Ask Virginia Ironside

Review of Books

Spring round-up of the reviews

Somerset Maugham – Michael Barber on the 20th century’s bestselling author William Cook admires the creator of Hornblower Biography & Memoir Second World War Music History Novels Children’s books

Review of Books

Issue 59 Spring 2022

Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie

Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson

The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story by Clover Stroud

Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution by Terence Dooley

Not Far from Brideshead by Daisy Dunn

Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea by Tom de Freston

One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick

A Class of Their Own by Matt Knott

Tales of a Country Parish by Colin Heber-Percy

This Mortal Coil: A History of Death by Andrew Doig

Constable: A Portrait by James Hamilton

Against the Tide by Roger Scruton, ed Mark Dooley

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

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, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jamil Popat For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk Spring has not started well: news from Ukraine continues to be overwhelming and utterly heartbreaking… In a recent article in the Times, AN Wilson wrote that ‘some of the greatest salvoes fired against the Soviet system were not fired from guns but from the pens of novelists’. He went on to describe how by their fiction Boris Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn did ‘more damage to the Soviet system than any amount of non-fictional argument’. Wilson concluded: ‘Napoleon, like Putin, subscribed to the “Great Man” view of history. Tolstoy [in War and Peace] showed that the mysterious Fate which moves events and human beings is bigger than a tyrant’s vanity, and it always wins in the end.’

Others, of course, have written about the power of the pen: George Whetstone in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582, wrote: ‘The dashe of a Pen is more greeuous [grievous] than the counterbuse [counter use] of a Launce; Rosencrantz, in Hamlet, says that ‘many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither’; while in 1621 Robert Burton wrote in his The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘…how much the pen is worse than the sword’. And a few centuries later the novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton has Cardinal Richelieu saying:

‘True, This! –Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold The arch-enchanters wand! – itself a nothing! –But taking sorcery from the master-hand To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike The loud earth breathless! – Take away the sword –States can be saved without it!’

Let’s hope so. And during those times when the news just gets too much, why not look inside this supplement … there are plenty of books to explore as a brief respite from the horrors of the present.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

10 SECOND WORLD WAR 11 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

16 CURRENT AFFAIRS 18 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

William Cook on CS Forester

20 MISCELLANEOUS 23 FICTION

Michael Barber on Somerset Maugham

24 MUSIC

25 NOVELS 28 PAPERBACKS 30 CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Emily Bearn

THE BURGUNDIANS

A VANISHED EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF 1111 YEARS AND ONE DAY BART VAN LOO, TRANS. NANCY FOREST-FLIER

Apollo, 624pp, £30

Bart Van Loo’s history of the Burgundian Empire has proved a publishing sensation in Europe, having sold 230,000 copies in hardback, and was described in Le Soir as ‘a history book that reads like a thriller’. The Burgundian ‘empire’ lasted from 1369 until 1477, when it was absorbed into the Habsburg Empire. Yet, as Dominic Sandbrook explained in his Sunday Times review, ‘Burgundy was never a kingdom in its own right, but an autonomous grey area, uneasily poised between France, England and the Holy Roman Empire.’

It benefited from French monarchical weakness, but it was also an economic powerhouse, encompassing dynamic, urbanised Flanders. ‘A complicated story, then – but a thrillingly colourful and entertaining one too. Stuffed with elaborate feasts and bloody battles, Van Loo’s book has been an enormous success in his native Belgium and it’s easy to see why. He has clearly done his research, but wears his learning lightly and keeps the emphasis firmly on story and character. If there’s any justice, a blockbuster TV series awaits.’

Simon Sebag Montefiore chose it as one of the Books of the Year in Aspects of History magazine. It is ‘a thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy that was the most advanced and sophisticated economy and the most extravagant flashy court of its time,’ he wrote. ‘Filled with flamboyant murderous and debauched dukes, courtesans, courtiers and maniacs, it is a total pleasure to read.’

In the Times, Paul Lay explained that Burgundy’s ‘name was eradicated in the 18th century only to resurface as a regional council in 1972…Yet Burgundy still owes a debt to its great medieval dukes, who form the heart of Van Loo’s entertaining study. For its wine, among the finest and most expensive in the world, is the fruit of the pinot noir grape that Philip the Bold promoted in his Great Wine Law of 1395. There are worse legacies.’

And in the New Statesman, Michael Prodger welcomed Van Loo’s ‘lively, anecdotal unpicking of this fascinating but nebulous entity’, and concluded that ‘if we have reached peak Tudor, the Burgundians are even more rewarding’.

Philip III, Duke of Burgundy, 1396-1467

Burgundy still owes a debt to its great medieval dukes

THE TICKET COLLECTOR FROM BELARUS

AN EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND BRITAIN’S ONLY WAR CRIMES TRIAL MIKE ANDERSON AND NEIL HANSON

Simon & Schuster, 384pp, £20

Anthony Sawoniuk was a ticket collector in Bermondsey. He also became the only person in British history to be tried successfully for war crimes. He was convicted in 1999 for the murder of 18 Jews in his Nazioccupied hometown of Domachevo in Belarus and served six years in prison before he died. As David Aaronovitch wrote in his review in the Times, this book illustrates the gulf ‘between court truth and historical truth’, and shows that ‘there are several distinct kinds of justice’.

Sawoniuk ‘ignored the advice of his own lawyers and took the stand’, wrote Saul David in the Daily Telegraph. ‘The old man’s angry testimony is the high point of the book... The authors have interviewed most of the key players in this heart-rending tale and the result is a sensitive and well-balanced account of an extraordinary moment in British legal history.’

For Kathryn Hughes, in the Sunday Times, the book was a ‘brilliantly gripping mix of true crime and narrative history’. She welcomed the fact that the authors ‘avoid piling on the horror, letting the court transcripts speak for themselves. Perhaps the authors’ greatest scoop is getting access to the annotated trial transcript of the judge, Sir Humphrey Potts. He was a scrupulously fair and somewhat chilly presence, but his marginalia bring what could have been dry legalese crackling into life. In particular M’lud could not believe the bold-faced ludicrousness of Sawoniuk’s claim that the Jews of Domachevo were never subject to special measures.’

SOLDIERS

GREAT STORIES OF WAR AND PEACE MAX HASTINGS

William Collins, 496pp, £25

‘As Max Hastings recognises, a book about soldiering should not concentrate on fighting, for that

would give a false impression,’ wrote Gerard DeGroot in the Times. ‘The warrior’s life is instead a cacophony of mundanity – marching, drill, sleeping, eating, getting drunk, telling stories, getting laid, killing lice. Hastings has spent most of his professional life researching or observing war. This book, which he has edited, is a glimpse into his junk drawer, a clutter of material that retains value but lacks obvious employment.

A sentry in the trenches, Ovillers, 1916

‘It’s a collection of brief observations on the soldiering life from a variety of authors dating from biblical times to the present day. They are anecdotes – some profound, some silly, others rather trivial. None is definitive or earthshattering, but together they provide a pointillist portrait of enthralling sensitivity.’ Soldiers’ stories, partly true but exaggerated, ‘tumble from the pages of this book like gems from a pirate’s chest’.

In his review for the Sunday Times, Nick Rennison found that ‘the sheer variety of voices for which Hastings has found room is impressive... The anthology opens with biblical warriors (Joshua at the fall of Jericho) and Herodotus’ account of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae; it ends with Hastings’s report from the Falklands conflict, a Russian soldier recounting the dog-eat-dog conditions in his regiment fighting in Chechnya, and a female member of a US intelligence unit describing her discomfort with interrogating suspects in Iraq.’ Although ‘the most famous names of military history, from Julius Caesar to Erwin Rommel, have their places, yet some of the most compelling tales are those of ordinary, often reluctant warriors’.

A GRAND TOUR OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX WITH JERRY TONER

Profile, 304pp, £16.99

This is the third book in a trilogy which started with How To Manage Your Slaves in 2009 and continued with Release Your Inner Roman in 2016. Reviewing Toner’s ‘engaging, witty and learned’ first book in the London Review of Books, Tim Whitworth explained that How to Manage Your Slaves ‘masquerades as a newly discovered tract by one Marcus Sidonius Falx. Each of the 11 chapters consists of a short essay in which “Marcus” offers the benefits of his experience, along with some fortifying anecdotes, and a brief commentary by Toner himself discussing the context and parallels from genuine ancient sources.’

In this third volume, Toner, who is Director of Classical Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge, ‘again spins a tale that is enjoyable and informative’, wrote Patrick Kidd in the Times. ‘Each chapter of Falx’s travel guide is followed by a commentary by Toner giving the references in classical literature to support the seemingly tall tales.’ Not only are places ‘vividly brought back to life’, such as Ephesus, with its population of 150,000, but ‘there are also some lovely, if gruesome, tales of the road, such as when he visits the Olympic Games and describes a competition in the pankration, or no-holds-barred wrestling, that needed a stewards’ inquiry to decide the winner after both competitors died. In the end, the crown went to the body whose eyes had not been gouged out. In warning about unscrupulous inn owners he shares the story about one infamous for serving human flesh for dinner. Toner notes in his commentary that the medical writer Galen wrote that man-meat is quite tasty and like pork.’

NEW ROME

THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EAST AD395-700 PAUL STEPHENSON

Profile, 432pp, £30

Stephenson takes an unconventional approach in this history of the decline of the Roman Empire and the first centuries of Byzantium. As outlined by the anonymous reviewer in Publishers Weekly, Stephenson ‘draws on the “new science of Roman history” to reveal how climate change, pandemics, invading tribes, and near-constant warfare led to the decline of ancient cities whose culture and tax revenues underpinned the imperial system.

‘For example, radionuclide and cave mineral deposits reveal that the empire experienced a long period of declining sunlight and less rain beginning in the middle of the 4th century, which contributed to a loss in cultivable land and the disruption of trade networks... Skilfully interweaving economic, environmental, and social history, this impressive chronicle offers an eye-opening perspective on a period of dramatic change.’

Gerard DeGroot, the reviewer for the Times, had mixed feelings about the book. ‘The revelations offered by new scientific approaches to history are concentrated in the book’s first section, which is by far the most illuminating. Stephenson examines ordinary life, painting a vivid and intriguing picture. Intricate details render these people very familiar.’ However, ‘after his delightfully detailed first section, Stephenson shifts abruptly to high politics. This section appears almost to have been

written by a different author; it is gratuitously complex and often tedious. The Romans built a mindnumbingly tortuous bureaucratic system – the origin of the adjective “byzantine” – but instead of trying to make sense of the complexity, Stephenson writes for that handful of readers who find incoherence illuminating... The confusion is worsened by Stephenson’s fondness for phrases such as “lacunose hexametric imperial encomium”. (I looked it up, but won’t risk an explanation.)’

DEVIL-LAND

ENGLAND UNDER SIEGE 1588-1688 CLARE JACKSON

Allen Lane, 684pp, £35

Clare Jackson claims that England in the 17th century was a ‘failed state, a byword for seditious rebellion, religious extremism and regime change’ – in the words of a Dutch pamphleteer in 1652, no longer ‘Angel-Land’ but ‘Devil-Land’.

‘Much of that century’s political devilry, Jackson contends, derived from a single source: the question of England’s proper relationship with Europe,’ John Adamson noted in the Sunday Times. ‘Jackson rises ably to the challenge.’ Leanda de Lisle in the Times agreed, describing the book as ‘a wonderfully clear and original history’.

‘Devil-Land works as a history of English foreign policy in the 17th century,’ Rhys Jones observed in the Financial Times. ‘But, really, it is about how Europeans, their ambassadors and envoys, found the English both baffling and infuriating.’ Jessie Childs in the London Review of Books and Lucy Wooding in the Literary Review both argued that this approach has its limitations. ‘Their utterances are undeniably fascinating,’ Wooding wrote, ‘but the individuals concerned were highly partisan, often ill-informed and generally shaped their comments to fit a particular agenda at home.’

Although Childs maintained that ‘for most of the century England was nothing like a failed state’, she conceded that ‘the research is impressive, the writing lucid and every page thought-provoking. It is also tremendously entertaining.’ ‘Parallels with the present are

English Ships and the Spanish Armada, August 1588, English school, 16th century

Europeans found the English both baffling and infuriating

obvious,’ Jones wrote. ‘But it sometimes reads like a history of English exceptionalism, even though the intention is clearly to characterise the English as exceptionally dysfunctional.’

Ronald Hutton in the Times Literary Supplement observed that English interest in their most dysfunctional century has tended to peak at moments like the present, ‘as the place of England in the world, in Europe, and in its own archipelago, seems once more to be in question’.

