Books
Marina Vaizey
Usually extracts in newspapers should stimulate the appetite of the reader to get with it; this is a rare moment when the glimpses afforded to Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging have peculiarly maligned a complex and amply researched investigation into questions of race, identity, politics, geography and history.First impressions were of a personal and rather self-indulgent memoir by a mixed-race young woman. Afua Hirsch, now in her mid-30s, was brought up in comfortable circumstances in Wimbledon. There are plenty of mentions of strawberry and cream, of tennis and leafy Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
From his debut Metroland, right up to the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, the prospect of a road not taken has haunted the mild and mediocre narrators of Julian Barnes’s novels. Like Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending, “average at life; average at truth; morally average”, they tend to prefer, or at least settle for, a comfy seat in the stalls as life’s high dramas unfold in front of them. True, the novels often shatter this detachment and, with gentle ruthlessness, wreck their hard-won equipoise. Yet The Only Story, although it initially slips into the well-woven tweed of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A macchiato may never taste the same again. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and history behind your cup of designer coffee, The Monk of Mokha will answer all your questions, and more.This is the prolific Dave Eggers’s third semi-biographical work: What is the What tells the story of one of Sudan’s “lost boys” and his journey to America; Zeitoun is the dramatic story of a Syrian American survivor of hurricane Katrina. In both of these works of reportage, Eggers gets close to his subjects and exposes trauma, injustice and prejudice. And both are page-turners, just as many of his Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an injection of reality of political, economic and historical analyses.”The central plank of Maçães’s argument is that China and Russia will in the near future be recognised as playing pivotal roles in the way “people, goods, energy, money and knowledge” flow. These flows cross a space he terms “Eurasia” characterised less as a geographic entity than a conceptual space governed by political, economic, and to a far Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy memoir will be irresistible. It is almost a day-by-day account of 15 years of the family and professional life of one of the anglophone world’s leading academics, critics and authors, who now has some 30 volumes of novels, literary criticism, and plays for stage and television behind him.It is the narrative of a somebody, but at times almost risibly reminiscent of George Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody. We are treated to a rundown Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist: deafness, a problem (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss) which began in 2007, had improved somewhat by 2010, declined catastrophically, then partially returned in his “good ear” before a severe sinus infection in 2015 wreaked further havoc.In the period when he was granted some respite, Coleman binged - he calls it harvesting - listening obsessively to particular singers and songs, “frantically stashing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
With a clownish bully currently installed in the White House, the 2017 Man Booker Prize aptly went to a novel that showed a President who commanded true courage and nobility – Abraham Lincoln – as he grappled with the mysteries of life and death, love and loss, in the wake of his son’s passing. Markie Robson-Scott saluted the “magnificently inventive” Lincoln in the Bardo, one of clutch of stand-out novels that explored power and its abuse in another year of deranged global politics.Unjustly ignored by prize juries, Colm Tóibín returned to mythical Greece to re-tell the tragedy of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem. Anton Sansour, a mathematician, academic and his partner’s father, jokes that all the fruit – from apricots to lemons – grows in his garden, while the seasonings traditionally arrived in town, on camel trains, along the ancient spice route from the East. This calorific symbol of “goodwill and fellow- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and immensely energetic life of a polymath artist. She builds her narrative on an enormous plethora of primary sources – his marvellous illustrated letters, his limericks and poetry, his hundreds of paintings, prodigious sketches and watercolours, his travel narratives, and the reminiscences, letters and narratives of his contemporaries.These Victorians, tireless travellers, left behind such copious piles of paper that they can practically write their own biographies (at least in terms of Read more ...
David Nice
"From drawing, via the theatre, to the cinema". Naum Kleiman's introductory qualification of Sergey Eisenstein's own self-perceived line in his Film Form is one that he follows in a necessarily selective and well-organised biography of the director as graphic artist, acompanied by over 500 previously unpublished illustrations.We follow the phenomenon from the young fantasist of Riga, anthropomorphising creatures as society eccentrics, though stage designs indebted to Meyerhold's example - what one wouldn't give to see realisations of his sets and costumes for Shaw's Heartbreak House and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Jaron Lanier has quite a story to tell. From a teenage flute-playing goat-herd in New Mexico to an “intense dreamer”, and a maths student capable of arguing, about films for example, with “supremacist. Borgesian flair”, then onwards and upwards, there is much to fascinate.With friends he founded the first virtual reality start-up company VPL Research in 1984, and has co-founded three other start-ups – those stories are not told here. He has been involved with Microsoft since 2006 and currently has the title of Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft Research. He is also a musician and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Utopias have a way of going up in flames. Rachel Hewitt’s new book, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, charts the revolutionary fervour and disappointment provoked over the course of the 1790s by looking at the decade through the biographies of five of its optimistic luminaries — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Beddoes, and Thomas Wedgwood.Over the course of this decade, the French Revolution broke out to great enthusiasm before souring into the Terror during which killed thousands; war with France was declared; Beddoes and Read more ...