can read, I don’t drive and it’s pointless, but she is pretty insistent. She says it’s completely safe and she even recommended a clinic where I could get them done. What do you think?

Brenda, Bexhill

AI’m not a doctor and I have always felt that the maxim ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is sometimes a good one to apply to medical matters. What does she mean – that the operation is completely safe? It’s not. True, only about five per cent of subjects have any problems after cataract surgery, but that’s still one in 20. The eyes are very sensitive, and why risk losing vision or, even worse, going blind? I have to say I speak from experience as one of those five per cent. I now wish I’d never had my cataract removed – I certainly didn’t need the operation. I’m afraid cataract surgery is becoming big business these days. And if you do decide to go ahead, don’t necessarily go to the clinic your optician recommends. She may well get a cut of the fee. And try another optometrist who may give you different advice.

Free at last, worse luck

QI feel so angry. I was complaining to my granddaughter about being old – with all my aches and pains – and encouraging her to do what she wanted when she was young, and she said that she envied me because now I was free to do what I wanted and no longer had to cook, look after children or work at a gruelling job. What she couldn’t understand was that I liked looking after my children and grandchildren and working! Now all that’s over, I feel bereft.

G L D, Edinburgh

AI know just what you mean. But remember she was only trying to be helpful and kind and thinking she was helping you to look on the bright side. She has yet to learn that one person’s ‘bright side’ may not be so bright for another person. It’s virtually impossible to imagine being old if you’ve never experienced it. Try, if you can, to be pleased that your granddaughter, even if misguided, has her heart in the right place – and it may be partly your loving influence in her life that has helped her to be the positive and caring person she is.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk

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Review of Books

Autumn round-up of the reviews

Paul Bailey admires the Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro Has William Cook outgrown Hermann Hesse’s work? Biography & Memoir History Nature Current Affairs Fiction Music

Review of Books

Issue 61 Autumn 2022

Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected by Matthew Dennison

The Celts: A Sceptical History by Simon Jenkins

British Traitors: Betrayal and Treachery in the Twentieth Century by Gordon Kerr

Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray by Paul Thompson and John Watterson

Henrietta Maria: Conspirator Warrior and Phoenix Queen by Leanda de Lisle

Survey of London: Whitechapel, Volumes 54 and 55 by Peter Guillery

Carry on Regardless by Caroline Frost

The Shortest History of Greece by James Heneage

Beryl: In Search of Britain’s Greatest Athlete by Jeremy Wilson

Elizabeth Taylor’s Kiss and Other Brushes with Hollywood by David Wood and Charles Elton

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jasper Gibbons For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk I was rather jealous of the winner of the Reading Agency’s World Book Night’s competition – apart from a bundle of books they also won a year’s supply of Magnum ice cream. That would have been very welcome during the recent heat waves. World Book Night, held on Shakespeare’s birthday, was started a decade ago to promote the enjoyment of books – the adult equivalent of World Book Day, which encourages children to read. The Reading Agency’s ‘vision is for a world where everyone is reading their way to a better life’. The charity works with public libraries, care homes, colleges and prisons (one cringes at the memory of the – fortunately short-lived – ban on books in prisons during the coalition government. What were they thinking?).

A Reading Agency’s survey earlier this year found that more than a quarter of adults read more during lockdown and that they kept up this practice once it was over. (What the charity also discovered, however, was that more than 11 per cent of adults never read at all. Depressing.)

And there’s more good news for publishers and book shops. I don’t know how many – if any – Oldie readers use TikTok (the video-sharing app loved by teenagers and young adults) but the section of the app devoted to novels since 2020, BookTok, has spurred huge rises in physical sales. A recent article in the Guardian quoted Simon & Schuster senior editor Molly Crawford: ‘BookTok’s influence on the book industry is one of the most hopeful things I’ve seen,’ she said. ‘TikTok should be seen as the modern distilling of the purest form of bookselling.’

But if you don’t want to turn to BookTok for advice on what books to read, I suggest you look inside this supplement – there are sections on history, biography, nature, fiction... I am sure you will find something of interest. Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

10 CURRENT AFFAIRS 12 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

17 SHORT STORIES

Paul Bailey on Alice Monro

18 NATURE 21 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

William Cook on Hermann Hesse

22 MISCELLANEOUS 26 FICTION 30 MUSIC

Establishment figures dance round a maypole, referencing the conspirators’ execution

CONSPIRACY ON CATO STREET

A TALE OF LIBERTY AND REVOLUTION IN REGENCY LONDON VIC GATRELL

Cambridge University Press, 485pp, £25

In 1820, 13 impoverished radicals were arrested in Cato Street before they could enact their plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, and his entire Cabinet. They had been betrayed by a government spy. Some were hanged and beheaded, others were transported for life. ‘Gatrell’s intense study of the men’s lives – and what brought them to believe that violently overthrowing the government could solve their problems – is forensic and vivid in its detail,’ wrote Stephen Bates in BBC History Magazine, while for DH Robinson, in the Critic, ‘this is micro-history at its richest and its most penetrating. More than giving us a social history in a few lives, Gatrell has told us a human story with the depth of a novel.’

For Robert Poole, in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘there is no better guide to metropolitan high and low life than Gatrell’. Poole called the book ‘an enthralling classic of London history’ in which Gatrell ‘eschews what he sees as the stifling pieties of labour history in favour of individual character and lived detail, professing a Dickensian empathy for the “muddled attitudes, slogans and resentments” of ordinary Londoners … Cato Street is underdog history at its purest.’

Another fan was Ferdinand Mount, in the London Review of Books: ‘Vic Gatrell tells this sorry story with zest and sympathy’ and the book follows the trail of his Hanging Tree (1994), City of Laughter (2006) and The First Bohemians (2013) in its capturing Regency London ‘in all its gaiety, violence, sexual sprawl and, above all, searing poverty. His trigger finger trembles with passion as he takes aim at the romantic curriclesand-crinolines view of the period… Gatrell says at the beginning of his salutary and often startling account that “a book of this kind cannot help speaking to the present”.’

FEMINA

A NEW HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES, THROUGH THE WOMEN WRITTEN OUT OF IT JANINA RAMIREZ

WH Allen, 464pp, £22

What is the significance of the word ‘femina’? When precious manuscripts were being destroyed by iconoclastic mobs or, more chillingly, by the purging of libraries during the English Reformation, those marked ‘femina’ indicated a woman’s authorship, ie, not worth keeping.

Ramirez recounts the forgotten lives of some of these medieval women and the scholars’ rediscovery of their records. She ‘takes a broad scope’, Eleanor Myerson noted in the Spectator, ‘both in time and geography, ranging from the 7th to the 15th centuries and crossing from East Anglia to the Rhineland to Krakow’. Some of these, such as Margery Kempe, may be familiar, others less so. ‘She isn’t the first to describe the reappearance of Kempe’s manuscript, but she tells the story well, among many other catchy and varied examples.’

‘One of Femina’s great strengths,’ Katherine Harvey wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘is that it is not just a collection of medieval heroines, although there are inspirational stories aplenty in its pages, but also a readable and wide-ranging account of the Middle Ages — with the women put back in — that forces us to look at familiar stories in new ways.’

‘In many instances Ramirez retells episodes that, within a specialist field, are already well studied,’ Myerson concluded, yet ‘with such a range of characters there will be something new here for everyone. And it’s about time these stories had a wider audience. They’ve been waiting long enough.’

PHARAOHS OF THE SUN

HOW EGYPT’S DESPOTS AND DREAMERS DROVE THE RISE AND FALL OF TUTANKHAMUN’S DYNASTY GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE

Little, Brown, 549pp, £25

The despotic rulers of ancient Egypt’s 18th Dynasty (c.1550-1295 BC), who included Nefertiti and the boy king Tutankhamun, considered themselves a master race – and with good reason. Thanks, first, to their armies’ mastery of the war chariot and the composite bow – a combination de la Bédoyère compares to the tanks and dive bombers that spearheaded Hitler’s blitzkrieg – and secondly, to their ultra-efficient bureaucracy, they lorded it over millions of oppressed subjects who regarded them as gods. Much of their wealth was squandered on the sort of

vainglorious monuments Shelley mocked in his sonnet Ozymandias, heedless of the custom by which such follies were promptly looted by their successors.

De la Bédoyère is acknowledged as an authority on ancient Rome and her army, for which there is an abundance of primary sources. No such material exists for ancient Egypt. Consequently, as Gerard DeGroot noted in the Times, ‘it’s not an easy story to tell, given the impossibility of probing deeply the personalities of the pharaohs. The appeal of this book rests instead on those temples, but that’s not enough to sustain interest. Unfortunately, de la Bédoyère’s determination to chart the reign of each pharaoh results in a book that is longer than it needs to be. This is basically the story of “a fabulously wealthy absolute monarchy that ruled without restraint”. The impact of that simple but important point is diluted by the author’s insistence on bombarding the reader with unnecessary ephemera.’

TUTANKHAMUN’S TRUMPET

THE STORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT IN 100 OBJECTS TOBY WILKINSON

Picador, 476pp, £25

A hundred years ago the archaeologist Howard Carter, in a scene you couldn’t make up, experienced a miracle. By the flickering light of a candle he glimpsed a treasure trove that had lain undisturbed for three millennia. The ‘wonderful things’ he saw would ensure that the insignificant boy king Tutankhamun would become the pharaoh that everyone knows. Indeed it was probably Tutankhamun’s insignificance that saved his tomb from grave robbers.

Recognised as one of the world’s leading Egyptologists, Professor Toby Wilkinson believes that we can learn more from the artefacts buried with the boy king than from Tutankhamun himself. In the Times, David Aaronovitch reminded readers that objects, like pictures, ‘tell a story … Yet I do wonder whether anyone pointed out that 100 is an awful lot of objects [and] the need to break up the narrative to fit in another object means that some of his arguments never really develop. Even so, don’t bring him [Vrba] to prominence as a name to rank with Levi, Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler.’

let this cavil stop you buying the book.’

The Sunday Times’s James McConnachie reckoned that ‘What ties everything together is a feeling of vibrant presence. This book thrums with life … To the ancient Egyptians, a pharaoh’s tomb was a “resurrection machine” [and] through the artefacts they used we can sense the lives they lived. I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people.’

THE ESCAPE ARTIST

THE MAN WHO BROKE OUT OF AUSCHWITZ TO WARN THE WORLD JONATHAN FREEDLAND

John Murray, 400pp, £20

On April 7, 1944, a young Slovak called Walter Rosenberg, who later took the name of Rudolf Vrba, and his friend Fred Wetzler became the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz. ‘Drawing on Vrba’s memoirs, and on conversations with his first wife and his widow, Jonathan Freedland has put together both the story of Vrba’s two years in Auschwitz and – perhaps most interestingly – the long saga of the aftermath of his escape,’ wrote Caroline Moorehead in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘It is written almost as fiction and moves at a great pace. The teenage Vrba, strong, fit, clever, resourceful and at various moments extremely lucky, endured every bleak aspect of the camp, from the selection ramps to the mortuary, the construction sites to the storehouse for the possessions taken from the Jews as they arrived.’

Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook noted that while at Auschwitz, Rosenberg ‘got a job as an assistant registrar, then as camp clerk, which meant he saw almost everything. As a result Freedland’s book is rich in the kind of details that haunt you long after you have turned the last page.’ Rosenberg later testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and was interviewed for the cinema documentary Shoah. ‘His life makes for an enormously moving story. Now, thanks to Freedland’s impeccable research and immersive storytelling, he has the biography that he deserves.’

In his review for the Guardian, Blake Morrison declared that Freedland’s gripping book sets out to

RULE, NOSTALGIA

A BACKWARD HISTORY OF BRITAIN HANNAH ROSE WOODS

WH Allen, 400pp, £20

A story of Britain told in reverse

‘Rule, Nostalgia announces Woods as one of the most interesting new historians of her generation, whose best days lie (thankfully) before her,’ wrote Dan Jones in his Sunday Times review. ‘Smartly she writes her story in reverse, revealing a longing for the good old days – mostly misapprehended – as an imaginative seam running all the way from the culture wars of the 2020s to the Reformation in the 1530s... While she often seems exasperated by nostalgia as a brake on reason and progress, she has a sympathetic ear for her sources.’

Less effusive was Richard Vinen, in the Literary Review, who thought Woods can be ‘subtle’ despite having ‘a taste for sweeping generalisation’, and that her book contains ‘some padding, repetition and stating the bleeding obvious’.

Historian and former politician Tristram Hunt reviewed the book for the Financial Times, finding that ‘among the book’s most accomplished sections’ are those dissecting the late Victorian fears of urban degeneration and a widespread ‘anxiety about anxiety’, which a nascent advertising industry ruthlessly played on. ‘“Is the Fall of England’s Greatness Near At Hand?” asked the makers of Eno’s Fruit Salt, linking a sluggish gut to the end of Empire.’ Although there is ‘precious little comparative analysis’ – what about Trump’s Make America Great Again? – ‘the framing is consistently interesting and, with it, a clear-sighted warning about the dangers posed to democracy from a culture of perpetual nostalgia.’