THE BBC

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY DAVID HENDY

Profile, 638pp, £25

Published to mark the BBC’s centenary, Hendy’s semi-official history ‘is both engaging and fair’, wrote Allan Massie in the Scotsman. It ‘is very much the case for the corporation, but it is a case that needs to be made’. Andrew Anthony in the Observer was left unimpressed. The reader is introduced to the trio who founded the BBC – Cecil Lewis, John Reith, and Arthur Burrows – and ‘is prepared for a dramatic tale of innovation and determination as the trio succeed in establishing their new business amid a hostile and powerful Fleet Street resistance.

‘Yet no sooner does Hendy introduce these characters than they largely slip out of the narrative. Instead, an array of other functionaries appear and pretty soon Lewis is gone, the BBC has become a corporation and listening to the radio has shifted from an obscure hobby for the wealthy to a national pastime. Exactly how that transformation takes place is lost in an abundance of information that never quite forms into a dynamic narrative.’ A sense of the unique product of the BBC is ‘what is most conspicuously missing from this conscientious but rather pedestrian history’.

Given the scale of Hendy’s task, wrote Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times, his approach is to make his book a ‘people’s history’ by ‘putting the voices of individuals centre stage’. However, ‘this laudable ambition is soon crushed by the weight of institutional detail. The

loudest voices belong to senior executives, not actors or presenters, let alone ordinary viewers and listeners. Even landmark programmes such as EastEnders and Doctor Who come and go in a few sentences, with no new revelations or insights.’

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO COLOUR

A CULTURAL HISTORY JAMES FOX

Allen Lane, 320pp, £25

The Elgin Marbles once showed tantalising traces of the vivid colours in which they had originally been painted. Then, in the 1930s, they were given a too-thorough clean by over-diligent curators using wire brushes and copper chisels. The colour was scrubbed off forever, leaving what an art historian called ‘lumps of stone … robbed of life, dead as casts’.

In her review of art historian and broadcaster James Fox’s book in the TLS, Kassia St Clair used this sad episode to illustrate a ‘stew of prejudices and assumptions about European identity. For Western European intellectuals, a marked preference for form and line over hue was a hallmark of the rational and civilised.’ Chris Allnutt took up the theme in the Financial Times, noting that ‘with more than 40,000 dyes and pigments available today, we live in an age of unprecedented vibrancy and Fox’s histories remind us that it has not always been so’.

In the Literary Review, Adrian Tinniswood enjoyed Fox’s range. The book ‘is all about context and the meanings that colours have acquired in different eras and different civilisations (though in his introduction Fox also provides a straightforward – and admirably brief – account of the physics). Taking seven colours – black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green – he devotes a chapter to each, offering a wide-ranging and often intriguing series of meditations on their changing significance.’ In the Times, Laura Freeman loved it – ‘a brilliant cultural history in undeservedly drab covers. Dreary hardback, sparkling text. Fox paints a great rainbow of natural history, philosophy, religion, art, optics, myth and the occult.’

Architectural gem: The Circus, Bath, built between 1754 and 1768

THE GEORGIANS

THE DEEDS AND MISDEEDS OF 18TH-CENTURY BRITAIN PENELOPE J CORFIELD

Yale, 488pp, £25

In the Times Literary Supplement, Judith Hawley called The Georgians an ‘ambitious chronicle’. Corfield ‘can write with confidence and authority about the whole sweep of the period’, she continued, ‘because she has already contributed greatly to our knowledge of developments that shaped the age, including the rise of the professions, urbanization and democracy... There are chapters on sexuality, literacy, religion, politics, science and technology, trade and overseas expansion. She also looks into social diversity, stressing that although society remained hierarchical, there was a great degree of flexibility and fluidity in its structure, especially among the middle classes.’

Andrew Taylor, in his review for the Times, found Corfield ‘particularly interesting on the quintessentially British subject of class. In 1760 the income of a skilled Sheffield knife or fork grinder could equal that of a poor curate, although one was a lower-class artisan and the other thought of himself, in theory at least, as an educated gentleman... Corfield is adept at switching from the general to the particular.’

In the Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook admired the book for finding ‘lots of room for eccentric and contradictory voices’. He was frustrated, however, that Corfield ‘stubbornly shuns any hint of narrative or character. Because the book is entirely thematic, we don’t really get a sense of change over time: one quotation might come from the 1690s, the next from the 1780s. Potentially exciting moments come and go in a few words: the Seven Years’ War, arguably the world’s first global conflict and a pivotal moment in the making of the British Empire, gets half a sentence.’

THE GATE TO CHINA

A NEW HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC AND HONG KONG MICHAEL SHERIDAN

Wm Collins, 512pp, £25 This entwined history of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong illustrates how the financial prowess of the latter informed the economic liberalisation of the former but without the once-hoped-for social reforms. ‘You can understand a lot about China’s relations with the rest of the world,’ wrote Stephen Vines in the Sunday Times, ‘by looking at how Beijing has dealt with Hong Kong.’ In the handover negotiations of the 1980s, China still sought global approval, whereas ‘now the rulers of Beijing are confident not just of their economic ascendancy but also of their global political power’.

The significance of HK goes back, wrote Isabel Hilton in the Observer, to ‘the unequal treaty by which Britain acquired what was seen in the 19th century as an unpromisingly barren rock. A rock that was to grow into one of the world’s most dynamic and

prosperous societies.’ This was in no small part, she pointed out, due to the proximity of China and the ‘benefit from the talent and energy of the millions who fled there’.

Hilton described the book as a ‘compendious new history’ which elucidates the role played by the prosperity of HK to the formation of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s ‘strategy to revive China’s desperate fortunes after 30 years of Maoist revolution’. Deng ‘transformed the material fortunes of the People’s Republic but China’s new middle-

class aspirations for a more open society became a casualty of [current leader] Xi’s formula of a firmer party grip on this complex society’. The result is that: ‘An intense, grievancefilled nationalism is the party’s preferred narrative for a new era of strategic confrontation.’ Watch out, Taiwan.

Xi Jinping: grievance-filled nationalism

THE GREEK REVOLUTION

1821 AND THE MAKING OF MODERN EUROPE MARK MAZOWER

Allen Lane, 572pp, £30

Mazower’s book ‘offers the best and fullest explanation, to date, for a series of events whose effects would change the entire geopolitics of Europe’, declared Roderick Beaton in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Written with compassion and understanding for the human cost of that achievement, it deserves to remain the standard treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come.’

Between 1821 and 1829 the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire and won their independence, with help from Britain, France, and Russia. ‘As the subtitle of Mark Mazower’s new book maintains, events in Greece 200 years ago helped shape modern Europe,’ wrote the Economist’s anonymous reviewer. ‘His elegant and rigorous account also holds lessons for modern geopolitics: about the galvanising effects of violence, the role of foreign intervention and the design flaws in dreams.’ In the Financial Times, Tony Barber praised the author for his ‘engaging combination of fast-flowing narrative and insightful analysis’, while Daily Telegraph reviewer Julian Evans found the book ‘superbly subtle and thorough’. For Lea Ypi, in the New Statesman, Mazower uses ‘vivid detail, impeccable scholarship and great nuance’ to show ‘how the modern idea of the nation emerges out of the complex, sometimes random and often messy interactions between a plurality of agents’.

It was left to Noonie Minogue, writing in the Tablet, to depart from ruminations about geopolitics and emphasise the ‘epic narrative, both scholarly, breathlessly page-turning and packed with hauntingly romantic characters. Few historians dig so deep or with such sympathy into what history felt like to those living through it... anyone in search of an opera plot should scour these drama-packed pages.’

THE SEARCHERS

THE QUEST FOR THE LOST OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST

Bloomsbury, 336pp, £25

One hundred years ago the word ‘closure’ had yet to acquire a palliative connotation, but it sums up what hundreds of thousands of bereaved British and Commonwealth families sought after the Great War. Not only did every home have ‘an empty chair’. More than half a million of them also had what Simon Heffer in the Telegraph calls ‘a void’. Their loved ones were ‘missing’ – presumed dead, but with no known grave. Luckily, help was at hand from one of the war’s ‘most compassionate, if forgotten, departments’, a Red Cross unit whom Robert Sackville-West calls ‘The Searchers’. These tenacious men and women dedicated themselves to identifying as many of the unknown bodies as possible, a macabre task that continues to this day.

In the Sunday Times John Carey described Sackville-West’s book as ‘compelling and often horrifying’. He reminded readers that, thanks to shell fire, ‘there were often no bodies to retrieve’. How fitting that Sir Edward Lutyens should style his shrine in Whitehall the Cenotaph, meaning, in Ancient Greek, ‘empty tomb’. Noting that ‘some families did not rely simply on detective work to trace the missing’, Simon Heffer said that ‘this was a golden age for spiritualists, all of them charlatans to some degree or other, but endorsed by no less popular and respected a figure than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ – whose ‘journey from materialist to messiah’ Sackville-West describes.

Another famous writer, Rudyard Kipling, pulled strings to get his severely myopic son John a commission in the Irish Guards, only to lose him soon after at the Battle of Loos. John’s body was not identified until 1992, far too late to console his father, but a tribute to the War Graves Commission’s dedication.

Canadian wounded, and abandoned Churchill tanks after the Dieppe raid

OPERATION JUBILEE

DIEPPE, 1942: THE FOLLY AND THE SACRIFICE PATRICK BISHOP

Viking, 400pp, £20

Soon after the Dieppe Raid had taken place, one of the officers involved said that it was a sea parallel of the charge of the Light Brigade. It lasted ten hours and out of 5,000 Canadian troops, there were 3,367 casualties, a rate of 68 per cent. The RAF lost 106 aircraft and the navy lost 33 landing craft and a destroyer, all for the sake of testing the feasibility of a landing and gleaning intelligence.

‘Bishop’s account of the operation is the best I’ve read,’ wrote Allan Mallinson in the Spectator. ‘He understands war, he understands battle, and he understands men. He marshals the material well; and there’s plenty of it, for failure generates much paper.’ Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, criticised the planning of the raid, while Vice-Admiral Louis Mountbatten, in charge of Combined Operations Headquarters, exaggerated the lessons learned in order to deflect criticism.

In his Sunday Times review, Max Hastings praised Bishop’s ‘exemplary account of this wartime fiasco... It was afterwards claimed that Dieppe taught important lessons for D-Day. This is true only if it is indispensable to stage a fiasco ahead of a proper operation of war. Bishop tells the sorry story with superb authority and verve.’

According to Daily Telegraph reviewer Saul David, ‘Bishop’s instinctive grasp of human nature and forensic analysis of the surviving evidence combine to pinpoint exactly why the hare-brained mission was launched and who was to blame... The hundred or so pages covering the raid itself are a masterclass of heartstopping historical narrative as we accompany the doomed soldiers on their hopeless mission.’

HITLER’S AMERICAN GAMBLE

PEARL HARBOR AND THE GERMAN MARCH TO GLOBAL WAR BRENDAN SIMMS AND CHARLIE LADERMAN

Allen Lane, 510pp, £25

‘Given the choice,’ said Arthur Herman in the Wall Street Journal, ‘Hitler always went for broke. “It’s the only call I’ll ever make,” he told Goering.’ So after Pearl Harbor he gambled that America lacked the will to fight a war on two fronts, and would offer only token support to Britain and the Soviet Union. With his troops within sight of Moscow, he declared war on America. This, say Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, sealed his fate. Alas, they argue, it also sealed the fate of Europe’s Jews, who up until then had been held hostage. Unable to strike at America’s Jews, who he thought controlled Roosevelt, Hitler approved the Final Solution, which also, paradoxically, hampered the Nazi war effort.

Simms and Laderman concentrate on the hectic five days between Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s joining forces with Japan. ‘By unfolding the story in real time,’ said Saul David in the Times, ‘the authors are able to emphasise the contingency of the decision-making process. But the drawback of this constantly shifting narrative – across cities and even continents – is that the reader is often left confused, even seasick from the back and forth.’

The New York Times’s Benjamin Carter Hett was more appreciative: ‘The greatest strength of this book is its success in accomplishing something supremely difficult: it reminds us how contingent even the most significant historical events can be, how many other possibilities lurked beyond the familiar ones that actually happened – and how even the greatest leaders often have only a shaky grasp of what is happening.’

BROTHERS IN ARMS

ONE LEGENDARY TANK REGIMENT’S BLOODY WAR FROM D-DAY TO VE DAY JAMES HOLLAND

Bantam, 592pp, £25

‘This is war as it should be written,’ Gerard DeGroot proclaimed in the Times, ‘painful to read, but impossible to put down. Seldom is war so vividly described – ordinary men facing extraordinary horror.’

Waging war in a tank might seem an improvement on the trenches, Patrick Bishop explained in the Telegraph, but these men had just exchanged one form of hell for another and casualties were far higher. Holland follows a single regiment, the Sherwood Rangers, ‘using his trademark technique of immersive detail and focus on a cast of well-defined characters’.

‘Going to war in a tank,’ Bishop observed, ‘meant men lived cheek-byjowl and depended utterly on each other...’ And ‘Inside the tank,’ DeGroot wrote, ‘they smelt an essence of cordite, fuel, sweat and urine. Outside was the ever-present stench of rotting corpses.’

‘James Holland’s greatest strength as a military historian is that he brings humanity to his work,’ Katya Hoyer noted in the Spectator. ‘The book is a powerful and moving reminder that there is tragedy in statistics.’ And Nathan Greenfield in the TLS agreed: ‘Holland takes us down to the individual’s experience.’

‘The power of Holland’s book lies in the painful intimacy he creates,’ DeGroot commented. ‘We grow fond of these soldiers, then they die....’ He concluded: ‘Caught up in the drama of battle, we sometimes forget the good men who died. Holland, to his credit, forces us to remember.’

THE WOMEN OF ROTHSCHILD

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS DYNASTY NATALIE LIVINGSTONE

John Murray, 480pp, £25

‘My heart sank when I received this book: it looked too beautiful to be serious,’ wrote Abigail Green in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Yet within a couple of chapters, I was hooked.’ Green pointed out that ‘every Rothschild history relishes the fact that while her children and grandchildren lived grandly in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, Gutle [the original matriarch] never left the modest home she and her husband had shared in Frankfurt’, but that ‘no Rothschild history I have read thinks to put Gutle centre-stage’. In Livingstone’s book ‘she emerges as a person, not a trope: fielding questions from the police during the Napoleonic occupation, hiring a follower of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to educate the younger children, and worrying about her daughters’ prospects.’

In the patriarchal structure of the Rothschild family, the women were ‘a vital component of the family’s soft power’, wrote Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times. They were not permitted to join the family banking business, but they instead made their mark as political hostesses and philanthropists and later as activists, academics or patrons of the arts. ‘The only thing missing in this otherwise hugely entertaining book is any discussion of the downside of all that money – yes, it conveyed great freedom and privilege, but, like being a member of a royal family, it must colour the way everyone treats you. Otherwise, this is a fascinating story, stylishly told.’

In what Mail on Sunday reviewer Kathryn Hughes called a ‘scintillating family saga’, Livingstone ‘reveals that the Rothschild ladies were, if anything, even more extraordinary than their fathers, brothers and husbands... Several of the women in sketch to quite do him justice’; his fraught relationship with his PayPal co-founder Elon Musk ‘could be a book in its own right’, he noted.

Richard Waters in the FT also felt Chafkin had reduced Thiel to an unlikeable villain, the lead character in a ‘parable of Silicon Valley’, rather than delving deeper into his complicated activity as an investor. For Waters, too much of the book relied on unattributed sources, people terrified of Thiel’s retribution. Naughton similarly wrote of the ‘reality distortion field’ surrounding him.

Anna Wiener’s judgment, in a long and thoughtful New Yorker review, was that Thiel is ‘genuinely eccentric’ and his contradictions a key part of his appeal: ‘There is something for everyone.’ Then again, she admitted that ‘what registers as mystique may simply be practised opacity’.

Women were ‘a vital component of the family’s soft power’

Louisa (née Montefiore), Lady de Rothschild, 1860s this book played a key part in helping families escape from Hitler’s Holocaust. Later, some of them contributed to the setting up of Israel. With consummate skill, Livingstone weaves together all these threads, the dark as well as the light, and the result is both thrilling and moving.’

THE CONTRARIAN

PETER THIEL AND SILICON VALLEY’S PURSUIT OF POWER MAX CHAFKIN

Bloomsbury, 400pp, £25

Libertarian kook, Bond supervillain, right-wing provocateur, inscrutable genius or sociopathic nihilist? The complex figure who, reviewers agreed, fits all these descriptions yet remains an enigma is the Founders Fund billionaire Peter Thiel. Villain, though, was the preferred description for most, casting Thiel as a ruthless entrepreneur, destructive disrupter and hater of all things liberal, who had helped bankrupt the Gawker site for outing him and had funded PayPal, Facebook and Donald Trump as his way of undermining capitalism’s liberaldemocrat status quo.

The Observer’s John Naughton enjoyed Chafkin’s ‘detailed, impeccably researched account’ of the rise of Thiel’s personality cult. In the Times, Hugo Rifkind wanted more detail still: ‘There is a little bit too much going on with Thiel for any

1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS

A MEMOIR AI WEIWEI

Bodley Head, 400pp £25

This is a ‘double memoir’, wrote Andrew Russeth in Art in America. ‘The first follows [Weiwei’s father] Qing, who was born into a well-off family in a village in Jinhua in 1910, travelled to Paris in the 1920s, and later became enmeshed in the politics of revolutionary China. The second follows Weiwei himself, who

inherited his father’s artistic passions and his stubborn independence.’

Sean O’Hagan in the Observer described how Ai’s poet father was one of 300,000 intellectuals rounded up in 1957 and ‘exiled to the country’s remote border regions to undergo “reform through labour”’. In 1967 Qing was sent to a desert region known as Little Siberia and Ai, not yet ten, chose to go with him. ‘While Ai inherited his father’s stoicism, wrote O’Hagan, ‘the defiance that would characterise his later activism was all his own.’ In 1989, ‘Ai compulsively watched CNN reports of the massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square’ and returned to Beijing. From there, the book ‘documents his art world ascendancy alongside his bruising battles with the Chinese authorities’, including detention and house arrest and a Kafkaesque 11-week interrogation.

Oliver Basciano in the Guardian thought it was in the ‘recollections of Weiwei’s teenage years in “Little Siberia”’ that the autobiography is at its most vivid. ‘Living in a dug-out pit, the boy foraged for firewood to keep warm, his father forced to clean latrines in which “faeces would freeze into icy pillars”’. Basciano wondered why ‘we hear little about the conceptual work that initially made his name’, concluding that for Weiwei art is too much of a safe haven, preferring to turn to ‘documentary-making to highlight the government’s corruption and censorship’. Politics, for Weiwei is in the end ‘a kind of readymade artwork’, he concluded — and considerably more dangerous.

Ai Weiwei, 2017: stubborn independence

MIGHT BITE

THE SECRET LIFE OF A GAMBLING ADDICT PATRICK FOSTER WITH WILL MACPHERSON

Bloomsbury Sport, 246pp, £14.99

In his late teens, Patrick Foster was a student at Durham University and a brilliant cricketer with Northamptonshire county Cricket Club. He had luck, looks and talent and his future was glowing. But, as Peter Carey in iNews put it, ‘this enviable combination started to slip away when he entered a betting shop for the first time’.

Foster’s account of his years as a gambling addict begins at Slough station where, £500,000 in debt, he is steeling himself to jump under a train. He was running 75 gambling accounts under 65 names. Melanie Reid in the Times found his book an ‘unflinching account of entitlement, self-hatred and degradation’. The book’s title refers to the name of a horse on which Foster bid to win £200,000, losing the lot when it came second to Native River. Altogether, Foster lost nearly £4 million and lied to everyone he knew, loved and worked with. He was saved from jumping under the train only by a text from his brother telling him he was not alone.

In the Daily Mail Roger Alton thought it ‘no lolloping misery memoir’, noting particularly Foster’s description of how deeply hidden his addiction was: ‘He’s very likeable, sporty, good at his job and friendly, while riddled with this crippling secret vice.’ It should, thought Alton, ‘be in the hands of anyone who has eyed a bet once too often’.

WINDSWEPT AND INTERESTING

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY BILLY CONNOLLY

Two Roads, 389pp, £25

Billy Connolly could talk about his life for hours, literally, in his stand-up appearances, without so much as a note. Chutzpah? Or did he just have ‘too many funny stories lining up in his head demanding to be told?’ asked Dominic Maxwell in his Times review.

Dictated into his phone during lockdowns, the book is packed with anecdotes but few revelations; as Lynn Barber pointed out in her three-star Telegraph review, ‘we knew the story already’ – of the boy who went from Glasgow tenement childhood to wealthy Florida retirement, via sexual abuse by his father, heavy drinking, comedy fame and film success alongside Judi Dench — thanks to two biographies by Mrs Connolly, Pamela Stephenson. It’s by no means a misery memoir, reviewers noted. Aidan Smith in the Scotsman claimed there were few shocks as you could hear Connolly onstage impersonating his childhood persecutors and ‘making them seem funny’.

So what’s to be gained from a new memoir? For Maxwell, Stephenson’s Billy (2002) was ‘the deeper dive, but this is where to go to hear Connolly’s life alchemised into anecdote’. Fiona Sturges, reviewing the audiobook version in the Guardian, argued that ‘his reading of his memoir’ is surely the ‘next best thing’ to his live appearances, as ‘the joyful wit is all present and correct’. Barber, though, suggested: ‘If you adore Billy Connolly you will love this book, but it’s still better to watch his old stage performances on YouTube.’

Billy Connolly: joyful wit

TERENCE

THE MAN WHO INVENTED DESIGN STEPHEN BAYLEY AND ROGER MAVITY

Constable, 328pp, £25

Sir Terence Conran, whose Habitat stores transformed the aesthetic of the 20th-century British home, died in 2020. Hardly had the dust settled on his reputation than it has been stirred afresh by design-meisters Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity, former employees of Conran.

In Terence, Bayley and Mavity

have penned a portrait of their mentor which settles ancient scores. They have written overlapping chapters, with Mavity’s tending to fawning and Bayley’s to fury.

In the Observer, Anthony Quinn found the alternating sections hard to read. ‘The contradictions of his character toll with maddening repetition through the book: he was a generous host and a penny-pincher; a voluptuary and a puritan; a tyrant and a democrat; a promoter of talent who skimped on crediting his colleagues.’ Quinn noted that Bayley, despite his fury, seemed unable quite to shake off the courtier’s mantle: ‘It is rather like watching a man angrily shaking his fist while unable to get up off his knees.’

In the Sunday Times, John Walsh enjoyed the bonfire. ‘The authors are well placed to identify Conran’s salient features, good and bad. The latter preponderate,’ he wrote. ‘In the index, entries include “ambitious”, “bully”, “callous”, “capricious”, “charming”, “childlike”, “competitive”, “controlling nature” and “cruelty”; and later “psychopathic trait”, “rude”, “ruthless”, “self-love”, “superior”, “tyrannical”, “unpredictable” and “untrustworthy”.’

Still, for all that, as Quinn noted, Conran ‘persuaded people to think about objects as something beautiful as well as useful. Britain was a better place because of him.’

ALL ABOUT ME!

MY REMARKABLE LIFE IN SHOW BUSINESS MEL BROOKS

Century, 460pp, £16.99

‘Brooks attacks his autobiography with a wholly characteristic lack of modesty,’ wrote Laurence Maslon in the Washington Post. The director cut his teeth on Sid Caesar’s TV comedy show in the 1950s, and enjoyed success with Carl Reiner on the comedy LP The 2,000 Year Old Man, before writing and directing his first movie, The Producers, in 1967. ‘Where the book comes up short is in any exploration of doubt, introspection or analysis... Handwringing is simply not a part of Brooks’s sunny disposition.

‘Indeed, the book’s most rewarding chapters are its earliest, with Brooks’s accounts of Depression-era Brooklyn and the European front of World War II (and the early days of television, for that matter). This isn’t Clifford Odets or Norman Mailer, but an epic adventure of possibility and positivity... While other comedians of his era – Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Larry David – were neurotic messes, Brooks was essentially, as the 2,000-year-old man put it, “jaunty jolly.”’

Geoffrey Macnab, writing in the i newspaper, found the book ‘a frustrating affair’, which ‘begins with promise’ as Brooks ‘evokes his Brooklyn childhood in very lively fashion’, yet ‘strangely, the more success Brooks achieves, the less engaging the autobiography becomes. Once Brooks’s filmmaking career begins in earnest with The Producers, the book turns into a series of self-congratulatory case studies...’ Brooks is ‘an amiable narrator’ and ‘many of his jokes still hit the mark’, but he ‘refuses to look too deeply into his private life’ and ‘we’re left with page after page of ever more enervating and self-serving showbiz anecdotes’.