BERLIN

LIFE AND LOSS IN THE CITY THAT SHAPED A CENTURY SINCLAIR MCKAY

Viking, 437pp, £20

‘Capturing the history, people and spirit of Berlin, arguably the beating heart of Europe, can be a tricky proposition,’ wrote Ian MacGregor in the Spectator. ‘McKay has wisely kept to analysing the city through the prism of the last century – or at least from the end of the Great War to the end of the Cold War... The cataclysm befalling Berliners in 1945 plays in sharp contrast to McKay’s vivid descriptions of the decadence of the Weimar years, and the multi-layered approach gives us fresh understanding. To have uncovered so many previously unknown characters and fascinating anecdotes is especially admirable when research trips to archives at home and abroad were a rarity during lockdown... the haunting accounts of Berlin up to 1945 left me thirsting for a similar rich treatment of the Cold War era.’ MacGregor wondered whether there is a chance of a sequel. ‘With the zeal he brings to his research, McKay would be my first choice to write it.’

David Aaronovitch, reviewing it for the Times, said that ‘from its early pages it feels as though Sinclair McKay was born to write this book’. His writing is ‘vivid and sometimes even beautiful. Although he is helped by his access to contemporary records or first-hand recollections, his own observations and summaries seem always apposite and wise. The sense of the city and its people is conveyed. To anyone who knows Berlin a little and is fascinated by it, but would like to understand it better, this is a wonderful aid.’

BURIED

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM IN BRITAIN ALICE ROBERTS

Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £20

Alice Roberts is a professor at Birmingham University known for the BBC archaeology programme Digging For Britain. ‘She treads a skilful line between basic historical scene-setting, detailed discussion of the scientific techniques used in studying ancient bones, and gushing, TV-style, about her personal reaction to skeletons that often bear marks of abuse and physical – even lethal – violence,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Unsurprisingly, Buried is written like a TV series. Eight episodic chapters look at different types of burial practice in Roman and early medieval Britain, each beginning with a single unusual case study before spinning out a broader story.’ Her book ‘is both accessible and expert, wears deep learning lightly, and provides a solid introduction to an often murky age in Britain’s early medieval past.’

Sunday Times reviewer Emma Duncan was not overwhelmed. ‘On television, Roberts’s fetching countenance and eager manner, along with liberal helpings of skeletons and jewellery, make this material digestible,’ she wrote. ‘In book form it is harder to swallow.’ She ‘questions the idea, embedded in our national consciousness by Dark Age historians, of an invasion by northern Europeans from which the English nation emerged... It’s a shame, then, that there’s no connection between this interesting thesis and the bulk of the book. The reason seems to be that the digs in which Roberts was personally involved had no bearing on it. If so, a book with less of her and more of others’ research might have been a more interesting one.’

‘Raising a Flag over the Reichstag’, photo taken during the Battle of Berlin, 2 May 1945

The book provides a solid introduction to an often murky age

THE SIEGE OF LOYALTY HOUSE

A CIVIL WAR STORY JESSIE CHILDS

Bodley Head, 318pp, £25

For three years from 1643 to 1645, the occupants of Basing House, a Tudor castle near Basingstoke which was owned by the Catholic marquess of Winchester, held out against Cromwell’s roundheads. ‘Sheltered within the massive earthwork fortifications were Roman Catholics and Anglicans, soldiers and architects, actors and apothecaries, people who burned with righteous anger at what was happening to their beloved country, and those who couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over,’ explained Kathryn Hughes in her review for the Guardian. ‘The one thing they all had in common was that they were nominally king’s men, on the side of Charles I in his bloody and seemingly endless struggle against his own parliament.’ Hughes praised Childs for ‘her ability to deliver first-rate scholarship in really luscious prose, uses Basing as a microcosm through which to view the civil war in all its fog and mess’.

Historian John Adamson, writing in the Catholic Herald, was enthralled by the book, describing it as the ‘sort of coup de théâtre that only the most brilliant archival research can pull off ... Few books on the Civil War convey so powerfully the human cost ... Rarely has such fine-grained focus on a single event been used so effectively to open up wider perspectives on that fractious age. And as an account of what it was like to live through the bloodiest and most traumatic decade

in England’s history, it has few rivals.’ In the Literary Review, Linda Porter wrote that ‘this heroic story has not been told before in such detail and with such an eye for the tragedies of civil war. Childs handles a remarkable amount of source material with masterly skill.’

Daily Telegraph reviewer Paul Lay found it compelling: ‘Childs reveals brilliantly the world of the Civil War in the grain of sand that is Basing House. She captures the horror, the courage, the sheer humanity of those, both besiegers and besieged, who endured the long, desperate lulls punctuated by intense episodes of visceral violence.’ Not only is the book ‘deeply researched’, wrote Leanda de Lisle in the Times, but ‘Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic. The story ends with Winchester’s son, Charles, who built a lodge overlooking the ruins, boozing his nights away under the reign of the restored Charles II and running hounds in torchlit hunts over the “bone-riddled ground”.’

NOMADS

THE WANDERERS WHO SHAPED OUR WORLD ANTHONY SATTIN

John Murray, 368pp, £25

In Literary Review, Bijan Omrani described this book as ‘a sweeping history of nomadism from prehistory to the modern age, but in spirit it is more than this. It is also a poetic reminder that humans should not be seduced into the slothful ease of passing all of their lives within four walls, rejoicing in the accumulation of material wealth.’ Gerard DeGroot made a similar point in his review for the Times. ‘Nomadic cultures are most vibrant when mobile and decline when the temptation to settle becomes irresistible,’ he wrote. ‘The lessons of struggle, of surviving on the hoof, are forgotten when possessions anchor them to place.’

DeGroot found the book to be ‘an unashamedly impressionistic paean to nomadic life, a bit of history interwoven with travelogue and memoir. His prose mirrors the nomadic life: it wanders across a landscape of 12,000 years, occasionally stopping to graze, constantly changing direction. Dates and precise places are seldom provided because they are unimportant to those of no fixed abode.’

Nomads is ‘a recovered history’, wrote Hugh Thompson in the Spectator, in which Sattin attempts ‘to retrieve their considerable contribution to our past and, sometimes, present, even though their numbers are much reduced... It does not claim to be comprehensive, and is all the better for it; instead, Sattin weaves a deft path through only those elements that interest him... This is a book that does not labour in the fields but gallops full stretch towards the horizon.’

Sattin’s prose mirrors the nomadic life

BEYOND MEASURE

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF MEASUREMENT JAMES VINCENT

Faber, 418pp, £18.99

Metrology ‘is a uniquely human invention that has evolved considerably over time’, Chris Allnutt explained in the Financial Times.‘As an account of the lengths humanity has gone to in the name of measurement, this quirky history is inch-perfect,’ he declared. ‘Vincent is a nimble storyteller, and a sympathetic one,’ Madoc Cairns wrote in the Guardian, while Tom Whipple in the Times described it as ‘a superb history of measurement’. Chris Stokel-Walker in New Scientist described it as ‘gripping … a pacy romp through time and space’.

Why did it matter that in earlier centuries man used his own body as a tool of measurement, or that land was measured by the area that could be ploughed in a day? Survival, and the key to that was standardisation. It was no accident that ‘dead pharaohs would be buried with measure-sticks in hand’, Cairns noted. ‘Early on, the right to assess — and enforce — measurement became a concomitant of authority. We call them rulers for a reason.’ Today, food chains could not function without scientific, standardised measurements.

With the French Revolution, the quest for conformity concluded with the creation of the kilogram. Whatever is being measured, ‘it is Le Grand K that sits, invisible, on the other side of the scales’, Vincent explained. Except in 1988 scientists discovered that a fingerprint has a weight, meaning the kilogram was a fingerprint’s-weight out: 50 micrograms. The requisite adjustment was made. ‘This is an erudite and elegant read, challenging in parts but highly accessible,’ Simon Humphreys concluded in the Mail on Sunday. ‘Delightful.’

BLOOD, FIRE AND GOLD

THE STORY OF ELIZABETH I AND CATHERINE DE MEDICI ESTELLE PARANQUE

Ebury, 316pp, £20

‘Darnley Portrait’ (detail) of Elizabeth I

This is ‘a marvellous story of a relationship between two powerful women in an age when females were believed to be unsuited to the exercise of government,’ wrote Linda Porter in the Times. ‘For many readers its interest will lie in its unfamiliarity, and it certainly does fill a gap in a neglected area of 16th-century history.’ While most historians focus on the relationship between Elizabeth and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, Paranque ‘in a story written with verve and passion... shows us the other woman in Elizabeth’s life’. Catherine’s ‘attempts to forge a marriage between one of her sons and the English queen form the backbone of Paranque’s book.’

For Matthew Dennison, in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Paranque’s account of Elizabeth and Catherine’s alternately fond and feisty interaction – a relationship at times overtly hostile, at others apparently affectionate, especially during Catherine’s protracted attempts to marry Elizabeth to each of her three eldest surviving sons in turn – offers readers an alternative and engaging biography of the great Tudor queen... As Paranque shows, both women faced similar challenges, largely based on gender; both would prove themselves as adroit as the most able male rulers of the period.’ Dennison’s main complaint was that the author’s prose style ‘repeatedly... suggests TV documentary voiceovers’, while at other times it ‘suggests a historical novelette’, and ‘sometimes the tone is syrupy’, though ‘for some, Paranque’s style will be accessible and unpretentious’.

THE FACEMAKER

ONE SURGEON’S BATTLE TO MEND THE DISFIGURED SOLDIERS OF WORLD WAR 1 LINDSEY FITZHARRIS

Allen Lane, 315pp, £20

On the Western Front British soldiers prayed for a ‘Blighty One’, a wound serious enough to ensure that they were sent home to receive treatment. ‘Serious’, but not disfiguring. Better to lose a limb than your face, and so become, as one victim put it, ‘an unlovely object’ – even to your nearest and dearest. Fortunately the cause of those whose faces had been ripped apart by modern weaponry was taken up by a visionary New Zealand-born surgeon called Harold Gillies, whose pioneering approach to plastic surgery before the days of antibiotics is the subject of Lindsey Fitzharris’s book, parts of which may leave some readers swallowing hard.

In the New Statesman the brain surgeon Henry Marsh, recalling how reluctant some surgeons are to share their expertise, wrote that what was most praiseworthy about Gillies was ‘his skill as a leader in building a multidisciplinary team – a quality that is quite rare in surgeons, who are often intensely egotistic. He was very much ahead of his time in this respect.’

The Guardian’s Wendy Moore said that Gillies ‘helped thousands of men to literally face the world again’. She thought he was not better known because his work had been ‘overshadowed by the more familiar story of his cousin, Archibald McIndoe’, founder of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’ for burnt pilots in World War Two.

In the Sunday Times Sebastian Faulks reminded readers that when Gillies began work, ‘plastic surgery was a new skill and had nothing to do with cosmetics. It was about giving a man back a jaw, a nose, cheeks, eye sockets and enough self-confidence to carry on living.’ He thought we could have done with fewer historical ‘digressions’ and more about Gillies himself, but conceded that Fitzharris’s ‘warmly engaged book will be part of any larger picture’.

Walter Yeo, injured at Jutland, was the first man to receive plastic surgery, 1917

ATOMS AND ASHES

FROM BIKINI ATOLL TO FUKUSHIMA SERHII PLOKHY

Allen Lane, 368pp, £25

Imagine a world where electricity is so cheap and plentiful, it is free. That’s what the physicists who devised nuclear energy dreamed of. ‘The boundless enthusiasm of the physicists is rather endearing if one ignores the perils that came with their dreams,’ Gerard DeGroot wrote in the Times. ‘Yet as Serhii Plokhy demonstrates in this superbly crafted but enormously frightening book, those perils cannot be ignored.’

Plokhy, a Ukrainian professor at Harvard and author of Chernobyl, examines six nuclear disasters that together expose the dangerous naivety of nuclear ambition. ‘His case studies are exquisitely rendered with just the right level of technical information to explain the problems,’ DeGroot continued. ‘The suspense of reactor crews struggling to find a solution to meltdown makes this book weirdly entertaining … until it dawns on the reader that these are real incidents, real people and real deaths.’

‘Plokhy excels in unpacking the human and systemic factors that contribute to nuclear disasters,’ Alexandra Witze wrote in Nature, describing it as ‘a cautionary tale … with plenty of opportunities for bad decisions’. Lawrence Freedman in the Financial Times described it as ‘an enthralling study of the atomic age and its perils’. Ray Monk in the New Statesman praised it as a ‘captivating and extremely timely book … facing as we are devastating and catastrophic climate change’.

But is nuclear power and the proliferation of reactors the solution? The author categorically thinks not. ‘For all the confident pronouncements and safety guarantees, the awesome power of nuclear energy doesn’t always behave in ways that are predicted,’ Jennifer Szalai cautioned in the New York Times.

‘Nor are we likely to have experienced our last nuclear disaster,’ Robin McKee noted in the Guardian, ‘in this grim but expertly concise account of what happens when atom plants go bad’. Richard Lea in the TLS argued that ‘Plokhy offers little context to the tens of thousands of people who died as a result of these six disasters … 1.3 million deaths each year are caused by road traffic and 8.7 million can be attributed to the air pollution from fossil fuels.’

Philip Thomas made a similar point in the Literary Review, citing a study showing that after Chernobyl the worst affected would have lost only three months’ life expectancy by staying put. ‘By way of comparison, Londoners are currently giving up four and a half months of their lives to air pollution.’ And far from being free, Lea added, ‘UK citizens will be paying a premium for electricity generated by the £23 billion white elephant at Hinkley Point for years to come.’

Disaster, 1946: the Wilson cloud, in the second nuclear test at Bikini Atoll

Shrewsbury’s Prince Rupert Hotel

THE PRINCE RUPERT HOTEL FOR THE HOMELESS

CHRISTINA LAMB

Wm Collins, 308pp, £20

Before Covid struck, the Prince Rupert hotel in Shrewsbury was a sumptuous, timber-framed four-star hostelry, 900 years old. But then it was forced to close and its management responded to the government’s ‘everyone in’ initiative – in which hotels were asked to take in rough sleepers during the pandemic. Before long, they had 100 rough sleepers living in their four-postered ensuite bedrooms. Journalist Christina Lamb, veteran reporter of war worldwide, learning of the new residents of the Prince Rupert, asked to spend a year with them. As, Hephzibah Anderson wrote in the Guardian, ‘This humane, humble book is the result – a work of scrupulous reportage that offers no easy fixes, dispensing with sentimentality as it chronicles brutal backstories, tender dreams and profoundly disheartening patterns of behaviour while somehow finding grounds for real if slender hope.’

Many of the rough sleepers were drug or alcohol addicts. Others were suffering from untreated mental illness. Many had not slept in a bed for decades. In the Sunday Times, Victoria Segal found, ‘The closequarters story Lamb tells in The Prince Rupert Hotel for the Homeless is messy, complicated and resistant to being tucked and smoothed away by housekeeping. Like the residents’ constantly overflowing baths, it leaks through the neat limits of feelgood “human interest” into something much darker and more resonant.’ The hotel lost more than 150 spoons after they were requisitioned for heating heroin, and a machete was found under a mattress. The staff responded, wrote Segal, ‘with dogged good sense, dispensing Easter eggs, birthday cakes and second and third chances to people who hadn’t had them before’.

Jasper Rees in the Telegraph was moved and elated by the book. ‘Don’t wait for the movie. There will be an avalanche of books about the pandemic. None will be as eyeopening or humane or moving as Lamb’s latest dispatch from the front line.’ Oh and, ‘miraculously, no one gets Covid’.

THE SOCIAL DISTANCE BETWEEN US

HOW REMOTE POLITICS WRECKED BRITAIN DARREN MCGARVEY

Ebury, 400pp, £20

Reviewers were united in sensing the anger Darren McGarvey brings to this analysis of poverty, a sequel to his 2018 Orwell Prize-winning Poverty Safari, and in comparing it to The Road to Wigan Pier. But they also saw it as unique in being written by one who had experienced at first hand the poverty he was describing and, since becoming successful as a writer, broadcaster and rapper, had a different way of life to compare his old one to.

How many MPs have done jobs where their toilet breaks were timed, was a typical McGarvey jibe noted by Louise Perry in the Times. She praised his eloquence and wit, his novelistic eye for detail, but also his understanding of the way the poor he meets today are unlike Orwell’s: they don’t necessarily go short of food, they have too much of the wrong kind; they aren’t overworked, they don’t have enough work.

Perry still found McGarvey’s division of the world overly binary, either rich or poor — an objection echoed by John Harris in the Guardian, faced with the text’s ‘working class angels and toffeenosed villains’. He also found the SNP’s dire track record in handling inequalities, drug addiction and high death rates given a pass. But he welcomed the ‘potent’ and ‘discomfiting’ questions McGarvey raised and the ‘astute points’ he made about the way inequalities are perpetuated by people who do well out of them or perhaps are too institutionalised even to recognise them. Much that goes wrong can be traced to lack of ‘proximity’, Harris argued, landing the poor in an ‘opaque administrative maze populated by faceless desk-killers’; the further away the desks, the crueller their decisions.

Passionate about the book, Joyce McMillan of the Scotsman found it difficult to overstate the ‘eloquence and even the tenderness’ with which McGarvey describes the situation of some of those he met in Glasgow. She noted some of his solutions — ban private education, revive grass-roots unionism, achieve Scottish independence — while worrying that the speed of change is leaving some of his ideas behind. But the book was still timely, ‘vital and indispensable’, and she was roused to an angry eloquence of her own, describing our current ruling class, with their ‘complacency, lack of engagement, their blinkered ideology and deadhand managerialism’, as ‘the source of the social problems they so confidently locate elsewhere’.

SERIOUS MONEY

WALKING PLUTOCRATIC LONDON CAROLINE KNOWLES

Allen Lane, 304pp, £25

Knowles is a professor of sociology at Goldsmith’s, but instead of studying life on impoverished housing estates she has written up a walking tour

through the global capital of the super-rich. ‘Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe,’ wrote Iain Sinclair, author of London Orbital, in the London Review of Books. ‘The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent ... Among the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan.’

Edward Lucas, in his review for the Times, thought the book ‘helps readers to see [London’s super-rich] as less secretive, more troubling and a great deal sadder ... Serious Money has a serious mission. These vast fortunes, Knowles argues, do not just make people miserable. They are rotting the ties that hold our society together.’

In the Critic, Alex Diggins praised the book as ‘startling’ and ‘spirited’. The author ‘tramps through London like a later-day Charles Booth to examine the tidemarks wealth has left on the city and its surroundings. Walking, she believes, “exposes politics, like a sediment in the landscape”.’ She is ‘alert to arresting details. Night managers at Mayfair’s most prestigious hotels keep a sharp eye out for single women ordering green tea – the favoured drink of sex workers, one tells her... One manager tells her he was dispatched to fetch a patch of lawn for a suite as the guest’s Pekingese only shat on real grass.’

However, Diggins was troubled by ‘the voicelessness of her subjects... Knowles’s approach feels curiously like that of an archaeologist, or a safari guide: the rich appear as some long-vanished civilisation, an exotic species’. Nat Segnit, in the Times Literary Supplement, placed Knowles ‘in the tradition of the great literary walkers, from Walter Benjamin to Will Self’ and said that ‘her insistence on crossing the city on foot is, in an important sense, an act of resistance, an embrace of urban realities in defiance of the sad confinement of extreme wealth, its smoked-glass segregation’.

Vast fortunes are rotting the ties that hold our society together

THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

A NEW GUIDE TO SEX IN THE 21ST CENTURY LOUISE PERRY

Polity, 200pp, £14.99

As Rachel Cooke noted in the Observer, Louise Perry’s book ‘in this cultural moment, could hardly be more radical’. Perry’s reexamination of the sexual revolution of the last half century (chiefly the freedom to have sex without the fear of pregnancy) finds that it is men who have benefited more than women.

As Gaby Hinsliff put it in her review for the New Statesman, it promoted the idea that: ‘Women should be able to have sex like men do. That’s the premise, at least, of much millennial feminism: that women should be free to do whatever they like with their bodies, without being shamed or judged or held to some hypocritical double standard. But is all this freedom really as liberating as it sounds?’

Cooke hailed Perry’s book not as prudish or conservative but ‘daring and brave’, as ‘an act of insurrection, its seditiousness born not only of the pieties it is determined to explode but of the fact that it is also diligently researched and written in plain English’. It may, thought Cooke, ‘turn out to be one of the most important feminist books of its time’.

Veteran second-waver Joan Smith agreed. In her review in the Literary Review she laid it out: ‘A combination of the pill, challenges to conventional morality and the rapid expansion of higher education promised exciting change but produced a model of sexual relations that favoured men just as much as the old one.

‘Second-wave feminists spotted this a long time ago, but the case for the prosecution has seldom been expressed as clearly as it is in this invigorating book. Whether men and women differ in their expectations for cultural or biological reasons is a matter of fierce debate (Perry comes down on the side of the latter). But there is no doubt that telling women they have to prioritise men’s desires, shaped by an avalanche of misogynist porn, has had catastrophic effects.’

AN IMMIGRANT’S LOVE LETTER TO THE WEST

KONSTANTIN KISIN

Constable, 210pp, £18.99

Konstantin Kisin was born in Moscow in 1982 and moved to the UK with his family at 13. Today he is a stand-up comedian and co-host of the popular online talk-show Triggernometry. ‘The purpose of this book,’ he writes, ‘is to describe and diagnose the malaise afflicting western society and to offer solutions.’ Because of our guilt about colonialism and slavery, we have become reluctant to defend values such as capitalism and freedom of speech.

Douglas Murray reviewed the book for the Daily Telegraph and said that Kisin ‘organises his book around a number of key themes, including chapters on the ways in which language can be used to conceal truth and on why we need journalists, not activists... Kisin gives examples of the heroes of modern journalism, not least Anna Politkovskaya...[he] is right to feel a certain sickness of stomach at the way in which so much journalism in the West has ended up wasting the opportunities of freedom... [he] has written a lively and spirited book defending the society he is grateful to have found himself in... we are lucky to have him.’

In his review for the Sunday Times, Tomiwa Owolade found Kisin’s ‘use of casual language and internet-speak... grating – there is an “FYI” in one passage; elsewhere he writes about how Einstein “slid into Freud’s DM”.’ But the stories he tells about the perils of journalism under Putin’s regime ‘vividly emphasise how lucky we are to live in a free and democratic society, and give Kisin’s book a powerful moral quality that ultimately makes it worth reading’.

HOW WE MIGHT LIVE

AT HOME WITH JANE AND WILLIAM MORRIS SUZANNE FAGENCE COOPER

Quercus, 536pp, £30

Jane Morris, with her wavy cloud of black hair, pouting lips and silently mysterious expression, became the embodiment of the mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal. Married to the bouncy polymath William but inamorata of the sultry philanderer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane, daughter of an Oxford ostler, is seen but rarely heard. Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s new book examines the Morris domestic set-up and attempts to plumb the depths of the woman described by Henry James as ‘a figure cut out of a missal – an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity’.

In the Times, Laura Freeman thought she’d done a good job given the constraints of pinning down a legend. ‘This is a book of guesses and whispers. Fagence Cooper asks many open-ended questions. “Was Jane flattered by the approach of the two London artists?” “How did she become so accomplished?” “What was Jane doing and feeling during this distressing time?”’

But the author of the fannycornforthblogspot ‘absolutely loved’ the book: ‘Jane was not just the passive observer of her own life [but] I was still surprised by her laughter, which was “unforgettable”, and exactly how active she was in the creation and management of her life, art and legacy.’ This after all is the woman who, when she gave a young poet a jar of her quince jam, was told by him that it was like ‘receiving it from the hands of Helen of Troy’.

In the Literary Review, art historian Tanya Harrod thought that the author had done very well, against the odds, ‘in restoring some reality to our view of Jane Morris, giving a proper sense of a woman with striking gifts and talents identifiably hers’.

Jane Morris, photographed in 1865

Jane embodied the mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal

IMAGINE A CITY

A PILOT SEES THE WORLD MARK VANHOENACKER

Chatto & Windus, 404pp, £16.99

Mark Vanhoenacker is both a commercial airline pilot and an acclaimed writer. His latest book is, wrote Melanie Reid in the Times, ‘a memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book, at its heart a moving account of personal unbelonging’.

Vanhoenacker had a deeply religious Catholic upbringing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, his father a former priest and his mother a lay missionary. Woven between his memories of childhood are meditations on the cities he has visited in his long journeys as a 747 pilot. Reid admired the way these strands, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, come together in the book: ‘Yet in middle age he finds that Pittsfield, the place he was desperate to leave, is increasingly becoming home to him again, a circle nearing completion. He ends the book with a pilgrimage to his old house, accompanied by his husband (also Mark) and the owners allow him to visit his bedroom, “so tiny that I can hardly believe it, or understand how it could hold all the memories that lift now like startled birds, and bank and part around where Mark and I stand in the narrow doorway”.’

In the Times Literary Supplement, Jonathan Buckley hailed an ‘exceptionally curious and widely read observer’ and found that in the end, the human city for Vanhoenacker is more present as an imaginative archetype than a real place. ‘to an extent Imagine a City is a record of the multifarious ways in which the real world has substantiated the fictional’.

ADVENTURER

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GIACOMO CASANOVA LEO DAMROSCH

Yale, 422pp, £25

In the Times Literary Supplement, Lisa Hilton noted that ‘this latest biography places Casanova in a particular 18-century subculture,

Casanova by his brother Francesco that of the “adventurer”: chancers who tumbled across Europe living on their wits, exploiting the rigid social hierarchies of their times to their own advantage. Not all adventurers were libertines, but a growing belief in the rationality of pleasure and the right to resist conventional mores provided justification for a new kind of individuality, which Casanova superlatively embodied.’