Mel Brooks at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in 2010

SEX CULT NUN

FAITH JONES

HarperCollins, 400pp, £16.99

With a title like Sex Cult Nun, Faith Jones’s memoir should fly off the shelves. Marion Winik in the Washington Post pointed out that the lurid title ‘doesn’t remotely capture the flavour of Jones’s thoughtful, carefully recounted memoir. Not to imply the book is not disturbing. There are many images you will wish you could forget, and descriptions of sexual mores and practices that call into question basic human values. But there are no nuns, and Jones’s life was anything but chaste, though not by choice.’

Jones was raised in a commune on the island of Macau, part of a cult, The Children of God, founded in 1968 by her grandfather, David Brandt Berg. As Winik puts it, ‘This was no tiny splinter group of crackpots, but rather a highly organised international group that ran for almost 50 years with some 10,000 live-in disciples in 170 countries. Its extensive, secretive bureaucratic infrastructure involved so many acronyms and neologisms that the author provides a glossary.’ Life was dictated by Brandt’s ‘Law of Love’, which encouraged incestuous relationships with children, family members and fellow cult-members that believed in the impending apocalypse.

In an interview with the website Bitchmedia, Jones, now a lawyer, was asked why she thought so many cults were apocalyptic movements. ‘Psychologically, to get people to act, you have to have a sense of urgency. An imminent threat. It’s that imminent threat of danger, attack, and catastrophe that gets people to act, oftentimes against their best interests.’

MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES

JOAN COLLINS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 373pp, £20

These diaries ‘weren’t written in the usual way’, minor movie star Collins told a Guardian interviewer. ‘I never put pen to paper. Between 1989 and 2006, I talked into a Dictaphone practically every night when I got home, then put it away and forgot about it for years.’ Collins ‘has promised us “unapologetic” – for which read, “bitchy” – but woo-eee, it is savage’, declared Camilla Long in the Sunday Times. ‘A special grade of revulsion is reserved for people with bad plastic surgery – Collins views this is as almost a moral failing: ugly and disorganised. One “ghastly” party, given by Melanie Griffith, is “a complete crush of hags, facelifts and ancient old men in flashy suits”.’ Celebrities are skewered, but the book is also full of ‘literally hundreds of people you’ve never heard of, sometimes for pages’.

For Roger Lewis, in his Daily Telegraph review, the diaries ‘show how much time she spends with incredibly boring people, whose only distinction is their wealth, the source of power... For long stretches, Collins’s diaries – which start in 1989 and end in 2009 – are as flat and uninformative as a Christmas round robin... what eventually emerges, giving the book its depth, is Joan’s real pain and a sense of waste. Her intensity and ambition are there to conceal a lot of insecurity... She is more circumspect than she pretends – names of malefactors are concealed as “a well-known actor”, “the woman is a celebrity”, “a society hostess”. Stories peter out. It was a book I couldn’t wait to defenestrate.’

THE CHANCELLOR

THE REMARKABLE ODYSSEY OF ANGELA MERKEL KATI MARTON

William Collins, 344pp, £25

The first English-language biography of Germany’s joint-longest-serving Chancellor, by Hungarian-American Kati Marton, was received very differently on either side of the Atlantic. It was favourably received by the New York Times, where Jacob Heilbrunn called it a ‘masterpiece of discernment and insight’, but it drew stinging notices from UK reviewers. They all, though, granted that Marton’s task was made exceptionally difficult by Merkel’s intensely private lifestyle and refusal to give interviews.

Peter Conradi in the Sunday Times conceded that Marton gave ‘lively descriptions’ of Merkel’s top-level meetings, thanks to the high-ranking movers and shakers she interviewed. As the widow of Richard Holbrooke, US ambassador to Germany 1993-94, she had also met the Chancellor. This closeness, though, led her to an almost ‘sycophantic’ approach that didn’t view Merkel’s legacy critically, especially her handling of the 2015 refugee crisis.

The Times’s Oliver Moody similarly commended Marton for her supply of anecdotes but deplored her inaccuracies and ignorance of European politics. ‘The book’s account of virtually every aspect of Germany’s political system, from coalition formation to Covid policy, is variously shallow, incomplete, misleading or flatly wrong.’

In the Guardian, Philip Oltermann disputed Marton’s depiction of Merkel as a feminist and suggested she found Merkel commendable as the not-Trump, her chancellorship ‘gossip-proof’. He was still waiting for a study that probed Merkel’s private motivations: ‘Marton’s diligently compiled but often overly reverential chronological overview is not it.’

Angela Merkel: intensely private

It’s an almost

‘sycophantic’ approach

Bob Mortimer: heartfelt testament

AND AWAY…

BOB MORTIMER

Gallery, 323pp, £20

‘I have never minded playing second fiddle,’ Bob Mortimer – known for much of his career as Vic Reeves’s sidekick – writes in this poignant and self-deprecating memoir. It tells the story, said Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian, of a man who nursed no ambition to perform. The youngest of four brothers who lost his father in a car crash at the age of six, Mortimer was ‘a desperately shy boy who suffered such crippling social anxiety that he endured three years of university barely speaking to another soul’. He was working, unhappily, as a council solicitor when he first saw Vic Reeves perform; ‘it was an epiphany’. A friendship, and eventually a collaboration, with Reeves, followed.

This book is framed by Mortimer’s near-death experience when he had a heart attack in 2015. His friend Paul Whitehouse took him fishing to help him recover his spirits, and that turned into the unexpectedly ruminative TV show Gone Fishing. That showed a less madcap side to the comedian and, he writes: ‘In many ways, the show is the culmination of my journey back from sidekick Bob to standalone Robert.’

Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times called And Away a ‘delightful, quietly revelatory memoir’: ‘And… is not marked by tears-of-a-clown cliché, however (although Reeves becoming weepy in the hospital, aware that “one day in the future we wouldn’t have each other to play with”, might break delicate readers).’ She concluded: ‘It’s a precarious world, but And Away … is a heartfelt testament to the magic of finding your happy place within it.’

MATERIAL GIRLS

WHY REALITY MATTERS FOR FEMINISM KATHLEEN STOCK

Fleet, 320pp, £16.99

Few academic philosophers can expect to write a book which garners the kind of attention received by Material Girls. Kathleen Stock’s gender-critical position on biological sex has sparked calls of transphobia and forced her resignation from her teaching post at Sussex University.

In the Observer, Gaby Hinsliff set the scene for confused onlookers. ‘To gender-critical thinkers, gender is a social construct imposed on women and to be resisted, since it’s driven by what men want them to be (Stock describes herself as a gender non-conforming lesbian). But trans people use the phrase “gender identity” to mean an innate sense of being male or female, which is fundamental to their identity because it explains why they reject the sex others perceive them as. To one side, gender is a terrible trap; to the other, it’s liberation from a trap.’

In Philosophers Magazine, Julian Baggini was ‘baffled’ by the ‘Manichean orthodoxy’ displayed by Stock’s detractors. ‘It is astonishing that Stock’s conclusion “As binaries in nature go, the sex division is one of the most stable and predictable there is” is now considered by many not only to be outrageous but prejudiced. If the argument that the gender critical position is transphobic rests on the denial of biological sex, it must surely collapse.’

In the Evening Standard, Stella O’Malley felt an ‘intense relief’ that light had been shed on an issue many find difficult to get their heads round: ‘finally a comprehensive account of gender identity theory was presented and explored with both clarity and depth’. And Sarah Ditum in the Daily Mail pointed out that although the reader ‘will have to grapple with some high level conceptual thinking – and even some diagrams’, the most important revelation to be found in Material Girls is the ‘curious mind and a generous spirit’ of Kathleen Stock herself.

Kathleen Stock: generous spirit

WELCOME TO THE WOKE TRIALS

HOW IDENTITY KILLED PROGRESSIVE POLITICS JULIE BURCHILL

Academica, 256pp, £24.95

For her fans, Julie Burchill always delivers. To publicise Welcome to the Woke Trials she penned a characteristically splenetic article in the Daily Mail (illustrated, inevitably, with a photo of Meghan Markle): ‘Wokeness is the roar of the entitled mediocre, desperate to hold centre stage and terrified by any challenge to their flimsy sense of self – a temper tantrum with a socially concerned alibi.’

However, the book only just made it onto the shelves, the author having fallen foul of the very attitudes she derides. It couldn’t have been better timing, publicity-wise. In Areo magazine, Brandon Robshaw filled us in: ‘Hachette Book Group had originally agreed to publish it, but dropped the deal after Burchill engaged in a spat on Twitter that it deemed problematic. She then placed it with Stirling Publishing (Edinburgh), but this time she pulled the plug, after it emerged that its director had links to a far-right group. The book was finally published in November 2021 by Academica, a press based in London and Washington, DC, that specialises in scholarly nonfiction.’

Burchill loves a spat but few newspaper reviewers took up the cudgels. In the Times, it was left to Burchill’s fellow traveller Quentin Letts to sound a deliriously approving klaxon. Her book had the ‘force of epic poetry’, he wrote: it was ‘a long, filth-flecked yell against the illiberalism of “the woke insanity”.’ Burchill is ‘lewd, loud and careless of polite opinion’, Letts went on. ‘She writes breezily about her bisexual bed-hopping and drug-taking and jobs from which she has been sacked. She moons at convention and roars at fashion’s wind.’

As Robshaw put it: ‘if you want an entertaining, over-the-top, anti-woke rant, full of scorn and spleen and sarcasm, fill your boots.’

INVISIBLE CHILD

POVERTY, SURVIVAL AND HOPE IN NEW YORK CITY ANDREA ELLIOTT

Hutchinson Heinemann, 624pp, £16.99

In 2013, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott ran a front-page series on the life and experiences of an 11-year-old girl called Dasani (named after a brand of bottled water), who lived with her parents and seven siblings in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Dasani captured the city’s heart – she became ‘homeless kid of the year’ – and the series focused attention on the pitiful state of the city’s homelessness provision.

In Invisible Child, Elliott expands and continues her coverage of Dasani over eight years of reporting. ‘And from the first page we are gripped,’ Christina Patterson said in the Times. ‘Dasani often wakes to “the popping of gunshots”. When she goes to use the communal bathroom, she knows she risks rape or assault. But she still does backflips at the bus stop, dances at the welfare office, “makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks”.’ Harrowing though Dasani’s

‘It reveals huge systemic inequality, with rich and poor living cheek by jowl yet worlds apart’

story is, Patterson wrote, ‘this is magnificent work, which will surely be a classic to sit alongside those by giants such as Studs Terkel and George Orwell’.

Anita Sethi in the I Paper said the book ‘unflinchingly reveals huge systemic inequality, with rich and poor living cheek by jowl yet worlds apart. The book sensitively traces Dasani’s life, coming of age as New York’s homelessness crisis deepens by the day.’

Elliott’s own paper the New York Times agreed: ‘The reporting has an intimate, almost limitless feel to it, the firsthand observations backed up by some 14,000 pages of official documents, from report cards to drug tests to city records secured through Freedom of Information Law requests. The result of this unflinching, tenacious reporting is a rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you’ve read them.’

SICK MONEY

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY BILL KENBER

Canongate, 432pp, £18.99

Billy Kenber’s new book looks in depth at the global business of pharmaceuticals – and it discovers, few readers will be surprised to find, that corporate greed and exploitation plays just as much of a part in the story as the selfless desire to push the boundaries of medical science and save lives. A host of books with titles such as Bottle of Lies, Bad Pharma, Empire of Pain, Dopesick, Selling Sickness and The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It have already told us as much.

That said, as Martha Gill observed writing in the Times, the Covid crisis did rather a lot to reform Big Pharma’s image: ‘A pandemic illustrates rather sharply the importance of having a $1 trillion industry dedicated to finding new medicines and translating those discoveries into billions of doses.’ Even so, Gill added, Kenber reveals that the story wasn’t that simple. Drug companies don’t like vaccines (they eradicate diseases so you don’t get repeat customers), and when Covid struck most were reluctant to get involved until they were promised billions in government subsidies. Even then, they preferred to sell the drugs to rich countries at high mark-ups and declined to share intellectual property rights with poorer countries.

Kenber’s indictment of the industry, she said, distinguished itself from its predecessors ‘by its investigative power and meticulous clarity’, and its scope goes far beyond Covid. It begins with the discovery of penicillin in 1928 and takes us to the present day ‘in an account studded with victims, villains and heroes’, notable among them ‘the South African drug company prepared to destroy stocks of a cancer medicine for children rather than bring down the price’.