Damrosch seems ‘cautious about appearing to defend a character whose behaviour might trouble or offend some contemporary readers’, she wrote, and ‘this exposes him to a degree of historical provincialism in which a certain strain of modern moral judgment is retroactively applied. Thus Casanova’s “behaviour was abusive in ways that are not just disturbing today but would have seemed disturbing to many people in his own day”. Indeed, but the 18th century was disturbed by quite different things – the usurping of sumptuary laws, for instance, or the false assumption of aristocratic birth.’

As Judith Thurman pointed out in her New Yorker review, ‘any life of Casanova has to compete with his memoirs, a masterpiece of reportage. His prose has the freshness of a live transmission. He was writing from the front lines of a secular revolution... for the principle of personal freedom... Damrosch’s biography condenses a vast trove of Casanoviana into a well-researched, 400-page narrative that is most engaging on its subject’s catholic interests as an intellectual and on the milieus he traversed as an itinerant charlatan. But this is a life for a #MeToo-era readership, and the book’s first paragraph posts a trigger warning: Casanova’s “career as a seducer... is often disturbing and sometimes very dark”.’

Laura Freeman, in the Times, said that the book gave her mixed feelings. ‘Reading Damrosch’s stern but measured book, I went from fancying Casanova, to hating him, to pitying him. There’s no fool like an old fool and no man so lonely as the Priapus who can’t get it up. Good, bad, in flight or in flagrante, Giacomo Casanova, scourge of 18th-century husbands, is never less than compelling.’

Any life of Casanova has to compete with his memoirs

ELON MUSK

RISKING IT ALL MICHAEL VLISMAS

Jonathan Ball Publishers, 244pp, £14.99

‘There could hardly be a better time for a new biography of Musk,’ said Tom Knowles in the Times. ‘Sadly, Risking It All fails to deliver anything new or insightful about its subject.’ Maybe this is a bit unfair, because Knowles conceded that sports-writer Michael Vlismas, at school in Pretoria with Musk, does explain how out of place his nerdy little class-mate must have felt in apartheid era South Africa, where boys were schooled in manliness. No wonder he wanted to live in America, the home of innovation and technical advancement, a goal he achieved aged 17 thanks to qualifying for a Canadian passport as the son of a Canadian mother. Thereafter he never looked back.

Private Eye’s reviewer thought Vlismas had spent ‘too much time on bonkers research’, hence his inability to decide whether Musk was a genius ‘to compare with da Vinci and Columbus’ or ‘little more than a monomaniac chancer’.

In the New Statesman, Will Dunn offered this assessment of the world’s richest man: ‘More than anyone else on earth, Musk is a creature of the great boom in equities. Through calculation or conviction, he offered the most exuberant promises in a market that already brimmed with confidence.’ Repeatedly referring to Musk as a ‘genius’ and a ‘visionary’, Vlismas, said Dunn, ‘contributes to the myth of the exceptional individual, a figure that is useful to the narratives that drive markets in good times’.

So how will this supersonic entrepreneur fare now? In the Irish Times Frank Dillon recalled that ‘his empire almost crashed in the 2008 financial crisis, saved by a major Government contract for Space X, his rocket company’. He seems uncharacteristically hesitant about Twitter. Perhaps he’s taken his foot off the pedal at last.

ANNA

THE BIOGRAPHY AMY ODELL

Allen & Unwin, 447pp, £20

Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour has been the reigning queen of fashion for decades, famous the world over for her terrifyingly exacting standards and for wearing sunglasses, inside and outside, at all times. Reviewing Amy Odell’s biography of Wintour, Hadley Freeman wondered in the Guardian what it was all about: what lay behind the giant shades? ‘No other magazine editor has ever held such fascination for the public. But why?’ Odell puts it down to sexism. ‘If a man did her job as well and with similar affectations, his discipline and commitment would

‘Save Anna’ logo, created in response to retirement rumours

likely be celebrated.’ Freeman wasn’t so sure. ‘This is a very zeitgeisty point to make, but is it actually true?’

Most British reviewers felt the question wasn’t really answered by a book which felt more like a defence of its subject than a deep exploration. Was Wintour simply a beautifully-dressed sphinx without a secret? Certainly Odell doesn’t seem to see the funny side of fashion. In the Observer, Rachel Cooke thought the author’s ‘utmost seriousness’ made it difficult not to laugh. ‘The author’s refusal to poke fun at anything, however ludicrous, is also the only reason I enjoyed her book. If the pages (and pages) she devotes to Wintour’s assistants – young

Odell doesn’t seem to see the funny side of fashion

women who must not want to be writers and whose job it is to make sure that her full-fat latte and blueberry muffin (an item usually left uneaten) are waiting on her big, white desk every morning – are comprehensive to the point of tediousness.’

Odell’s admiring interviewees tell her that Wintour has exquisite taste and a ‘brilliant sense of humour’ but her reputation for coldness and for terrifying her underlings is glossed over. As is the ‘grimly hagiographic’ interview with Asma Al-Assad that her staff begged her not to run. Wintour eventually pulled the piece and pushed its author under the bus, her own reputation surviving miraculously intact.

In the Telegraph, Lisa Armstrong mused on how she had survived so long. ‘The reader is left wondering whether the answer is as simple as Wintour having recognised early on that power is often most effective when it’s a caricature of itself, and that cultivating a Cruella de Vil persona would do her no harm at all.’

HEIRESS, REBEL, VIGILANTE, BOMBER

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ROSE DUGDALE SEAN O’DRISCOLL

Sandycove, 368pp, £18.99

At the age of 17 in 1958, Rose Dugdale was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, one of the last of the debutantes. She read PPE at Oxford, where she shocked fellow students by breaking into the then gentlemen-only Student Union, dressed as a man. She obtained a PhD in economics and became increasingly radicalised, finding herself drawn to the IRA’s version of socialism. She drove a Lotus sports car collecting weapons to send across the water, and Special Branch began to take an interest in her. She moved to Ireland, to join the ‘armed struggle’ and together with bombmaker Jim Monaghan developed the Ballycroy 3-4 bomb which was used to blow up a barracks in Armagh in 1991 and exploded in front of the Baltic Exchange in London in 1992.

‘One of the frustrating aspects of Dugdale’s life is the unsolved mystery of when, how, or for that matter quite why, she made her violent lurch to the left,’ wrote Ben MacIntyre, in the Times. But O’Driscoll is candid: ‘I have been able to find no event or specific family dynamic that explains why Rose took such a different path.’

This inconclusiveness also perplexed Charles Lysaght in the Irish Times, ‘The author holds back from a verdict on whether it was altruistic idealism or pent-up anger against her own that motivated Rose Dugdale.’ To Dugdale’s son Ruairí it seemed simple – she had a compulsion to rebel against rules. Lysaght described the book as a ‘well-researched, balanced, somewhat diffuse biography’. O’Driscoll interviewed Dugdale, now aged 81, and living in care at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, as well as members of her family, friends of her early life and IRA collaborators. Lysaght sought an answer to her motives: ‘Was it all, I wonder, her regimenting mother’s doing?’

THE STARMER PROJECT

A JOURNEY TO THE RIGHT OLIVER EAGLETON

Verso, 240pp, £12.99

‘There’s a lot of dirt on Keir Starmer’ in this new biography, wrote Nick Clark in Socialist Worker. But Eagleton, the son of the Marxist philosopher Terry and a journalist at the New Left Review, ‘wants to do more than reel off Starmer’s crimes for the gratification of a defeated and desperate Labour left. He wants to discover the meaning of Starmer – what his leadership represents for the direction of the Labour Party and British politics.’ He concludes that ‘Starmer’s “pro-police, pro-army, anti-protester” agenda is “not merely a sop to Red Wall conservatives, but a consistent feature of his politics, born out of longstanding service to Britain’s deep state”.’

For Patrick Maguire, in the Times, ‘Eagleton writes elegantly – save for the occasional lapse into theoretical jargon. However, it’s when he turns reporter, searching through Starmer’s legal career, that he is most convincing... By the time of the 2011 riots, the lawyer who once defended the rights of acid house ravers to tune in and drop out oversaw [as Director of Public Prosecutions] 24-hour court sittings that tried teenagers at 3am and deported one rioter for stealing a single scoop of ice cream. Eagleton

Keir Starmer: what does he stand for?

describes him as the Cameron government’s “punisher-in-chief”. Starmer, who has a shorter temper and thinner skin than his unflappable public persona implies, is bound to resent this revisionist history of his long legal career... Left-wingers who have abandoned Labour will feel vindicated by the battering Eagleton gives his subject,’ while ‘his depiction of Starmer as a hard-nosed, ruthless, calculating careerist will cheer even the wildest Blairites’.

ZELENSKY

A BIOGRAPHY SERHII RUDENKO

Polity, 200pp, £20

Volodomyr Zelensky: extraordinary man

It has been a wonder and delight to many in the West that the man now leading Ukraine’s spirited resistance to the Russian invasion – President Volodomyr Zelensky, rugged in combat fatigues – was a television comedian before he entered politics and, what’s more, was the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian version of the movie. Not since Ronald Reagan’s has the transformation from showbiz to statesmanship been so deftly and effectively navigated.

This new book – originally published in Ukraine last year as Zelensky Without Make-Up – seeks to fill in some gaps. ‘Who is Zelensky and what is he really about?’ wondered Andrew Anthony in his review for the Guardian. ‘Those looking for answers to the Zelensky enigma will be disappointed by this hastily written and translated book, which bills itself as “A Biography”. Written by Serhii Rudenko, a Ukrainian political commentator, it’s not really a life story, but an account of his eventful three years in office.’ Its gossipy and sardonic style, he said, relied a lot on jabs and asides that only those already familiar with Ukraine’s political scene would be able to make sense of.

Nevertheless, some welcome details emerged – above all that Zelensky is not the ‘stainless paragon of Western fantasies’. Though he rode to power on a wave of disaffection with cronyish establishment politics, Zelensky has cronies of his own – and is indebted to a Ukranian-Cypriot-Israeli media billionaire who is banned from the US on suspicion of ‘significant corruption’. ‘The takeaways from this uneven book are that Ukraine is a flawed democracy and that Zelensky, despite his reformist rhetoric, is a product of the system.’

Writing in the Times, Tom Ball agreed: ‘The stitches of this hurriedly fashioned book are glaringly on show. Translators Michael Naydan and Alla Parminova worked “around the clock” to get the book finished on deadline, say the publishers. I can believe it, given how syntactically and tonally alien much of the book is to standard English.’ He also faulted its meandering structure. ‘This is all the more frustrating because Zelensky is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary life tale.’

This is an account of Zelensky’s eventful three years in office Putin is given the benefit of the doubt on many questions

PUTIN

HIS LIFE AND TIMES PHILIP SHORT

Bodley Head, 864pp, £30

The Observer’s reviewer Angus McQueen found it ‘refreshing’ that Short, ‘in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union... There is a blank evenness to Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject.’ But he lets Putin ‘escape true responsibility, not for individual crimes, but for failing to transform Russia, instead reaching back to an arthritic mythical past, not forward to a different future’.

Short is ‘a fine wordsmith’, acknowledged Edward Lucas in the Times, and ‘as a chronicle of Putin’s public doings, the book is near faultless’. But the author’s ‘search for balance makes him oddly incurious

about the darkest side of Putin’s life. Worse, he draws false equivalences: between Putin and his critics, and more fundamentally between Russia and its justifiably nervous neighbours.’

Washington Post reviewer Angela Stent (who is writing her own book about Putin) was more damning. ‘In his [Short’s] telling, the United States bears much of the blame for what Russia and Putin have become’, and he gives Putin ‘the benefit of the doubt on many questions where we may never know the answer’. However, ‘Short’s pointing the finger at the United States hardly excuses Putin’s aggression toward his neighbors, nor his increasingly draconian crackdown on his own population.’

Vladimir Putin: aggressive

PAUL BAILEY admires the skill of the Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro

Alice Munro’s luminous writing career spans more than 60 years of her long life. She is the author of a solitary novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which is really a collection of interconnected stories, but otherwise she has devoted herself to the art of the short and usually not-so-short story. Her friends and publishers know her as a perfectionist, sometimes to their admiring irritation. She would concur with the weary wisdom of the French poet Paul Valéry, who once declared that ‘a poem is never finished, only abandoned’.

She is similar to Jean Rhys, who was reported to spend hours worrying about whether to use a comma or a semi-colon, in this one respect. That perfectionism, thankfully, never hindered the astonishing productivity Munro sustained at the peak of her powers, from the early 1980s until her official retirement just over a decade ago, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

I have loved Alice Munro’s stories for almost as long as she has been writing them. I reread them constantly and invariably with a renewed sense of the intricate skill that has gone into their composition. They always have the capacity to take me by surprise. Her prose is notable for its transparency and the fact that the words she chooses with such scrupulous attention to detail are all in common usage. But that hardearned simplicity is, of course, deceptive, encompassing as it does any number of subtly differentiated human beings, each of whom is recognisable in his or her complex individuality.

Yet there is often a catch in that state of recognition, because Munro is a shrewd storyteller who understands that certain people are essentially unknowable. They keep their depths, if they are in possession of them, to themselves. She respects unknowability in its various manifestations – in a tell-tale scrap of conversation, or in a casual, witty aside. She honours her readers’ intelligence to reach their own conclusions, make their own judgments. She puts judgmental observations in the minds and mouths of her characters, which is where they properly belong.

The story ‘Miles City, Montana’ from the collection The Progress of Love (1987), displays her artistry at its most authoritative. It opens with the narrator remembering her father carrying the dead body of a very young boy who has just been drowned in ‘the little nameless river that flows into the Saugeen in southern Ontario’:

Alice Monro: wise and wonderful

The boy’s name was Steve Gauley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-coloured now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that has been left out all winter. His face was turned into my father’s chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud.

The very next paragraph begins with the narrator, who was six at the time of the drowning and whose name is not revealed, writing ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I really saw all this.’ She goes on to reveal that perhaps she saw her father carrying the boy, and the men following him, and the dogs, but that she wasn’t close enough to the dead Steve to notice something like mud in his nostril. The astute reader is thus given the indication that events of the past frequently receive embellishments in the memories of those who have witnessed them. This is the first of the many surprises in a story that goes back and forth in time.

In 1961, 21 years after the tragic death of Steve Gauley, the narrator and her husband Andrew set off from their home in Vancouver in his brandnew Morris Oxford, a small car big enough to accommodate them and their two daughters, Cynthia, who is six, and the three-and-a-half-year-old Meg. The family is heading for the small town in rural Ontario where Andrew’s mother and his wife’s father still live. To make the journey more interesting, they are travelling via the northwest of America, a circuitous route as they are well aware.

There’s a key scene when peanut-butter-and-marmalade sandwiches are produced for the girls. Andrew complains to his wife that the salmon-and-mayonnaise sandwich she hands him doesn’t contain any lettuce. He tells her he is disappointed. She has, in fact, forgotten to buy a lettuce, but hears herself coming up with a white lie instead. Andrew sulks. She asks him not to be mad with her, to which he replies ‘I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.’ Cynthia, aware of this domestic tiff, starts singing from the back seat, and the parents are united again, for the time being.

These seemingly banal details fulfil a wider purpose. What happens, or rather what is almost miraculously prevented from happening in the swimming-pool of a hotel in Miles City, Montana, will affect the entire family for years afterwards. The story is one of Alice Munro’s incontestable masterpieces, of which there are more than a few.

Munro’s stories, which are often as long as novellas, are set mainly in Huron County, Ontario, the district in which she was born in 1931. She could be accounted a regional writer, in the way that William Faulkner is. The brilliant novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick has described her, with justification, as ‘our Chekhov’. Her obsession with small town life, with the inevitable passing of time, with the revelations that come in the midst of despair or sudden, inexplicable happiness, are much like his. It is possible to open any of her collections – Open Secrets, The Moons of Jupiter, The Love of a Good Woman – and encounter works of genius. I feel happy at the thought of having lived for so long in her wise and wonderful literary company.

Monro’s stories always have the capacity to take me by surprise

Two lives on earth: Barbary macaques AN IMMENSE WORLD

HOW ANIMAL SENSES REVEAL THE HIDDEN REALMS AROUND US ED YONG

Bodley Head, 464pp, £20

Science writer Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his brilliantly researched articles on Covid, and An Immense World, his study of animal perception, has been rapturously received. It is ‘magnificent’ wrote Kilian Fox in the Guardian, observing that Yong shows that the reality of life on earth is ‘more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange’ than we can ever have imagined.

In the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai thought Yong’s revelations ‘thrilling’, praising his gifts as both scientific researcher and storyteller. ‘A dolphin that echo-locates a human in water’, she learned, ‘can perceive not only the human’s outer shape but also what’s inside, including skeleton and lungs.’ And ‘tree frog embryos – ensconced inside their unhatched eggs – can detect the vibrations of an attacking predator and release an enzyme from their faces that dissolves the casings that house them, allowing them to escape.’ For Rhys Blakely in the Times, it was ‘fantastic, and he noted how recent our knowledge is. ‘We only realised that humpback whales sang in 1960. Mice may be one of the most studied animals in laboratories across the world, but it was not until the 1970s that we worked out that they were secretly speaking to each other, using high-pitched squeaks beyond the range of human ears.’

In the New Scientist, nature writer Mark Cocker was dazzled by the story of the emerald jewel wasp. ‘It possesses a sting with a touchsensitive tip that it can insert into the midsection of a much larger cockroach prey. This injection briefly paralyses the victim’s locomotion centre, but a second sting fired into the roach’s brain tranquillises it for the rest of its short life. In the state of a “submissive zombie”, the roach will attend the wasp’s lair to serve as fresh protein for the jewel wasp’s progeny. Such is the wasp’s control of its victim that it can use its antennae to lead the roach along, much as a human might walk a dog.’ Yong’s book is, wrote Cocker, ‘a masterpiece’.

LAND HEALER

HOW FARMING CAN SAVE BRITAIN’S COUNTRYSIDE JAKE FIENNES

Witness, 261pp, £20

It’s a pity that no-one reviewing Jake Fiennes’s book forbore to mention that he is the brother of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes. It must be annoying for him. However, there was praise for Fiennes’s account of trying to heal the damage done to the Norfolk estate where he is conservation manager by decades of industrialised agriculture or what he calls the ‘Taliban approach’ to farming.

In the Times, John Lewis Stempel, prolific writer and fellow farmer, spelt out the task ahead of him, as Fiennes advocates ‘land use that ploughs a course between rewilding (which, when push comes to shovel, is mass reforestation) and intensive agriculture’. But Fiennes, LewisStempel thought, was a ‘fine, sound voice in the post-Brexit, post-Covid world, where food security, climate change, nature adoration, veganism, rewilding and narked livestock farmers like myself are clashing’.

In the Guardian, Alex Preston thought it a ‘hopeful, intelligent, important book’ about the possibility of a wildlife-friendly farming future. ‘The “small tweaks” Fiennes recommends as part of the mantra of regenerative farming are not on their own immediately thrilling – letting hedges grow out, not ploughing to the edge of a field, disturbing the soil as little as possible, using “cover crops” in winter. In combination, though, they are revolutionary, because they can start to reverse the terrible damage done to the countryside by industrial agriculture.’

Fiennes was interviewed by Jessamy Calkin for the Daily Telegraph and he gave her a tour of his patch of north Norfolk. ‘He believes fervently in nature’s power to recover,’ she wrote, ‘but his mission is not about rewilding, it’s about getting rid of the old ways – monocultures, intensive farming, chemicals, butchered hedgerows – and improving soil health, creating pasture for livestock and turning land over to plants that will benefit insects and birds. “We just need to end the apartheid between economic growth and protecting and enhancing the environment.”’

ROOTED

STORIES OF LIFE, LAND AND A FARMING REVOLUTION SARAH LANGFORD

Viking, 336pp, £16.99

Sarah Langford followed her well received 2020 account of life as a criminal barrister with a chronicle of her new life managing her husband’s family’s arable farm in Suffolk. In the Guardian, nature writer Amy Liptrot was entranced. ‘They replant hedges, reclaim old field names, go organic, introduce new crop rotations, plant trees and wildflowers, extend field margins and bring in grazing animals. They see the land begin to flourish and meet other farmers doing similar things. This kind of “regenerative agriculture”, Langford writes, “is more than just growing food … it is a movement which can cure not just ecological ills but social ones too”. Here, grazing livestock can be beneficial to soil health and biodiversity – and to communities.’

In the Financial Times, Laura Battle admired much about Rooted but found it at times ‘gratingly solipsistic’, a view not shared by the Spectator’s Juliet Nicolson who thought Langford a good listener. ‘She listens to the cacophony of

revisionists, experimentalists, economists, nutritionists, catastrophists and faddists, to views that are variously suggested, accepted, rejected and imposed on families for whom a tie to the land has been their pride for centuries. She treads with care and respect, acutely conscious of her own “outsiderness”. And as her confidence grows, she gradually earns the esteem and trust of a community in which she has become rooted.’ For the blogger MoreAboutBooks, ‘She leaves the reader feeling uplifted and energised and, ultimately, hopeful, not least because of the good people who are trying to make a difference.’

Nicolson also felt Langford was a clarion call of hope. ‘There is no one answer to overcoming resistance to change, to reacting when change overreaches itself and demands reversal, or to how regeneration sits beside scientific advance; no single solution to how we square the needs of a billowing world population with the ecological survival of the planet. But Langford hopes that, while acknowledging the groundswell of imaginative theory and technological invention, a trust placed in farming methods rooted in the distant past might provide solutions for our future mental and physical health and to world sustainability.’

THE RISE AND REIGN OF THE MAMMALS

A NEW HISTORY FROM THE SHADOW OF THE DINOSAURS TO US STEVE BRUSATTE

Picador, 528pp, £20 (350)

Steve Brusatte is a professor of paleontology and evolutionary biology at Edinburgh University. He is also a gripping storyteller. In his latest book, he looks at the mammals that co-existed with dinosaurs and survived the huge asteroid collision that killed the giant lizards. It thrillingly covers the 320 million years of evolution that produced the first humans. As Hannah Beckerman pointed out in the Observer, ‘Brusatte is an impassioned guide and the result is a highly engaging work of popular science.’

The science blogger Wavefunction loved it. ‘Much of the book is focused on how mammals evolved different anatomical and physiological functions against the backdrop of catastrophic and gentle climate change, including the shifting of the continents and major extinctions driven by volcanic eruptions, meteor, sea level rises and ice ages. These adaptations include milk production, temperature regulation, hair, bigger brains and stable locomotion, among others.’

In the Times, Rhys Blakely was blown away. ‘Over the past 20 years or so, the study of how mammals came to be has progressed at breakneck pace. Fossils have been unearthed at an unprecedented rate; new technologies for analysing them have yielded remarkable new insights. We have learnt that the mammals that shared the world with the dinosaurs were far more diverse than Buckland could have known. The idea that they were unspectacular little creatures that cowered in the shadows of the giant lizards has been upended.’

Though dinosaurs are ‘amazing’ wrote Blakely, they are not us. ‘This is a book that plots our ancestry, all the way back to the steamy Carboniferous coal swamp where our lineage first split from that of the reptiles. It is saga on the grandest scale: the tale of how our forebears survived an apocalypse and how their progeny rose up to rule the world. There is a wonderful subplot: the story of how humans became the only species capable of considering their origins.’

No sign of a mammoth for 4,000 years

ENDLESS FORMS

THE SECRET WORLD OF WASPS SEIRIAN SUMNER

William Collins, 384pp, £20

HG Wells’s novel The Food of the Gods featured giant wasps with three-inch-long stings and Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory was a dark and terrifying tale. As John LewisStempel said in his Times review: ‘Who likes wasps?’ He continued: ‘Our dislike of wasps is ancient and damning. It’s there in the Old Testament, Joshua 24:12. God used wasps to terrify — “And I sent the hornet before you”.’

He went on: ‘Sumner, a professor of behavioural ecology at University College London, feels our antipathetic attitude to wasps, as opposed to bees, is unfair’ – far from wasps (of which there are at least 100,000 known species) being a ‘pointless pest’ they are ‘one of nature’s most secret and neglected gems’, according to the author. But Lewis-Stempel thought bees had the edge as they ‘provided humanity with perhaps the only sweet stuff in our diet, honey’.

Steven Poole in the Telegraph pointed out that ‘Wasps might not be quite as clever as bees – Sumner admits that they have nothing comparable to the famous “waggle dance” with which bees tell their comrades where food is – but they can (scarily) recognise human faces as well as one another’s. From the point of view of evolutionary history, she observes, “bees are just wasps who

have forgotten how to hunt”.’ He summed up: ‘You might not positively love wasps by the end of Endless Forms, then, but it would be a tetchy soul who did not grudgingly admire them a bit more.’

Simon Ings called the book ‘exuberant and authoritative’ in the New Scientist while Constance Craig Smith in the Daily Mail thought Sumner might ‘persuade you not to whack the next one you find in your kitchen’. As Sumner writes: ‘A world without wasps would be just as devastating as a world without bees, or beetles, or butterflies.’

Our antipathetic attitude to wasps is unfair

WILLIAM COOK last read Hermann Hesse as a teenager. Would the writer still appeal some 40 years later?

Forty years ago, Hermann Hesse was everywhere. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated into 60 languages, his timeless stories were popular all around the world. And then he disappeared. I read him avidly in my teens and then forgot all about him, but now I’m in my late fifties I find myself rereading him with the same old adolescent fervour. How come?

I must admit it was mere coincidence which brought me back to Hesse. On a recent train journey through Switzerland, I spent a lonely night in Lugano, and discovered that Montagnola, where Hesse spent the second half of his long life, was only a few miles away. I trekked up to this hilltop village, to visit the quaint museum devoted to Hesse’s life and work, and as I wandered round my teenage memories came flooding back. I hadn’t read him for 40 years! How would he read today? The short answer is very well indeed.