The book ends with a call for action: ‘There is still hope for redemption, and Kenber lays out a plan for reform,’ said Gill. She added: ‘Whatever the remedy, it can’t come too soon.’

SHARE POWER

HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN CHANGE THE WAY CAPITALISM WORKS – AND MAKE MONEY TOO MERRYN SOMERSET WEBB

Short Books, 160pp, £9.99

In her new book the editor-in-chief of Money Week magazine, Merryn Somerset Webb, draws a bead on fund managers. She says it’s manifestly unfair that this ‘smallish group of very well paid, mostly group-thinking men’ ignores all but the wealthiest of their shareholders. In theory, anyone who belongs to a pension fund or has an ISA – at least 20 million of us – is entitled to vote on how the fund is invested. In practice we very rarely get the chance. The technology exists for fund managers to canvas us. Isn’t it

time, asks Somerset Webb, that they made use of it?

To show what individual shareholders can achieve Somerset Webb recalls the Gilbert brothers, two American champions of ‘corporate democracy’, who made a nuisance of themselves at the AGMs of the 1,500 companies in which they held shares. One of them blew a clown’s horn every time a CEO said something he considered silly.

The Gilberts were wealthy individuals who inherited money made in the California Gold Rush. But as Emilie Bellet noted in the Financial Times, ‘this concise and enjoyable read’ proves you don’t need to be a ‘big player’ to have your say. ‘There are a number of small steps that individual investors can take to ensure they have a greater share in the businesses they ultimately own. These include being more visible and vocal by banding together in grassroots shareholder activist groups or engaging with investment platforms, fund managers and even local politicians.’

In the Times, Robert Colville described Share Power as ‘a breezy, accessible and admirably brief summary of what the stock market is, how it works, and where it isn’t working well enough …. Somerset Webb says it took her a while to write because “there are too many long books around – and I suspect very few are read from cover to cover”. This one should be.’

Merryn Somerset Webb: accessible

CS Forester’s stories are not only escapist entertainment but also great works of literature, believes WILLIAM COOK

‘It was not long after dawn that Captain Hornblower came up on the quarterdeck…’ So begins one of the finest series of historical novels in the English language, a series I devoured as a teenager then put aside for 40 years. More fool me. It’s only now that I realise what CS Forester’s wiser fans have always known: that his seafaring yarns aren’t just escapist entertainments – they’re also great works of literature. You can see why they were beloved by so many great writers, from Raymond Chandler to Ernest Hemingway.

Has Forester been forgotten? Not quite. Most of his books are still in print and he’s still familiar to readers of a certain age, but for one of the most widely read authors of his generation he’s endured a pretty steep decline. He’s been eclipsed by Patrick O’Brian, an author I’ve tried to like but can’t get along with. O’Brian’s literary talent is indisputable, but Forester does something O’Brian doesn’t do for me – he makes you want to turn the page.

He was born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in 1899 in Cairo, the son of an expat English teacher. His parents separated when he was a toddler and his mother brought him back to England. A voracious reader from an early age (Jane Austen and Henry James were among his childhood favourites), he was educated at Dulwich College and then Guy’s Hospital, but he didn’t take to medicine and left without a degree. He volunteered for the army in the First World War but failed the medical, whereupon he turned to writing.

Success came early. Aged 24, he wrote Payment Deferred, a thriller which spawned a movie, starring Charles Laughton. He subsequently wrote two good novels about the Peninsular War (Death to The French and The Gun, filmed as The Pride & The Passion, with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren) and two very good novels about the First World War (The African Queen, which became a fine film, with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and The General, which HG Wells – quite rightly – called ‘a magnificent piece of work’).

As a result of his prowess as a storyteller, he was invited out to Hollywood, and even though his flirtation with screenwriting was only fleeting (‘the fools ran after me and I ran after the whores’), he fell in love with California and ended up living there. It’s an amusing irony that his quintessential English hero, Horatio Hornblower, was conceived so far from home.

If Forester had never created Horatio Hornblower, he would still deserve to be remembered, but it was these timeless books that secured his reputation. Tautly written, tightly plotted and insatiably readable, they paint a vivid picture of the Royal Navy’s glory days during the Napoleonic Wars that (for me, at least) remains utterly unsurpassed. The historical background is impeccable, and the battle scenes are electric, but it’s Hornblower himself who makes them so absorbing. Fearlessly brave but sick with nerves before every battle, bold and resolute but secretly tormented

It is Horatio Hornblower’s vulnerability that makes him heroic

by doubt and indecision, he’s so sympathetic and believable that we can’t help but adore him.

The first few Hornblowers, written in the late 1930s, were very well received, but during the Second World War Forester devoted himself to the war effort, travelling on a Royal Navy warship to research his wartime novel, The Ship (highly praised at the time, it doesn’t read so well today). He then travelled to the Bering Straits, to write a similar book about the US navy, but during the voyage he contracted arteriosclerosis, which left him disabled.

Mercifully, this handicap didn’t affect his writing, and the Hornblowers he wrote after the war were just as gripping. His last Hornblower book, left tantalisingly unfinished when he died, aged 66, shows as much promise as his first one, written 30 years before. He married twice and had two children. Despite the ill-health that plagued him, he led a happy, productive life. Max Hastings, who knew him as a child, recalls ‘a lean, bony, ascetic figure with a twinkling eye which caused him to reflect in everything he wrote his consciousness that the play of human affairs is always a comedy’.

But it was a comedy tinged with tragedy, and that is why his books endure. Intrinsically reserved and diffident, yet forthright whenever duty calls, it is Hornblower’s vulnerability that makes him heroic, a vulnerability he shared with his affable, crippled creator. ‘Hornblower was no born fighting man,’ observed Forester in Lord Hornblower, arguably his finest book. ‘He was a talented and sensitive individual whom chance had forced into fighting, and his talents had brought him success as a fighter just as they would have brought him success in other walks of life, but he had to pay a higher price. His morbid sensitiveness, his touchy pride, the quirks and weakness of his character, might well be the result of the strains and sorrows he had had to endure.’

From the Book of Hours of Alexandre Petau, Rouen, 16th century

HIDDEN HANDS

THE LIVES OF MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR MAKERS MARY WELLESLEY

riverrun, 370pp, £25

‘This rather short book is packed with wonderful stories beautifully told,’ Gerard DeGroot wrote in the Times. ‘Her love of medieval manuscripts shines through her elegant and charming book,’ Linda Porter commented in the Literary Review.

‘Manuscripts do more than convey information. Their creation calls for imagination, physical effort, a love of meaning and beauty. They are works of art in their own right,’ Jonathan Sumption enthused in the Spectator. ‘Mary Wellesley is a serious scholar, with years of experience of handling these fragile artefacts. Her achievement in this book is to convey something of these sensations…. Few people have described the experience so eloquently.’

She ‘attempts to dispel the widely held belief that all medieval scribes were monks, and to illuminate the women who participated in medieval English literary culture’, Sara Fredman noted in the TLS. Radiocarbon analysis of teeth belonging to a 1,000-year-old female skeleton revealed tiny deposits of lapis lazuli pigment acquired when she occasionally sucked her paintbrush – proof that women worked as manuscript artists and were trusted with the most expensive materials.

‘The range is remarkable,’ Sumption marvelled, in a book encompassing the most important manuscripts, such as the early 8th-century St Cuthbert Gospel, to the more obscure Gwerful Mechain, a gloriously bawdy 15th-century Welsh female poet. Boyd Tonkin in theartsdesk noted that ‘Wellesley also tries to recover the names and the stories of long-departed book creators’, women like the nun Leoba, ‘the first named English female poet’.

‘Wellesley tracks the after lives of her chosen texts,’ Tonkin noted. ‘She demonstrates how “the whims of scribes, the biases of collectors and the vagaries of chance” determined which works lived, and which died.’ The 15th-century The Book of Margery Kempe was only discovered when the owners of a country house were looking for a ping pong ball in a cupboard and stumbled on the manuscript instead.

‘A book so sublimely conceived and beautifully written deserves better presentation,’ DeGroot quibbled, bemoaning the paucity and positioning of the illustrations, but overall found it ‘an expression of love – deeply intimate and delightfully self-indulgent…’

ALLEGORIZINGS

JAN MORRIS

Faber, 207pp, £14.99

‘All the mysteries of creation, the Milky Way and the armadillo, art and mathematics, even love and hate, even the loss of a child — perhaps the whole damned caboodle is itself no more than some kind of majestically impenetrable allegory,’ said Jan Morris in her book, published posthumously, and so concludes her long life of writing, experience, adventure and reflection.

Allegorizings is a collection of short essays, which Alex Clarke in the Guardian found beguiling. They are ‘filled with whimsy’ and ‘jeu d’esprit’ and Morris proves that ‘being fanciful is not the enemy of seriousness’. Morris delves into weighty topics that range from the difference between nations and nation states, patriotism and nationalism, as well as decidedly light musings on matters such as sneezing, marmalade and hot-water bottles.

Lynn Barber in the Telegraph, was delighted by Morris’s irreverent attitudes. ‘The peerless travel writer’s posthumous final book is a rallying cry in favour of “callowness and fizz”.’ Barber loved her ‘sharp, throwaway judgments – James Joyce’s Ulysses, is “unnecessarily obscure” and Princess Diana was “reassuringly common”.’

‘A joyful cascade of essays,’ said Libby Purves in the Times. ‘Outrageous but kindly, mischievous and fanciful but mercilessly descriptive, appreciative and mocking, in physical and mental travels she takes mishaps and glories with glee. She can hymn luxurious pleasure, but revels in scruffiness.’ With no cautionary note to sound, Purves found this last book, a ‘glorious envoi for this marvellous writer and sweetest of human beings’.

THE FAIRY TELLERS

A JOURNEY INTO THE SECRET HISTORY OF FAIRY TALES NICHOLAS JUBBER

John Murray, 336pp, £20

Nicholas Jubber has form in the history of storytelling. His 2019 Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories of Europe ranges from The Odyssey to the Icelandic sagas. His latest, The Fairy Tellers, focuses on six identifiable individuals who gave us most of the well-known stories.

Among them are Gianbattista Basile who wrote down the first European version of Cinderella, the Syrian Hanna Dyab who brought us Ali Baba and Aladdin, and Dortchen Wild who gave the Grimms Rumpelstiltskin and Hansel and Gretel. As Melanie McDonagh put it in the Times: ‘Jubber digs up what he can of their background, travels to their places of origin, from Naples to Aleppo, and prefaces each with a snappy sample of their stories.’

Several reviewers pointed out that fairy stories were never intended for children. As Christina Hardyment noted in the Sunday Times, Jubber enjoys the gross details the tales revel in and ‘his ebullient enthusiasm and shrewd analysis of story structure introduce the listener to the ogres, vampires and demons of Somadeva and much more’.

Naturally everyone had absent favourites. For Rebecca Abrams in the Financial Times, it was ‘Celtic, English, African or Yiddish folk stories’, while in the Spectator, Philip Hensher was disappointed to find no mention of Andrew Lang’s wonderful collections: ‘I would have liked more about the different places of folk tales within different societies; and Jubber seems to end just when the story starts to become truly interesting. The scholars at the end of the 19th century who were applying the discipline of anthropology and the emerging concepts of narratology to the folk tale would have been worth his attention.’

But most, like Abrams, thought the book full of riches: ‘Jubber’s cornucopia of tellers and tales is a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that revels in its own hybridity and the imaginative riches produced by the crossing of cultural and literary borders.’

MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH

THE BELGICA’S JOURNEY INTO THE DARK ANTARCTIC NIGHT JULIAN SANCTON

WH Allen, 368pp, £20

What a story! In 1897, a Belgian expedition led by Baron Adrien de Gerlache, in the ship Belgica, was the first to winter in the Antarctic, where trapped in ice, the crew, ill-equipped and short of food, were forced to survive the coldest months. Julian Sancton’s book was hailed by critics as a huge success, telling the story of snow madness and heroism with panache and with a novelist’s eye for gripping detail.

In the Guardian, Geoff Dyer filled in the background. Belgium’s ‘lack of any tradition of polar exploration lent an allure to De Gerlache’s undertaking, however it also made it difficult for him to raise funds or find personnel. He ended up recruiting a ramshackle, multinational team of scientists and sailors: essentially anyone who was ambitious, up for adventure or lacked more tempting offers.’ Among the group, however, two leaders emerged: a young Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who went on to be the first man at the South Pole, and a ‘dodgy yankee’ doctor called Frederick Cook.