He was born in 1877, in Calw, a small town in southern Germany. His parents were pious Protestants: his father ran a religious publishing house. A bright but rebellious boy, Hermann was sent to an elite boarding school to train as a Lutheran minister, but he ran away and was subsequently committed to a lunatic asylum (by his parents). Released after several months, he became an apprentice bookseller, until the success of his first novel, Peter Camenzind, published in 1904, enabled him to quit the day job and write full time.

Peter Camenzind was a classic Bildungsroman (coming-of-age saga), the story of an idealistic young man searching for a role. It was told in a fresh and lively voice, but it didn’t break much new ground. Hesse’s next few novels were well-written and well-received, fairly conventional and fairly forgettable (Gertrude and Rosshalde are among the better ones). And then along came the First World War, and Hesse’s writing was transformed.

Hesse tried to join the German army but was rejected on account of his weak eyesight, and as the casualties mounted up, he became a committed pacifist. His pacifistic essays enraged mainstream opinion in Germany, and in 1919 he left his wife – who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia – and their three sons and fled to Montagnola, where he rented a few rooms in a rundown villa called Casa Camuzzi (the Hesse Museum is right next door).

For Hesse, bourgeois stories about bourgeois problems seemed meaningless after the carnage of the trenches. During the war he’d written a series of elemental stories, more like ancient myths than modern fiction: Knulp; Demian; Strange News from Another Star... In Montagnola he continued this migration from modernity. During the 1920s he wrote his finest novels: Steppenwolf (a disturbing fable about a misanthropic loner), Siddhartha (a mystical tale about man’s search for enlightenment) and Narcissus & Goldmund, about the relationship between an ascetic monk and his vivacious pupil.

The book that won him the Nobel Prize was The Glass Bead Game, which he spent 12 years writing, from 1931 to 1943. It’s no coincidence that this period roughly coincided with the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Hesse detested Hitler, but as a devout pacifist his opposition to the Nazis was oblique. A book about a monastic order devoted to an abstract intellectual pastime, The Glass Bead Game mirrored this retreat into his own world. Hesse wrote relatively little during the last 20 years of his life, and when he died, in 1962, it seemed he’d be remembered (if at all) as a writer of the 1920s. But then an odd thing happened: Henry Miller championed his writing in

America, and during the Sixties he was adopted by the hippies as an unlikely guru. What Hesse would have made of this God only knows. Bookish and reclusive, he was an improbable figurehead for the Woodstock generation. Yet what attracted these dropouts wasn’t his lifestyle but his ideas.

Hesse’s best stories are akin to parables, lessons in how to live your life. Know yourself, be yourself – this is his core philosophy. Wealth, status, family, fidelity – none of these things is important. The only thing that matters is to follow your own path. Naturally, this was just what the hippies wanted to hear, and so for countless long-haired layabouts, his stories became sacred texts (the fact that Hesse’s heroes invariably pay a heavy price for their freedom largely seemed to pass them by). Hesse’s books sold over 150 million copies, but when hippiedom fell out of fashion, so did Hesse.

However rereading him today, I reckon he’s ripe for a revival. His greatest novels were written against the backdrop of the First World War and the rise of Fascism; the hippies read his greatest novels against the backdrop of the Cold War and Vietnam. Like a lot of philosophical writers, his books read better in bad times than good times. With a new war in Eastern Europe, and new worries about the Energy Crisis and Climate Change, this enigmatic German author suddenly seems horribly topical again.

Hermann Hesse: devout pacifist

During the Sixties Hesse was adopted by the hippies as an unlikely guru

Daisy Bates, one of anthropology’s founding mothers, in Ooldea, Australia, 1932

IN SEARCH OF US

ADVENTURES IN ANTHROPOLOGY LUCY MOORE

Atlantic, 320pp, £17.99

‘First came the missionaries, then the explorers and finally the anthropologists. The missionaries wanted to impose something, the explorers mostly wanted to take it away, but the anthropologists were there to meet as equals,’ Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Sunday Times, describing the book as a ‘skilful summary of the early years of anthropology between 1880 and 1939’.

Hitherto, ‘primitive’ cultures across Africa, Asia and the Americas had been studied from the comfort of libraries in Europe and America, but a new generation of scholars revolutionised their discipline by living with their subjects for extended periods of time. ‘Moore’s fast-paced book tells the stories of 12 of these men and women,’ Fara Dabhoiwala enthused in the Guardian, it is ‘packed with vignettes’. Hughes noted that the stories of some of them, particularly women such as Margaret Mead, had been ‘told quite recently in a string of excellent books’. ‘Nonetheless, Moore’s fluent accounts confirm that there is always room for a new view, especially when it is as well done as this one.’

What linked these anthropologists was their interest in using the study of exotic cultures to illuminate the peculiarities of the ‘civilised’ world. ‘Anthropology thus became a means of showing what humans had in common, rather than what separated them,’ Dabhoiwala wrote. ‘Moore doesn’t sugar-coat her protagonists’ many prejudices, their cavalier treatment of their indigenous subjects, or the problematic history of their discipline,’ Dabhoiwala concluded. ‘But though she summarises their scholarly views, the main pleasure of her book lies in its celebration of a dozen colourful, unconventional, free-thinking lives.’

DON’T TRUST YOUR GUT

SETH STEPHENSDAVIDOWITZ

Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20

That feeling in our bones, the one that Americans get in their gut, is called intuition – and we like to believe that when it comes to decisions intuition is on our side. However, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz thinks we give our gut feelings too much credit: they are very often plain wrong. In Don’t Trust Your Gut, he argues that we should put our faith instead in the empirical evidence of hard data.

In the Harvard Business Review, Eric Bonabeau was in agreement with this thesis. ‘Our desire to believe in the wisdom of intuition blinds us to the less romantic realities of business decision making. We remember the examples of hunches that pay off but conveniently forget all the ones that turn out badly.’ It all stems, wrote Bonabeau, from ‘our deep-seated need to see patterns’. But the patterns that we make stem from what we already know and so when confronted by a new phenomenon, ‘our brains try to categorise it based on our own previous experiences, to fit it into one of the patterns stored in our memories.’

Tom Calver in the Times was also intrigued. Take romance and the extraordinary algorithmic world of online dating. ‘The world’s online daters have given researchers billions of data points that can tell us who are the most desired love matches. Looks, money and sexy jobs – lawyers, firefighters and soldiers – all make for success in dating. And height really matters: researchers found that a 6ft man earning £50,000 a year is, on average, as desirable as a similar 5ft 6in man earning £190,000 – a costly six inches.’

WHEN I GROW UP

CONVERSATIONS WITH ADULTS IN SEARCH OF ADULTHOOD MOYA SARNER

Scribe, 304pp, £16.99

Moya Sarner’s quest for insight into what makes us ‘adults’ led her to interview a range of people, using her experience as a journalist to winkle out candour from her subjects. For James McConnachie in the Sunday Times it was a ‘thoughtful and painfully open book’. Sarner suggests we go through phases of development, which she calls ‘grow-ups’, and that being an adult comes down to undergoing this process: it’s an attitude, not something we ever acquire.

What McConnachie missed in Sarner’s account were contributions from non-Western interviewees, any literary examples of investigations into adulthood (Kipling, Auden?) and a sound grasp of how babies affect grown-ups, possibly because Sarner doesn’t have children.

In the Guardian, Salley Vickers

found it a ‘noble if not wholly successful enterprise’. She was impressed by Sarner’s interview technique, but found the theoretical additions — Sarner is in analysis herself and interviewed a range of psychologists for her book — ‘undigested gobbets’. She did, though, agree with Sarner’s eventual vision of an adult as one nourished by an inner child, but feared too many adults were ‘stranded’ in childhood, with nowhere to go.

THE LAST DAYS OF ROGER FEDERER

AND OTHER ENDINGS GEOFF DYER

Canongate, 304pp, £20

Geoff Dyer’s many fans go wild when a new Dyer appears. Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian pondered his gifts. ‘Dyer has always been an essentially youthful literary presence. Across a career that has blended novels, biography, essays, criticism, memoir and journalism there has been a consistently wide-eyed curiosity about the disparate things that catch his attention: DH Lawrence; jazz; Burning Man; Russian cinema; drugs; the Somme …

‘Of course, one of the main things that has always caught Dyer’s attention is Geoff Dyer, and he now attempts to bring his trademark freshness, bounce and humour to an examination of the decidedly un-youthful spheres of “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out”. This is his moment. While Dyer may still be young at heart, he is also now in his mid 60s, had a mini-stroke in his mid 50s and his tennis habit has left him with “multiple permutations of trouble: rotator cuff, hip flexor, wrist, cricked neck, lower back, and bad knees (both)”.’

Ben Hutchinson in the Literary Review wondered, however, if Dyer’s customary tone of ‘amateurism and uncertainty’ had begun to pall: ‘Self-deprecation, pushed to an extreme, risks becoming selfappreciation.’

And in the New Statesman, Lola Seaton agreed. ‘Why, then, are Dyer’s ruminations less consistently engaging here?’ She missed his usual avatar of the slacker who can’t get down to writing. ‘They are presented as emanating directly from Dyer, unmarinated by his pungent literary alter-ego: not the lively musings of a dreamy or cartoonishly agitated writer playing hooky, but the plainer reflections of a diligent author contentedly at work.’

THE REAL AND THE ROMANTIC

ENGLISH ART BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS FRANCES SPALDING

Thames & Hudson, 384pp, £35

English art in the 20 years between the wars is the subject of Frances Spalding’s new book and it is, as she writes in her introduction, ‘richly contrary. Staunch conservatism jostles with energetic revivalism; allusions to the classical past or the early Italian Renaissance become aligned with the pulse of the new; the pursuit of the modern and international is suddenly trumped by a return to native traditions, the local and the vernacular.’

Laura Freeman in the Times was delighted by the book. ‘Spalding’s canvas is panoramic, her brushwork precise. This period of relative peace gave rise to the skirmish of the isms: modernism, constructivism, surrealism, neo-romanticism. Were you Team Abstract or Team Representation? Hampstead or Bloomsbury? East End or Chelsea? Spalding makes the case that the lines aren’t so strictly drawn. The real and the romantic weren’t opposing tendencies, but threads that often intertwined.’

Michael Prodger in the Sunday Times was equally full of praise. He thought the book ‘superb’ and loved the way Spalding illuminated the great variety of different styles and approaches in this time. ‘Traditionally, the period has been held to represent a “return to order” — a retreat to the safety of pre- first world war conventions and paintings of solid figures, landscapes, interiors and still-lifes. What Spalding highlights, however, is that this was just one of many routes taken by English artists and that modernism, despite being inescapably tainted in the public mind by its association with the war, did not disappear but took new, albeit less threatening forms.’

In the Literary Review, David Boyd Haycock, was also admiring. ‘She unravels the complexities of English art in this period with clarity and confidence, moving back and forth in time, and between artists, writers, critics, curators and collectors.’ Furthermore, Spalding introduces readers to little-known women artists without a hint, as Freeman put it, of ‘polemic, tickingsoff and grindings of axes’.

By the Hills, 1939, by Gerald Brockhurst

THE GREAT PLANTBASED CON

WHY EATING A PLANTS-ONLY DIET WON’T IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH OR SAVE THE PLANET JAYNE BUXTON

Piatkus, 54pp, £25

Former management consultant Jayne Buxton got fed up with being told that it was better for health and for the planet to eat less meat. She decided to investigate the extravagant claims of the plant-based diet and found them seriously overrated. Even the hallowed five-a-day gets a pasting.

In the Times, Louise Eccles was stimulated by Buxton’s commonsensical approach. ‘The Great Plant-Based Con is persuasive, entertaining and well researched. I certainly feel better armed for a dinner table debate on the pros and cons of plant-based diets. And the book will help to alleviate the guilt many of us feel about our diets. Buxton says there is no environmentally perfect way to eat, so we should not dive into plantbased food in a blind panic.’

What is more, Eccles noted, we needn’t beat ourselves up about methane emissions from cow burps. ‘According to 2019 government data,

Sign of the times: plant-based burgers emissions from UK livestock constitute just 5 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions; transport and energy supply account for more than half of all emissions.’

In the Telegraph, Boudicca Fox-Leonard interviewed Buxton in the aisles of the local supermarket where she pointed out that so-called healthy plant options have some horrible things in them. ‘Canola oil, yeast, acidity regulator, methylcellulose, corn oil thickener, starch, gelling agent.’ It was, she said, ‘a wasteland of chemicals and oils where nutritious protein should be’.

UNLAWFUL KILLINGS

LIFE, LOVE AND MURDER; TRIALS AT THE OLD BAILEY WENDY JOSEPH

Doubleday, 336pp, £20

‘During her decade as an Old Bailey judge, Wendy Joseph presided over a great number of homicide trials,’ explained Jonathan Buckley in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘but the cases she discusses in Unlawful Killings are not true crime stories in the literal sense – they are synthesised crimes or alleged crimes, distilled from all those real-life calamities in order to illustrate not just the complexities of investigative and judicial procedure, but the wider problems from which each case arises. As one would expect, her writing is characterised by analytical precision, but this is also a book of great empathy and urgency...