In the Times, Sue Prideaux described the horror. ‘Realising that their lives depended entirely on the whim of the Antarctic ice pack, the men’s minds became unmoored. They became prisoners of perpetual dark, with mirages so common they learnt not to trust their eyes. Suspended in torturous insomnia, tormented by the squeaking of the ever-multiplying rats, the groaning of the ship, the roar and crack of moving ice, and unexplained screams …’ They were saved by Cook who spotted the symptoms of scurvy and prescribed a diet of raw seal blood which saved them. Sancton’s account is ‘captivating’, according to Michael Thomas Barry in the New York Journal of Books: ‘One can almost feel the sting of the Antarctic coldness and imagine the endless darkness and despair as it wraps its brutal shroud upon the crew.’

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ANIMALS

HOW CO-OPERATION CONQUERED THE NATURAL WORLD ASHLEY WARD

Profile, 400pp, £20

We can learn much from the way animals work together according to Ashley Ward, Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Sydney. Reviewers of his book were gripped by the strange examples of co-operation and diplomacy. Animals are not as competitive in the game of survival as one might imagine. In the Guardian, Katy Guest was intrigued particularly by the ‘thought-provoking chapters about baboons, bonobos and chimpanzees’. Apparently their ‘complex societies are often founded on networking rather than domination by strength’.

James McConnachie in the Sunday Times noted that ‘Some animal behaviour seems almost democratic. African buffalo wake up and gaze towards where they want to go; the herd heads off in the direction chosen by the majority. Tonkean macaques line up behind candidates for a leader, like MPs voting in the Commons. Army ants even elect their queens: when founding a new colony, they form two columns down which the contenders march with their attendants; when a queen is accepted by each line, it sets off.’

In the Daily Mail, Christopher Hart praised a ‘smart, funny and thoroughly engaging book.’ But he sounded a note of caution. ‘Before we get too warm and fuzzy about this though, we should also note that co-operating animals get together primarily to . . . exploit, kill and eat other animals.’ Ward opens his book, Hart remarked, with a bloodcurdling scene in northern Trinidad where, ‘As dusk falls, vampire bats leave their daytime lair, an abandoned house deep in undergrowth, to look for blood.’

Bonobos: highly socially tolerant

African buffalo wake up and gaze towards where they want to go

ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT

LIFE IN THE POST HUMAN LANDSCAPE CAL FLYN

William Collins, 376pp, £16.99

Cal Flyn embarks on a ‘series of bold expeditions to examine the marks left on our land after humans have retreated’, explained Fiona Sturges in her review for the Guardian. The book describes ‘the isolated and often eerily dystopian fortress islands, irradiated exclusion zones, abandoned towns and shuttered industrial sites that have been recolonised by the natural world’. She goes to among other places Chernobyl, Estonia, Detroit, Montserrat and an uninhabited Scottish island – she herself is Scottish.

‘An ecological polemic must walk a tightrope,’ wrote Will Wiles in Literary Review. ‘If it presents an overly confident picture of natural resilience, it will lull the reader into a false sense of security. If it is bleak about the condition of the planet and the prospects for humanity – even if that is where the facts point – it might fill the reader with despair. Islands of Abandonment avoids these perils. It gives us grounds for hope, while not understating the huge task that awaits us in changing course away from catastrophe.’

Laura Hackett in the Times agreed: ‘Given its subject matter – when humans abandon a place, it is rarely for a good reason – this book could have been relentlessly negative. But Flyn’s lyricism, combined with her awe at the power of nature to survive in the worst of conditions, makes for a more edifying experience.’

‘There is some thrilling writing here, a fine way with the telling detail, and a plea for radical revisioning of what we mean by “nature” and “wild”,’ wrote Kathleen Jamie in the New Statesman.

Volcano eruptions in 1997 destroyed Plymouth, the capital of Montserrat

EVENSONG

PEOPLE, DISCOVERIES AND REFLECTIONS ON THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND RICHARD MORRIS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 336pp, £25

‘Evensong is an apt title for this beautifully written and moving meditation on the history and current state of the Church of England, partly because it names the service which more than any other incarnates the patient, meditative, undogmatic nature of the faith,’ began Ivan Hewett in his review for the Telegraph. ‘As Richard Morris puts it, “Anglican evensong has been described as a home for the hesitant, a service for those who put store by doubt as well as belief.”’

In the Church Times, Christopher Irvine, himself a vicar, wondered what kind of book it was: ‘was it another account of the current state of the Church? Or was it, rather like evensong itself, a book that helps you to unwind at the end of the day? Well,’ he continued, ‘these two elements are not entirely lacking, but the story that it tells is a very human story of a father and son, a vicar and an archaeologist – and a compelling story it is.’

Quentin Letts in the Times explained that Evensong is ‘three short books in one: a memoir of a childhood in Anglican parsonages after the war; a dilation on the author’s career as a church archaeologist and museum administration; and finally an account of John and Elsie’s [Morris’s parents’] story, which is done with tender understatement and is all the more moving for that sparseness.’ He summed up: ‘there is an elegiac decency to this book. In its restrained, courtly way it reminds us of the Christian context to British life that we are losing with each ahistorical shrug from our leaders.’

IN DEFENCE OF WITCHES

WHY WOMEN ARE STILL ON TRIAL MONA CHOLLET, TRANS SOPHIE R LEWIS

Picador, 304pp, £14.99

‘Chollet’s thesis is simple: women today are still on trial for the same reasons witches were: for independence, childlessness and ageing,’ explained Rose George in the Sunday Times. She wanted to ‘like this book, because skewering misogyny is fine by me’. However, she thought it ‘unsatisfying when so many forceful and forensic feminist books have been published recently...’

Rachel Donadio was more positive in the New York Times, calling In Defence of Witches ‘a thoughtprovoking, discursive survey’. She went on to explain that Chollet’s book was a best seller when it came out in France in 2018: ‘She has grown a following with work that calls attention to sexism, the gender gap in salaries and the societal pressures placed on French women in a culture with clear ideas about how women are expected to look and act… Chollet has emerged as a quiet revolutionary pushing back against the clichés and the patriarchy that shapes them.’

Keith Contorno, in the Chicago Review of Books, believed that the book is ‘an especially helpful read for providing additional contexts from which women may be empowered as well as how they may reject what was designed to privilege men and subjugate women’. He thought that ‘Ultimately, Chollet’s book leaves us with a lot to ponder and some hope, too.’

MICHAEL BARBER considers Somerset Maugham, the 20th century’s bestselling author – but was he second rate?

Somerset Maugham’s stock in trade was the vanity of human wishes, so it’s somehow appropriate that instead of the Order of Merit, which he believed he deserved, he had to make do with the Companion of Honour: ‘It means, Very well done, but …’ Was he ‘second-rate’, as his detractors alleged? Perhaps. But writers as different as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and John le Carré said they learnt from him. And Maugham himself wondered ‘why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people’.

One answer might be that he dealt with fundamental issues like greed, lust, love, courage, betrayal and death. He was also easy to read. ‘Too easy,’ sniffed some critics. But as Maugham noted, with characteristic pith, ‘To write simply is as difficult as to be good.’ He served a long literary apprenticeship, which was not helped by having spent his early years speaking French: his father worked at the British Embassy in Paris. On the other hand, orphaned at ten and then exposed to the rigours of Victorian boarding schools, which left him with a stammer, he experienced the ‘moderate unhappiness in childhood’ which is thought beneficial to future writers.

Obliged to choose a profession at 18, Maugham became a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1892. His duties there gave him the material for his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, the modest success of which, allied to a small private income, encouraged him to write full time once he’d qualified. To begin with he found dialogue easier to master than narrative or description. And it was as a very successful Edwardian playwright, who at one point had four plays running in the West End, that he made his name. Of Human Bondage, which established him as a novelist, was not published until September 1915, by which time his private life had become a mess.

Maugham rated sex as ‘the keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible’. The writer Beverley Nichols said he was ‘the most sexually voracious man I’ve ever known’. But as Maugham confessed to his nephew Robin, ‘I persuaded myself I was three-quarters normal and onequarter queer, when really it was the other way round.’ So although he agreed to do the decent thing and marry Syrie Wellcome, the mother of his daughter, he only had eyes for Gerald Haxton, ‘Master Hacky’, the feckless, hard-drinking American hustler who for 30 years shared his life.

Maugham met Haxton in 1914 while serving with an ambulance unit in Flanders. Later he joined Military Intelligence and was sent as a go-between to Geneva, then full of spies, using writing as his cover. His duties had more of the cloak than the dagger, as was apparent when, calling himself Willie Ashenden, he came to fictionalise them. This unromantic view of espionage presaged the British spy story as patented in the Thirties by Eric Ambler. Ashenden and his ‘perfidy’ were denounced by Goebbels in 1940, following which the Gestapo added Maugham to their blacklist.

Unwilling to live more than a few weeks at a time with Syrie, who divorced him in 1927, Maugham spent much of the Twenties travelling in the tropics with Haxton, who possessed the ‘engaging comehitherness’ that Maugham lacked.

Expatriates opened up to Haxton, who repeated what they said to Maugham, who turned their anecdotes into stories. When not travelling the couple based themselves at a well-appointed villa on the French Riviera, described by Maugham as that ‘sunny place for shady people’. Lurid stories circulated about what went on there, but guests were instructed that Maugham’s mornings were consecrated to writing, and woe betide anyone who interrupted him.

In 1930 Cakes and Ale, arguably Maugham’s greatest novel, was published. He also acquired a huge new following thanks to the talkies. Noting how many of his books and stories were filmed, Gore Vidal said that ‘he dominfated the movies at a time when movies were the lingua franca of the world’. Later his work also found favour with television, a medium that offered Maugham a role himself, hamming it up as the worldly-wise Old Party who knows what fools we mortals be.

The diarist Chips Channon snobbishly said Maugham ‘was not of course a gentleman’. Maugham might well have agreed, because as his alter ego, Ashenden, acknowledged in Cakes and Ale, ‘It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.’ Just how hard became all too apparent during Maugham’s last decade. Instead of letting nature take its course he went, aged 80, to a Swiss clinic that specialised in ‘fresh-cell therapy’, a rejuvenation technique that did wonders for the body but not the mind. He developed a bad case of senile paranoia and egged on by Haxton’s successor, Alan Searle, vilified Syrie, who had died several years before, and tried to disinherit their daughter. Aghast, most of his old friends dropped him and his last years were bleak. But, lest we forget, the most popular British author since Dickens left much of his vast estate to the Royal Literary Fund, where even now it helps needy writers. There are worse legacies.

Chips Channon snobbishly said Maugham ‘was not of course a gentleman’

Lennon and McCartney in 1964

THE LYRICS

1956 TO THE PRESENT PAUL MCCARTNEY

Allen Lane, 874pp, £75

This boxed collection of Sir Paul McCartney’s lyrics, edited and introduced by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, comes with an epic price tag as befits its coffee-table gloss and bulk. In the Observer, David Hepworth found it revealing of McCartney’s ambitions. ‘Each song has a commentary drawn from chats with Muldoon, who was presumably the one introducing words such as “epistolary” and “intertextual” into the conversation. Macca rarely resists an upmarket comparison. If one Paul is keen to point out that the intermediary of She Loves You is like the hero of LP Hartley’s The GoBetween, the other Paul is quite happy to agree he may have been influenced by it.’

Like Hepworth, Blake Morrison in the Guardian, enjoyed the pleasurable alchemy created by the conversations of the two Pauls. ‘Fifty hours of them, in 24 sessions between 2015 and 2020, covering 154 songs. On the face of it, the two Pauls have little in common: one a complex poet, the other a pop star. But they share an Irish heritage. And a few of McCartney’s rhymes (pataphysical/ quizzical, Edison/medicine) wouldn’t look out of place in a Muldoon poem. At any rate the two hit it off. Though Muldoon has edited himself out of the text, you can sense him in the background, prompting and prodding.’ Though McCartney has been at the top of the tree for half a century and has met everyone, he here talks movingly of his poor Liverpool childhood and in particular the enormous influence on his work of the death of his mother, Mary.

On the arts website Salon, Kenneth Womack was awed by 78-year-old McCartney’s undimmed energies: ‘As a writer and performer, McCartney is at home in virtually any style, from rock and country through jazz, R&B, and beyond. In terms of his musicianship, he is simply virtuosic, distinguishing himself time and time again as an inventive, often groundbreaking guitarist and perhaps the most innovative and melodic bass player to ever pick up the instrument.’

HOW TO BE A ROCK STAR

SHAUN RYDER

Allen & Unwin, 304pp, £20

Against all sensible odds, Shaun Ryder is alive and nearly 60, after being front man for the band Happy Mondays on and off for four decades. A legendary hellraiser and druggie, in oldie age he is now clean. The Guardian’s Emma Garland said: ‘Shy on stage and a pain in the arse everywhere else, he was an addict in a polo shirt and a pair of flares who, even during his rise to fame in the “Madchester” era, reputedly earned more money selling [ecstasy] than records. Split into short chapters covering everything from lyrics to haircuts, riders to rehab... [the book is] mainly an opportunity for him to reflect on the experience of going from a postie who didn’t know the alphabet to performing for 198,000 people in Rio.’

‘It is partly a repackaging of well-polished tales of chaos for both devoted fans and younger newcomers who know Ryder best via stints on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! or Gogglebox,,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘He says he now thinks of himself as “an all-round entertainer” – an oddly benign term for a man who once passed out in the coffin of a Brazilian heroin dealer’s recently deceased grandmother.’

‘While there is a reprehensible kind of common-sense advice here – don’t throw TVs from hotel windows if you don’t want police attention – Ryder’s experiences aren’t necessarily gold-standard career advice,’ said Segal. And Garland concluded: ‘Candid and brilliant, touching if occasionally a bit repetitive, it is a collection of stories so bizarre you’d be more likely hear them from some rogue bloke down the pub than a celebrity. But that’s the thing about Ryder: he is some rogue bloke down the pub.’

Ryder’s experiences aren’t necessarily gold-standard career advice

FROM MANCHESTER WITH LOVE

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TONY WILSON PAUL MORLEY

Faber, 603pp, £20

‘Wilson, who died in 2007, aged 57, of a heart attack was a Manchester star,’ said Miranda Sawyer in the Observer. ‘A local TV presenter, non-moneymaking entrepreneur, relaxed music manager and, as it says on his gravestone, “cultural catalyst”.’

Other people had other words for him. ‘“Tony Wilson is a wanker,” read the graffiti that started to proliferate around Manchester city centre in 1982,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. ‘Richard Madeley, who at the time was Wilson’s co-presenter at his day job with Granada TV, asked his colleague if the insults upset him. “It doesn’t bother me,” Wilson said, “because I am.”’

Wilson created the legendary Factory Records (the label that featured bands such as Joy Division and New Order) and the equally legendary Hacienda nightclub (which went from a music lover’s dream to a place awash with drugs and guns). He also hosted cult TV music show So It Goes which introduced viewers to a band called the Sex Pistols.

Cultural historian Audrey J Golden, writing on music website Louder Than War, recognised the book as ‘a glorious and amusing homage to Laurence Sterne’s (in) famous novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Yet it’s also a work unto itself, solidifying Tony Wilson as a postmodern hero.’

Sawyer also saw ‘intelligence, bloody-mindedness [and] a romantic, revolutionary soul’ in the book. She said: ‘It requires concentration, mixing, as it does, careful interviewing with flights of fancy, revealing detail with time-travelling description. The book’s peculiarity and expanse and, yes, love means it becomes an immersive experience... very moving indeed.’

OH WILLIAM!

ELIZABETH STROUT

Viking, 240pp, £14.99

Lucy Barton, the writer-heroine from two of Elizabeth Strout’s previous books, My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible, unravels her later years, the complex relationships with her ex-husband, William, their daughters, his mother, her dead second husband. ‘There is something beautiful about her characters’ heartache – particularly the way they are always so flummoxed by it,’ said Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times. The theme of never really knowing your loved ones, and never being known by them, runs throughout Strout’s book. But for Corr-Thomas Oh William! is an ‘intensely truthful book not only about how we experience trauma but the ways we keep on reframing our perceptions of it’. Her narrative ‘feels devastating and vital, bleak and tender. Cathartic? Yes. Comforting? No.’

Susie Mesure in the Spectator agreed. ‘What Strout is doing, in her customary crisp prose, is getting the reader – addressed throughout as “you” – to reassess every single relationship they’ve ever had.’

For Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph, Strout has a ‘distinctively female voice, expressive of ordinary family circumstance but also alert to the many ironies and falterings of the human heart’. But he wasn’t wholly convinced, describing the novel as ‘a hesitant account that ‘Lively’s humane vision and accessible, fluid writing style is universal,’ adding ‘perhaps this collection resonates most acutely for the older reader. Here we find characters who want to connect with their own past.’

Kate Saunders, in the Sunday Times, was delighted: her writing is always ‘sizzling with wit, irony, acute observation’. She found the stories to be ‘sometimes tragic, often very funny, with an occasional whiff of the supernatural. If there is a recurring theme, it is the pull of the past, and the various ways in which her characters are shaped by history.’ She went further: ‘Penelope Lively is a literary goddess.’ But as a Lively fan, she had one reservation: ‘The only thing I didn’t love about this book is the air of valediction, as if Lively had decided to clear out her life’s work, choosing what to keep and what to send to Oxfam.’

Elizabeth Strout: truthful writing reads like a transcript of effortful psychotherapy sessions’. Finally, though, he seemed won over: ‘Strout’s strength doesn’t lie in narrative drive or philosophical depth: she is a novelist of the inner sensibility, and what makes her so compellingly readable is her rendering of the ebb and flow of emotion and impression.’

METAMORPHOSIS

PENELOPE LIVELY

Fig Tree, 323pp, £20

Now 88 and, in her own words, ‘at the end of my writing life’, Penelope Lively has selected the best of a lifetime’s worth of short stories to produce this collection, titled Metamorphosis. She has book-ended her choices with two new offerings.

Alison Kelly, in the TLS, enjoyed this ‘wonderful’ collection. The experience of change pervades the stories but ‘alongside change, a greater theme takes precedence throughout the collection: as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the unifying focus is on love’.

Isabel Berwick, who grew up reading Lively’s novels for children, found no change in her command of story-telling. In the FT she wrote,

‘Here we find characters who want to connect with their own past’

CROSSROADS

JONATHAN FRANZEN

4th Estate, 580pp, £20

‘There was a moment — call it 1971 — when Protestant Christianity met the counterculture, when teenagers brimmed over with faith, hope, and love while wearing bell-bottom jeans and beaded necklaces, strumming guitars, even cursing and drinking beer,’ wrote Hamilton Cain on OprahDaily.com. This, then, is the setting for Jonathan Franzen’s ‘sweeping, sumptuous new novel’, which ‘peers back at this oddball moment, post-Manson Family and pre-Watergate, when Jesus was groovy and Nixon’s America teetered beneath the stresses of Vietnam and the ravages of drug use and infidelity’.

At the heart of the novel is the suburban pastor Russ Hildebrant, his wife, Marion, and three children, all at a crossroads in their lives, and a Christian youth group whose members are similarly positioned. Cain considered that Franzen had ‘poured all his gifts into Marion, whose history is a vessel for some of the novel’s most vivid, perceptive writing — and the result is dazzling’.

Neither Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman nor James Marriott in the Times were impressed, though. ‘Franzen is a major writer with a minor style,’ complained Marriott,

adding that ‘Some of the sentences are worse than indifferent’, while Kelly concluded that Franzen was, ‘Not a prophet but a curtain-twitcher and of passable interest.’ For Max Liu in the i, however, this, the first in a planned trilogy, was ‘his best book yet’ — ‘A novel about a horny vicar, his depressed wife and some Nixon-era, corduroy-clad Christian teenagers that proves to be a page-by-page pleasure, a riveting way for Franzen to explore universal themes, tackled with ferocious creative intelligence.’

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY

AMOR TOWLES

Hutchinson Heinemann, 576pp, £20

Amor Towles: on the open road

Amor Towles, whose 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow was an international bestseller, has looked to the open road for his latest, a picaresque adventure set in the American Midwest. Carrie O’Grady went along for the ride in the Guardian: ‘Hundreds of miles roll by over the course of The Lincoln Highway, a breezy Bildungsroman meets road trip that suits the Boston-born Towles’s expansive, folksy, anecdotal style down to the ground.’

The novel begins in Kansas in 1954 with 18-year-old Emmett Watson and his younger brother Billy about to head off to California to look for their mother who has walked out on them eight years before. Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times was disappointed: ‘It struggles to maintain drive or direction. Juggling classical and American mythologies, evoking westerns and Broadway capers, its story hares off in one direction then another, at times feeling less a road trip novel than Wacky Races. At almost 600 pages, many readers may find it hard to stay this novel’s bumpy, often misdirected course.’

And Cal Reveley-Calder in the Sunday Telegraph agreed. ‘It bobs along as if aspiring to be a blockbuster road-movie script, but it’s unforgivably light on tension and impetus.’ And, oh dear, Barry Pierce in the Irish Times was similarly underwhelmed. ‘Those hoping for the classic road trip novel that the book’s blurb, endpapers and cover promise it to be will be disappointed as Towles decides to ditch the intended plot for a laborious cat and mouse storyline that takes up the entire novel.’

Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, however, went against the grain and loved it. Though she conceded that it took a while to get into. ‘Before the grand finale there’s a whole central casting waiting-room full of walk-on parts to contend with. We meet wise tramps and psychotic fake priests, eccentric professors and street-smart black kids, legless veterans and obliging farmer’s wives, happy hookers and kindly nuns.’

THE MORNING STAR

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

Harvill Secker, 666pp, £20

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volumes of auto fiction, My Struggle, were one of the last decade’s literary sensations. Now he has returned to novels with a huge tome of 666 pages. ‘The sign of the devil may not be accidental,’ reflected Andrew Anthony in the Guardian. ‘The book is divided into discrete chapters,’ wrote Anthony, ‘that are first-person accounts by nine different narrators, all of whom experience disturbances or strange happenings that coincide with the sudden appearance of a large brilliant star in the sky, which may be a supernova.’

In the New Yorker, Brandon Taylor was intrigued. ‘Under the mysterious sign in the sky, people go about the sort of stifled, frustrated lives that Knausgaard has made his domain: the creatively blocked, the spiritually starving, the terrifyingly sensitive, the queasily realistic failures.’ Anthony found ‘a shaggy dog story full of loose ends and narrative flaws, but it has that beguiling, elusively compulsive quality that Knausgaard seems to have made his own’.

But in the Spectator Stuart Evers was disappointed. ‘Men and women, young and old, speak with the same voice: they “slurp” their tea or coffee or beer; they light “fags”; they tell you what music they are listening to; they overuse one-sentence paragraphs; they ask a lot of rhetorical questions; they have interesting conversations pertaining to the key themes of the book. They have different names, different purposes and characteristics, but the prose is rigorously, unbendingly that of Knausgaard.’

It has that beguiling quality that Knausgaard seems to have made his own

OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS

GARY SHTEYNGART

Allen & Unwin, 336pp, £14.99

Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, reported Sam Leith in the Guardian, is ‘very, very Russian – in the best possible way’. It tells the story of a group of friends riding the Covid pandemic out in self-isolation in a house in New York’s Hudson Valley – and takes its bearings from Chekhov and Turgenev. The host is a Russian-American novelist called Sasha, and guests include his university pals, as well as a vain and silly actor who’s supposed to be working with Sasha on a script, and a young woman writer who is flavour of the month in literary New York. There follows a frequently hilarious series of minor reversals, beefs and humiliations, romantic misadventures and literary jealousies – but true to Chekhovian form, ‘on his stylistic mixing board the slider marked melancholy has been notched up to 11.'

Claire Lowdon in the Times warned that this contribution to the burgeoning genre of Covid-lit would date fast – ‘Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is so steeped in the present moment that we’re unlikely to be reading it in ten years’ time, let alone

100’ – but said that was all the more reason to read it now: ‘I will eat my facemask if anyone comes up with something quite as fun as this.’

‘It’s a true pleasure,’ Lowdon continued, ‘to sink into Shteyngart’s expansive, benevolent storytelling — hopping between his characters, dashing back and forwards in time, commenting on the world at large, revelling in the mechanics of his craft.’ She especially applauded the fifth-act ‘mood-switch from farce to elegy’. Writing in the FT, Erica Wagner was similarly charmed: ‘This is a warm, empathetic novel,’ she said, ‘written with a tenderness and close observation of this enclosed society.’