‘The first case, the stabbing of a teenage boy, is followed by a woman accused of suffocating her infant daughter, then a death apparently caused by dangerous driving, the strangulation of a young woman by one or both parents and the brutal killing of a woman by her exserviceman husband. Every episode is artfully constructed, with new questions being raised with every twist of the narrative.’

A similarly admiring assessment was given by Kathryn Hughes in her Sunday Times review. ‘None of these cases is simple and all have hinterlands of unfathomable sadness,’ she wrote. ‘Still, Judge Wendy is not here to wring her hands. Rather, she wants to walk us through the arcane legal framework within which she must try these very different defendants, pointing out the places where the law is a “dull-edged tool designed for nothing but the careful application of itself” as well as those other, better moments where it tries to protect the innocent and pursue the guilty. It is these latter places, where the world is briefly set right, that make you want to cheer...

‘In the hands of a less-skilled writer, all this job-speak might start to drag, like the sound of a dentist droning on about root canals. Yet Joseph is such a deft deployer of suspense and nuance that she turns even the Sentencing Act 2020 schedule 21 into a cliffhanger... She is funny too, with a keen eye for the absurdities of the human condition.’

THE WRATH TO COME

GONE WITH THE WIND AND THE LIES AMERICA TELLS SARAH CHURCHWELL

Apollo, 464pp, £27.99

Everyone knows about the notorious role that Birth of a Nation has had in nourishing the historical myths of white supremacists in the US. But what about a seemingly more innocuous classic, Gone With The Wind? Sarah Churchwell’s new book argues that its romanticising of slavery and the Old South, though subtler, may have been more pervasive still. After all, the book still sells 300,000 copies a year and, adjusted for inflation, the 1939 movie remains the highest grossing film of all time. ‘Churchwell has written about American mythology before,’ wrote Alex von Tunzelmann in Literary Review. ‘This time it feels like she has hit the motherlode […] For Churchwell, “Gone with the Wind provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself”.’ She continued: ‘Churchwell swiftly begins to pile up startling evidence in short, pithy chapters. Race, gender, the Lost Cause, the American Dream, blood-and-soil fascism, the prison-industrial complex, a Trumpist mob storming the Capitol in 2021: it’s all here.’

In the Times, Gareth Russell said Churchwell’s attention to how the 1939 film toned down the book’s overt racism ‘show that it is not true — as some of the critics’ critics suggest — that decrying Gone with the Wind is about projecting modern values on the past […] Churchwell is persuasive in arguing that the popularity of this love story, wrapped in the Lost Cause myth, has obscured or sanitised some of the greatest cruelties in American history.’

The Spectator’s Greg Garrett agreed: ‘Stylish and thoughtful, Churchwell’s book is an exemplary exploration of how Gone with the Wind reflects, and continues to affect, American culture.’

LEADERSHIP

SIX STUDIES IN WORLD STRATEGY HENRY KISSINGER

Allen Lane, 528pp, £25

Henry Kissinger (100 next year) served as Secretary of State to two American presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and in his latest book he profiles the careers of six key post-war political figures: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher. ‘The world,’ wrote Andrew Anthony in the Guardian, ‘viewed through Kissinger’s eyes, is not so very different from the kinds of interhouse machinations dramatised in Game of Thrones, and you could picture him as the Hand of the King, forever whispering fiendish plots and dark truths to a paranoid master.’

Anthony reckoned that De Gaulle was the most finely drawn portrait of the six: ‘You sense that Kissinger, who has never undersold himself, admires De Gaulle’s gall, but it’s his statecraft that most commands his respect: “On every major strategic question facing France and Europe over no fewer than three decades, and against an overwhelming consensus, De Gaulle judged correctly.” That’s a large claim, but then Kissinger prides himself on being able to see the grand sweep of history, undistracted by minor diversions.’

However, Phillips O’Brien in the Times thought the start of the book, including the chapters on De Gaulle and Adenauer, a slow burn: ‘They come across as rather onedimensional heroes of the type that can be fashioned in the essays of clever undergraduates who rely on a small number of secondary works to support their work… If one were to sum up this book, it would be to let great leaders get on with the task of ruling, and not complicate their lives too much with ideals or advanced notions of freedom.’

Margaret MacMillan in the Financial Times asked whether individuals matter in shaping the course of events. ‘Henry Kissinger thinks they do,’ she wrote… ‘Of course, it helps if they are surrounded by the best advisers.’ She said that although he has not held office since 1977, he has advised virtually every US president since Nixon. ‘His record and views divide opinion deeply but he is rarely ignored.’ She concluded her review: ‘Elder statesman is an overused term but Kissinger is the genuine article, and worth listening to — even if you choose to disagree with him.’

HOW TO PREVENT THE NEXT PANDEMIC

BILL GATES

Allen Lane, 304pp, £25

Aztecs dying of smallpox, 16th century

Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft, philanthropist and the author of the well-received How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021). He has now turned his attention to pandemic prevention. ‘In summary,’ wrote Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, ‘[Gates] comes up with four recommendations – make better tools to deal with infectious diseases; develop his pandemic fire brigade [Germ, the Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation Team]; help poor countries to develop disease surveillance; and strengthen primary health care systems, especially in low and middle-income countries. Who could argue?’

Well, said Appleyard, almost everyone. The problem, he reckoned, is that humanity’s ‘woes are largely of humanity’s making; even the inhuman virus spread because of globalisation, world travel and the perversity of politics…’ It would be impossible to get everybody to agree to Gates’s plans.

Adam Vaughan in the New Scientist quoted Gates: ‘We’re all eager to return to the way things were before but there is one thing we cannot afford to go back to – our complacency about pandemics.’ Vaughan thought Gates was good ‘at guiding readers through his blueprint for the technological, economic and regulatory fixes to stop the next pathogen from causing global havoc, never assuming too much knowledge.’

Mark Honigsbaum in the Guardian was surprised that Gates didn’t seem interested in ‘addressing the role of information technology in spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines or misinformation about the effectiveness of lockdowns and mask mandates’. Gates was confident that ‘the truth will outlive the lies’ – optimism that Honigsbaum did not share.

Harry de Quetteville in the Telegraph thought ‘it a strangely bloodless book about blood and tears on a vast scale. Such capacity for cool calculation has of course made Gates’s fortune. And, through his foundation, saves countless lives. But in focusing relentlessly on the big picture, he seems oddly detached from the experience of individuals.’

LIFE TIME

THE NEW SCIENCE OF THE BODY CLOCK, AND HOW IT CAN REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR SLEEP AND HEALTH RUSSELL FOSTER

Penguin Life 480pp, £16.99

As Tom Whipple wrote in the Times, ‘When it comes to sleep most of us get too little of it; some of us spend a lot of time obsessing about it; all of us suspect we could do it better.’ Who better to advise us, then, than Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University. In the FT, Anjana Ahuja explained: ‘Pitched somewhere between science book and lifestyle manual, this is a comprehensive manifesto for living in harmony with our body clocks, penned by someone who has devoted his career to studying them. Chasing perfect synchronicity not only increases happiness and mental sharpness, he argues, but potentially reduces the risk of diseases such as obesity and diabetes.’

Foster told Killian Fox in the Observer that stress and anxiety are the enemies of sleep, so we should find ways of destressing – and ideally get rid of all the stuff that will distract us, making sure that the bedroom is dark and cool, while investing in a decent mattress and pillows. Whipple summed up his thoughts: ‘Foster’s book is an odd but compelling mix. At times it is very entertaining; at others a practical self-help guide. Sometimes it is a scientific Q&A. It is rigorous without being academic, fun without being facile.’

Godmersham Park, Kent, was inherited by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight

GODMERSHAM PARK

GILL HORNBY

Century, 432pp, £14.99

In her 2020 bestselling novel Miss Austen, Gill Hornby examined the world of Jane Austen through the voice of her sister Cassandra. Now in her latest novel she turns to Austen again and makes her central figure Jane’s great friend Anne Sharpe, a governess in the household of her brother Edward Knight at Godmersham Park.

Alexander Larman in the Observer was delighted by Godmersham Park which he thought ‘generous-spirited’ and ‘thoroughly enjoyable’. It succeeds, thought Larman, ‘as a page-turning romp on its own terms, but also manages once again to give agency and interest to a minor figure in Austen’s life who has otherwise been ignored by biographers and scholars’.

Anne Sharpe, forced by straitened circumstances into taking up work as a governess to young Fanny Knight, is a classic Austen heroine, a protagonist, said John Mullan in the Times, ‘usually only glimpsed among the busy minutiae of some of Austen’s surviving letters’. Professor Mullan, an Austen expert, said Hornby’s ‘research is impeccable’. He wrote: ‘Most of the crucial scenes in the novel are imagined directly from entries in Fanny’s diary.’

In Metro, Claire Allfree, in her review of an ‘invigorating riff’, particularly enjoyed Hornby’s acute ear for Austenian language. ‘The plot is readable enough but it’s Hornby’s clever way with homage that keeps the reader entertained, be it her tongue-in-cheek aping of the conventions of the genre or her tone-perfect encapsulation of the author’s own amused view of human life.’

THE WHALEBONE THEATRE

JOANNA QUINN

Fig Tree, 560pp, £14.99

An epic debut novel, spanning some 50 years, The Whalebone Theatre tells the story of imagination, anchored in the World War years, and with a large cast including the landed family of Chilcombe, their servants and their many visitors. The Whalebone theatre, not a metaphor, is the stage created by the young child/heroine out of a whale washed up on her Dorset beach. Play becomes play within a play.

Jasmina Svenne was charmed by this ‘moving’ novel by a ‘talented’ writer, and admired the ‘idiosyncratic but always believable’ characters of the three central protagonists. Reviewing for the Historical Novel Society, she was troubled by a few anachronisms but found much to admire. Carrie O’Grady in the Guardian enjoyed a ‘cosy, teatime feeling: delightful to indulge in, but denying us the thrill of fear that comes when characters are really up against it’. For her, Quinn somehow fails to dare in her writing where tension ‘dissolves into nothing’ and a relationship fails to ‘attain its perilous intensity’.

India Knight in the Sunday Times was reminded of the Elizabeth Jane Howard Cazalet novels; The Whalebone Theatre ‘comes with an unexpected 21st-century sensibility so that it feels modern rather than homage-like and is bursting with energy and zip’. An ‘absolute treat of a book’, she affirmed, a book ‘that has you hooting with laughter one minute and feeling absolutely floored the next, not just because of the meanderings of the plot or Quinn’s acute emotional intelligence, but because she is one of those writers who has her finger on humanity’s pulse’.

THE HOUSE OF FORTUNE

JESSIE BURTON

Picador, 416pp, £16.99

Reviews don’t come more deliciously vitriolic than John Maier’s in the Times, who found Jessie Burton’s sequel to The Miniaturist, her 2014 bestseller about 17th-century Amsterdam, a ‘disaster zone of overwriting’. When the novel’s narrator announced that its heroine, 17-year-old Thea, grappling with the new sensation of sexual desire, found ‘there are no words for it’, his response was pure relief. For Maier the book represented the worst kind of ‘drivel’ that people reserve for their summer holiday reading, clichéd in every department.

In the Telegraph, Claire Allfree also found it ‘overworked’ in style, so that the trapped women of late 17th-century Amsterdam it depicts are also trapped by its ‘heavily lacquered prose’. She also compared Burton’s sentences to brickwork, all neatly laid out.

As if reading a totally different book, Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times found it ‘more satisfying’ than its predecessor, ‘a moving celebration of the possibilities for change and regeneration’. The Guardian’s Alex Preston went further, calling it a ‘bold and thrilling sequel’ with a warmer heart and ‘superior in both style and substance’. Preston found a ‘peculiar austerity’ in Burton’s writing, which had the ability to illuminate details and reanimate the physical and emotional landscape of early modern

Amsterdam — a claim about 180 degrees away from Allfree’s sense that the novel fatally lacked any ‘animating spirit’.

THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

BENJAMIN MYERS

Bloomsbury, 256pp, £16.99

THE SIDEKICK

In the Guardian, Hephzibah Anderson set the scene: ‘It’s 1989, and over the course of a blazing Wiltshire summer, a series of mysterious and increasingly complex crop circles appear in the county’s ripening wheat fields….They’re soon attracting international attention from the media, UFO enthusiasts, dowsers, exorcists and tourists.’

‘The Perfect Golden Circle,’ explained Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, ‘is a fictional account of the [two] outsider artists behind these mammoth works… Intrinsic to their work is the ethos of never harming the land. They are careful not to break any stalks when they bend them down, are passionately upset about river pollution, fly-tipping, unnecessary road building and the newly discovered hole in the ozone layer.’ It’s a ‘parable of the ecological and artistic affairs of man that never disappears up its own circle’ and ‘deserves top ranking in any list of the best books about rural England’, Katsoulis concluded.