TO PARADISE

HANYA YANAGIHARA

Picador, 720pp, £20

Hanya Yanagihara: baffling but thrilling Hanya Yanagihara scored a worldwide bestseller with her 2015 novel A Little Life. So expectations were high for her latest. To Paradise comes in at over 700 pages and reviewers seemed not altogether sure what to say about it. Many felt it was so difficult to understand that it might be a masterpiece. ‘I felt the impulse a few times to put down the book and make a chart – the kind of thing you see TV detectives assemble on their living-room walls when they have a web of evidence but no clear theory of the case,’ confessed Jordan Kisner in the Atlantic.

In the Spectator, Claire Lowdon was baffled but thrilled. ‘Ingeniously, improbably, all this hangs together to make a sui generis whole that’s decidedly greater than the sum of its very weird parts. The thing with the repeating names: it sounds bonkers, but it works. The genes of the same basic story express themselves again and again in myriad variants. Utopias, dystopias, nested narratives, multiple genres, intricate world-building. Shameless swathes of exposition, crude indulgence of our darkest fears. Formidably fluent, morally simplistic, conceptually audacious, aesthetically overblown.’ In Slate, Laura Miller thought this amounted to a bit of a tease: ‘Yanagihara toys, dominatrix-style, with her readers’ desire for narrative fulfilment.’

But in the New Republic, Siddhartha Deb simply found a maximalist novel with minimalist returns. ‘Why has Yanagihara written a novel that announces such large questions and over such enormous length while showing little interest or ability to deliver on them?’

LILY

A TALE OF REVENGE ROSE TREMAIN

Chatto & Windus, 288pp, £18.99

Rose Tremain’s latest novel received a tepid reception from critics. Tremain has gone to the mid-19th century in Lily: A Tale of Revenge and the plot concerns a foundling child (Lily) rescued from wolves only to end up in prison waiting for execution.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Claire Allfree thought the author, as always, ‘terrific at summoning up historical period’. But she wondered if Tremain’s efforts to deepen our empathy for Lily rather than to ‘increase and complicate our understanding of the world in which such suffering exists’ had made the novel’s attitudes too modern. In the Guardian, however, Paraic O’Donnell thought the style unintentionally melodramatic, while over at the Spectator, Stephanie Sy-Quia thought Tremain had really laid it on with a trowel. ‘… packed with treacly images and cliché’, she harrumphed. ‘This is pulpy, mawkish pastiche veering on the penny dreadful, more Lemony Snicket than Charles Dickens.’

In the Times, Lucy Atkins was in general better-disposed, discerning that ‘a subtler, more interesting fairytale theme fizzles beneath the melodrama with hungry mythical wolves, an evil nurse, two flawed fairy godmothers and a carriage trip to the ball (the garish Covent Garden opera)’. But even Atkins concluded that the novel as a whole hadn’t really worked: ‘More escapist than genius, Lily is cosy and familiar, expertly beguiling, but without the edgier sophistication of Tremain’s finest works.’

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

ANTHONY DOERR

4th Estate, 622pp, £20

The American writer Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2014 with his novel All the Light We Cannot See. ‘Through its exploration of loss, heroism, and destiny,’ Hephzibah Anderson explained in the Observer, ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land grapples with the climate crisis and humankind’s culpability, and does so with wisdom and clemency.’

‘The story crystallises around a book within a book,’ wrote Elizabeth Knox in the Guardian, ‘the existence of which is imagined by Doerr, though its author is a real writer of the ancient world. Antonius Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fabulous adventure story written by Diogenes for his niece, to beguile and console her during an illness.’

Marcel Theroux, writing in the New York Times, thought it was a ‘wildly inventive novel that teems with life, straddles an enormous range of experience and learning, and embodies the storytelling gifts that it celebrates’. He summed up: ‘It’s a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences. Cloud Cuckoo Land is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading.’

In the Sunday Times, however, Houman Barekat, thought the narrative ‘ponderous’ and ‘less than gripping’ and that the novel was a ‘long and dull grind’. But Melissa Katsoulis in the Times disagreed: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land is an impressive

‘It’s a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading’

‘It’s bold of Edward St Aubyn to write a novel [Double Blind, Vintage, £8.99] that’s so much about science and about so much science: physics, genetics, epigenetics, botany, soil science, quantum mechanics, psychiatry, microbiology, neuroscience, immunotherapy and evolutionary theory (theology, too, if it counts),’ wrote Blake Morrison in the Guardian. St Aubyn’s previous ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical, but this, his tenth, has a ‘rich cast of characters’, according to Alex Preston in the Spectator, including Francis, an unworldly young botanist, and his girlfriend Olivia. It is ‘a novel with a heart’, in which ‘we learn what ”the corrupting exposure to the habits of the very rich” does to people, and what it takes to resist that corruption’. But, said John Self in the Times, it has a ‘maddening lack of focus’, although it does have some ‘good jokes’.

In Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence (Wellcome Collection, £4.99) Dr Gavin Francis believes that ‘we should never give up trying to get better’, according to Imperial College’s Emily Mayhew in her review for the Guardian. It is ‘a short and informative book for those involved in their own recovery and those who support them as they do so. It contains fascinating and useful tips to supplement standard medical resources available to patients.’ Although Ian Critchley in the Sunday Times thought the book sometimes felt too short for its subject, he believed its ‘great strength lies in Francis’s discussion of his own experiences of sickness and those of his patients’.

Roland Philipps’s Victoire: A True Story of Espionage and Resistance (Vintage, £10.99) is about the double, turned triple agent Mathilde Carré, who died in Paris aged 98 in 2007. In the Times Saul David thought it ‘a grimly compelling story’, in which Philipps ‘fills in much unknown detail about Carré’s espionage career, the early work of France’s resistance movement and the German response’. As Clare Mulley in the Spectator explained, Philipps chooses ‘to focus on Carré’s "human contradictions and vulnerabilities, and her strenuous, sometimes heroic, attempts to overcome those”. In doing so this is a deeply humane book, and humanly flawed.’ achievement and a joy to read. Serious novels are rarely this fun. In a world where nature and stories are more precious than ever, this fine book is an education, a comfort and an inspiration.’

A TERRIBLE KINDNESS

JO BROWNING WROE

Faber, 400pp, £14.99

Tragedy: graveyard in Aberfan ‘To generations of people in Britain the name of the Welsh village of Aberfan evokes more tragedy than its flat syllables should allow,’ began John Self in his review for the Times. ‘On October 21, 1966, a mound of coal waste slid down a hillside and engulfed Pantglas Junior School and the nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Any author who adopts this terrible event as a premise for their novel will have access to ready-made, deeply felt emotion that must be used carefully and not exploited. Jo Browning Wroe’s first novel, A Terrible Kindness, avoids this risk with a respectful approach that nonetheless draws on the horror effectively.’

Barney Norris in the Guardian explained: the novel ‘purports to be the story of a young embalmer who attends the disaster. The first thing to say is that it resolutely isn’t: it is, in fact … a domestic saga about a young man struggling to overcome his childhood while joining the family business.’ But he’s a ‘difficult character to like’, Norris continued, and thought there was ‘a good deal of clunky writing throughout’. He ended his review: ‘Has the passage of time made it acceptable to use the dead of Aberfan as a literary device that prompts a character to reengage with the troubles of their childhood?’

In the Observer, Hephzibah Anderson wrote: ‘This well-crafted tale contains many joys, the least expected its meticulous evocation of the hidden world of undertaking, with its clannish decorum.’

THE EVERY

DAVE EGGERS

Hamish Hamilton, 577pp, £12.99

‘The novel is a follow-up to Eggers’s 2013 dystopian satire, The Circle, in which Mae Holland joined the eponymous social media company, a mashup of Facebook and Google, and rose through its ranks,’ explained Sara Collins in the Guardian. ‘It opens after the Circle has acquired “an e-commerce behemoth named after a South American jungle” and rebranded itself as the Every…’

‘Eggers sets out an Orwellian vision of a near future in which big tech has “transformed proud and free animals – humans – and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens”.’ She thought Eggers was a ‘gifted writer who couldn’t write a bad novel’, but The Circle wasn’t a ‘great one’, although it contained ‘several funny sequences threaded together with skewer-sharp sentences’.

The Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly wrote: ‘Part of the joy and genius of Eggers’s novel is its hybrid genre nature. At one level it is a thriller… On another, it is a comedy, in a vein almost similar to PG Wodehouse.’ He ended his review: ‘You read it and think: yes, this is set in the future but it is actually going on here and now. It is an urgent and necessary book. It’s also fun. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.’

Adam Roberts in the Spectator disagreed, thinking the novel had the ‘texture of suet’ and remained ‘drearily unenlivened, right through to its twist ending, which many readers will see coming an ergonomic mile off’. And Ron Charles in the Washington Post also had reservations: ‘At 577 pages, The Every suffers from the Web’s worst quality: unlimited space. It’s like a 27-hour TED Talk by some clever guy who thinks smoking is bad for your health.’

Books & Publishing

EMILY BEARN on books for all ages

Children’s fiction has come under increasing fire for being too political – but this spring’s picture books offer the world weary young reader plenty of scope for escapism. Mister Toots (Harper Collins, £12.99) is another gem of a picture book by Emma Chichester Clark, author of the beloved Blue Kangaroo series. This time, she tells the story of a family of dogs whose friendship with a strange creature that can only say ‘Toot!’ demonstrates that lack of a common language is no barrier to affection. ‘They loved him with all their hearts. Everybody did.’

When Cherry Lost Terry (Old Street, £12.99), by The Oldie’s sub-editor Penny Phillips, tells the enchanting story of a cat who loses his mysterious friend Terry, and must enlist the help of all the animals in the alphabet in order to track him down. ‘“Oh, please,” twitched a squirrel named Sue, / “Won’t someone decide what to do?”/ She skittered and hopped – / Then suddenly stopped / As out of a bush sprang … GUESS WHO?’ Illustrated by Clare Mallison. And The Spring Rabbit (Frances Lincoln, £7,99) is an uplifting Easter story by Angela McAllister, following the adventures of a girl called Spring, who wakes from her snowbound slumber to discover the miracles of new life. ‘One winter morning, a sunbeam slipped between the trees and danced on the glistening snow. Its warm touch stirred Spring from her long sleep.’

For older readers, Ambrose

Follows His Nose

(Puffin, £10.99) is a newly discovered story by the late and much loved Dick King-Smith, who celebrates his centenary this year. The story follows the adventures of a young friend who befriends a rabbit with a supernatural sense of smell (‘Ambrose has a very sensitive nose … a nose like a bloodhound’), and was completed by the author’s great-granddaughter Josie Rogers, who cleverly preserves his crisp prose and anarchic humour.

The Thief Who Sang

Storms (Usborne, £7.99) is the much awaited new fantasy by Sophie Anderson, author of The Girl Who Speaks Bear. This time, our heroine is Linnet, who lives on a magical island where the humans and the bird-people have become divided. When her father is captured, it will fall to her to save him, and unite her homeland. Fantasy lovers will also find plenty to relish in The Sky

Beneath the Stone

(Floris, £7.99) by the debut author Alex Mullarky, which follows the plight of Ivy North, a reticent 13-year-old who is thrust into adventure when a sorcerer turns her younger brother into a kestrel. And in historical fiction, The Ship of Doom by MA Bennett (Welbeck, £6.99) charts the adventures of a girl called Luna, who discovers that her aunt’s boringsounding ‘Butterfly Club’ at the Greenwich Observatory has a most mysterious secret. Soon Luna finds herself transported in time to 1912, and tasked with saving Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless radio from the Titanic. And Jummy at the River School (Chicken House, £6.99) by the debut author Sabine Adeyinka is a sumptuous adventure set in ‘the illustrious River School, the best boarding school for girls in Southern Nigeria’. Fans of Mallory Towers will find plenty of midnight feasts and ‘giggling late into the night in the dorms’, but there are also serious themes of poverty and inequality.

And no young literature student

should be without Shakespeare for Everyone by Emma Roberts (Magic Cat, £14.99), a deceptively informative reference book which gallops us through Shakespeare’s life and complete works in 64 jauntily illustrated pages. Covering everything from Dogberry’s foolery to the structure of a sixain, this is a children’s book which will have much to offer the self-improving grandparent.

And anything calling itself a ‘book of feelings’ might send some grandparents running for cover. But Sometimes by Stephanie Stansbie (Little Tiger Press, £6.99) is an exemplar of its genre, using immersive rhyming text to tell the heartwarming story of two children navigating the emotional ups and downs of a typical day. ‘Your body’s full of feelings: / like the tide, they ebb and flow. / Sometimes they lift you high / and sometimes they bring you low.’

From top: When Cherry Lost Terry, Spring Rabbit, The Sky Beneath the Stone and Jummy at the River School