Margie Orford, however, was not so enthusiastic in the Spectator: ‘It all reads a bit like a lockdown fever dream,’ she wrote… ‘Why the men hang out together, or what has set them traipsing around fields on moonlit nights, is not made clear because neither is articulate… and so the result for this reader was one of intense irritation.’

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman said he could use many adjectives to describe the novel: ‘fascinating, clever, angry, poignant, beautifully constructed but the one I shall plump for is: it is lovely. I do not use that word lightly. It is a work of love, and a work about works of love, and a work that evokes a sense of love in the reader… It is, as well as lovely, a deeply serious book.’

BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

Faber, £18.99 368pp

Benjamin Markovits has plundered his past life as a professional basketball player in The Sidekick, a tale of childhood friendship. Brian Blum, white and middle-class, doesn’t make the grade in basketball and ends up as a sportswriter and his friend Marcus Hayes, black and from a single-parent home, ends up a star NBA player. The novel is narrated by Brian who, decades later, is researching a biography of Marcus.

This, for Stuart Evers in the Spectator, was ‘the novel’s principal strength, but also its weakness’. Evers thought Blum, a lonely bachelor, just too male and stale to be compelling company. The Sidekick, he thought, ‘has the distinctive topography of a classic American story: sports as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations; the innocence of pick-up games in schoolyards vs the cynicism of the big leagues. To a greater or lesser extent, these themes are present in The Sidekick. The trouble is that the reader must go through Blum to find them.’ In the Times, Houman Barekat also found Brian heavy going. ‘You don’t have to be boring to be an elite sportsperson, but it helps — and therein lies the problem… Blum’s dull resentment at living in his friend’s shadow makes for a rather meagre psychodrama.’

But in the Literary Review, Joseph Owen thought Brian, lonely and unlikeable, a truly believable creation. ‘His narrow and indulgent narrative voice is a great strength of the book.’ Markovits, thought Owen, ‘fashions an interior consciousness defined by self-deception, a character inhabiting a slowly shrinking world of inferiority and sadness’. And the anonymous blogger alifeinbooks agreed, finding poor Brian ‘engaging, self-deprecating and often funny’.

A golden age: aerial view of crop circles

NONFICTION

A NOVEL JULIE MYERSON

Corsair, 288pp, £16.99

Julie Myerson’s nonfiction account of her 17-year-old son’s cannabis addiction, published in 2009, met with much controversy. Thirteen years later, the author has published a novel about a teenage girl’s addiction to heroin and called it, Nonfiction, a title which, said Hephzibah Anderson in the Observer, sounds ‘overly meta’. Myerson is teasing her critics by making fiction and nonfiction indeterminable. Her novel, Anderson observed, ‘blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love’.

Anderson enjoyed ‘its bareknuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted’. The mother in the novel observes that for a writer ‘nothing stops them chronicling even the most devastating experiences’. Anderson admired Myerson’s courage not to spare herself nor the reader: ‘here is a book that instantly sucks the reader down into a swirling vortex of grief, trauma and powerlessness’.

Claire Allfree, in the Telegraph, found the revisitation of the subject, this time disguised as a novel, unappealing, ‘while Nonfiction reads on one level as a writer defending the right to write what she likes in whichever way she pleases, its knowing proximity to real life is also unavoidable’. She concluded, ‘What I couldn’t get over was how little I actually cared about the novel’s blood and guts; the unfolding tragedy at its centre.’ Alex Peake-Tomkinson in the Spectator agreed, ‘I did feel it might now be time for Myerson to look beyond her own life.’

A suburban ‘dark, really dark story’

THE SCHOOLHOUSE

SOPHIE WARD

Corsair, 289pp, £16.99

Sophie Ward’s first novel was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize. Her latest one, The Schoolhouse, is set between the past and present. It’s December 1990, and a 10-year-old schoolgirl, Caitlin, vanishes, and DS Emma Carter ‘suspects there’s weirdness afoot at the local primary school’, according to Susie Goldsbrough in the Times.

‘Meanwhile, on Holloway Road in north London,’ she continued, ‘news of the case drags up long-suppressed horrors for Isobel, a librarian whose mysterious childhood “accident” – somehow linked to the experimental school [The Schoolhouse of the title] chosen by her hippy parents – has left her solitary, self-loathing and deaf.’ Goldsbrough thought the story ‘dark, really dark’ and ‘would make a brilliant Scandi-style television drama, with its creepy suburban landscape of marshland, canal and empty newsagent-lit streets’.

Clare Clark in the Guardian, however, believed the novel ‘accelerates towards an improbably overcooked conclusion’. She thought it a pity because the novel ‘has much to say about childhood and, in particular, the failures by adults in authority to protect the children in their care… A child betrayed by the adults in her life may survive, is [Ward’s] fierce message, but the damage lasts a lifetime.’

Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph considered it a ‘largely conventional crime novel’, and believed Ward has a gift for ‘bringing characters to life’ and that her writing ‘always delivers a real emotional impact’. Stephanie Cross in the Daily Mail, however, was dismissive: ‘Ward is an interesting writer,’ she wrote, ‘but sadly here her themes — institutional failures; the slipperiness of the truth — all feel well-worn, even as the drama becomes increasingly outlandish.’

GHOST LOVER

LISA TADDEO

Bloomsbury, 240pp, £16.99

‘Ghost Lover,’ wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, ‘is a nine-course tasting menu that is all spice and no flavour. It picks up on the sex-and-trauma scenarios from Taddeo’s debut novel, Animal (2021), a blood-soaked revenge thriller set in Los Angeles… Yet the main dish is always the same facile serving of female jealousy. In every effortfully flippant tale, self-conscious women compete to be the most desirable female in the room.’

As a whole, this collection of stories ‘is a mixed bag’, wrote Sarah Gilmartin in the Irish Times. ‘The primary issue is one of repetition, in style, theme, character and authorial voice. Some stories – the poignant Maid Marian, the powerful A Suburban Weekend – come close to greatness, tautly written tales of loss and unlikely redemption. Others are pale imitations, ghostly approximations of superior bedfellows.’

Stephanie Merritt in the Observer thought the book’s biggest weakness was ‘Taddeo’s fondness for overblown similes that strive so hard for originality they become completely unmoored from meaning’. But on a positive note she believed Taddeo forced ‘the reader to acknowledge the grey areas and ambiguities around sexual power play’.

‘For all its hilarious incoherence,’ Thomas-Corr concluded, ‘Ghost Lover ultimately inspires depression. When will publishers stop throwing money at women just because they are writing about sex? If a male author imagined pan-frying his penis, there’s no way he would be acclaimed as a fearless chronicler of desire. Ghost Lover doesn’t feel like progress. As one woman in Taddeo’s final story tells another: “You’re full of poisonous energy. I’m going to need to do a juice cleanse when I get home.”’

This collection of stories is a mixed bag

FIGHT NIGHT

MIRIAM TOEWS

Faber, 251pp, £14.99

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including Women Talking, a chilling tale of systematic subjugation in a rural religious colony. She grew up in Manitoba, the daughter of Mennonite parents; her father and only sister both committed suicide. ‘Fight Night is an exuberant celebration of female resilience,’ wrote Stephanie Merritt in her review for the Observer, ‘though it too is shot through with grief and pain, and its power is in showing how these are not merely inseparable but interdependent.

‘The plot is spare and focuses on the relationship between three generations of women in one Canadian family, most particularly on the bond between the narrator, Swiv, and her grandmother, Elvira.’ Merritt thought Toews had ‘created a gem of a book, sharp edged and shining, a paean to the strength of women that posits humour and hope as a choice in the face of suffering’.

In the Guardian Dina Nayeri thought the novel was a ‘triumph of devotion and imagination’ and ‘rooted in the understanding that we keep our loved ones close with every strange, shameful, hilarious detail we commit to memory, recording device or paper; that the dead leave the world altered, that life is continually renewed, and that we are made to survive the most unbearable losses’.

‘Fight Night is mostly a formless stream of consciousness in which jokes and feelings are given priority,’ explained Melissa Katsoulis in the Times. ‘Toews uses comedy to make sense of trauma, arranging the comic one-liners and slapstick right up against overtly serious conversations and thoughts. Packaging psychological complexity into beguiling, moreish, easygoing prose is an unusual skill’. Although Max Liu in iCulture did not think Fight Night was Toews’s best novel, he thought it ‘entertaining and affecting, fiction written in and about the teeth of life’. He felt bereft when he finished it and shaken by its power.

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GOOD POP, BAD POP

AN INVENTORY JARVIS COCKER

Jonathan Cape, 368pp, £20

Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian said the book ‘ambles through 25 years, tracking Cocker’s worldview as it takes shape in his home city of Sheffield. It opens in the present day, as he’s clearing out the loft of his London house. There is a lot of stuff in there, and each item has a story. His task is to decide whether to keep each thing or “cob” it (throw it out). Mulling over these ancient treasures puts him in philosophical mood, and the book soon expands into both an autobiography and a treatise on pop.’

‘The book is poignant in a subtle, understated way; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for the age of the Ford Cortina,’ wrote Will Hodgkinson in the Times. A turning point was a disastrous fall while showing off. ‘The ensuing broken bones in his feet, legs, wrists and pelvis meant the 22-year-old was trapped in hospital for months, surrounded by proper men who had done far more terrible things to themselves in mines and on building sites. That’s when the revelation came: instead of trying to be a lofty artist, he should write about the world around him.’

Kate Mossman in the New Statesman said: ‘A picture emerges of a young punk formed not by rage and alienation but by pop dreams and a predilection for jumble sales. Jarvis has, I think, spent his whole life being much more enthusiastic and loving of things than he appeared to be. He always withheld something, and perhaps that made him look cold. In turning out the contents of the loft, he has let the warmth back in.’

A turning point was a disastrous fall while showing off

A LIKELY LAD

PETE DOHERTY WITH SIMON SPENCE

Constable, 336pp, £20

This is an ‘authorised biography’ of Doherty, stated Declan Ryan in the Observer, ‘put together by writer Simon Spence from more than 60 hours of conversations during lockdown. As the singer notes in the foreword, he’d been clean of drugs for more than a year when they began the process and he’s a lucid, honest presence.’

That’s more than can be said for much of the singer’s career. ‘In 2003, shortly after he realised that he had become a full-blown heroin addict,’ explained Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times, ‘Doherty was playing the Coachella festival in California with his band the Libertines... he was lying in a bush with a bottle of whiskey when Iggy Pop ran past sipping water. “He stopped and said something like, ‘I’ve been there, but now I’m into jogging,’” Doherty recalls forlornly. “Even Iggy Pop had abandoned me.” ’

Segal said: ‘Received wisdom suggests it was Doherty’s drug problems that scuppered the band... His spin here is that his estrangement came from being a true renegade, railing against “the industrialisation” of the Libertines as they increasingly left him behind...’ Then ‘Doherty threw himself into his addictions to heroin and crack, his second band, Babyshambles, and a relationship with model Kate Moss.’

‘ “I insisted she get on a bus with me,” writes Doherty,’ said Kate Hind in the Mail on Sunday: ‘“She went everywhere in a limo usually. We got dressed up in disguise, put on wigs, and jumped on the bus around London. We used to have a bit of a laugh.”’ But it wasn’t all so amusing: ‘Doherty claims Moss “covered this teddy bear of mine, called Pandy, in petrol and set him alight”.’ Segal called the book ‘chatty, intractably charming, yet mottled with darkness’.

LIVING ON A THIN LINE

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY DAVE DAVIES

Headline, 288pp, £20

‘This updated memoir – a previous account, Kink, was published in 1997 – has its origins in a period of intense rehabilitation and re-evaluation prompted by a stroke the guitarist suffered in 2013,’ wrote Kitty Empire in the Guardian. ‘After his stroke, he had to relearn how to play guitar. His enthusiasm for neuroplasticity – the way the brain lays down new pathways – is one of the book’s more endearing aspects.’

The Kinks co-founder was not always so endearing. In the Times Ian Winwood said: ‘John Lennon described him as a “cynical, obnoxious bastard”. “To be fair, he had a point,” Davies concedes.’

Empire added: ‘Davies is at pains to detail how awfully he behaved. The evidence is here, in the baiting of [his brother] Ray (Ray baits back), the volatile relationship with drummer Mick Avory (Avory attacked Davies onstage once)... He’s in no way contrite enough, however, about his habit of ditching wives and small children willy-nilly when a better offer came along.’

‘Davies portrays his fractious relationship with his brother as an ocean of unknowable currents. Ray’s decision to move to New York in 1976 is mentioned with a shrug and the words: “Putting space – the entire Atlantic ocean – between us was not the worst thing that could happen”,’ said Winwood. ‘Davies’s curious decision to recuperate at his sibling’s north London home after a ministroke 38 years later provides a new seam of complaint. “I sometimes feel he’s like a vampire the way he draws so much energy from people” was the verdict after a fortnight’s board and lodgings.’