Taking a Walk: Cairngorms Two

My children have been raised in a very flat place. So, rather than daunt them with a Cairngorms mountain walk, I took them for a stroll at Loch Garten, which is the Highlands – and nature – for beginners.

This RSPB reserve offers a walk between the woods and the water, Caledonian pine forest and scenic loch.

We spilled out of the car and headed to the visitor centre. An RSPB helper greeted us and grilled the kids on their nature knowledge. ‘What do golden eagles eat?’

To my dismay, my wild children were tongue-tied. ‘Badger?’ tried one. Oh, the shame.

Visitor centre patronised, eco-friendly beeswax sandwich wraps bought, keen to sample local nature we began the Two Lochs Trail, a circular two-mile stroll from Loch Garten to Loch Mallachie and back.

The osprey pairs who breed here in the summer had departed for Africa but, like most visitors, we’d happily settle for a golden eagle, a brace of red squirrels and half a pound of crested tits.

It was a still day; grey, soft and quiet, and it took a few minutes to realise that the forest was full of small birds. The trees peeped with great tits, coal tits and blue tits, and the occasional siskin – but no crested tits.

Some of Abernethy’s pine woods may be truly ancient but they didn’t feel very wild, because there was also a forest of signs and interpretation boards. A conscientious person could spend half a day reading them.

Loch Garten shone silver through the pinky trunks of the pines and when we reached its sandy shores, most of my walking companions fell at the first hurdle. My wife, Lisa, and two children set up camp on the little beach. So now it was just me and Esme.

At ten, Esme has the eyes of a hawk, the ears of a bat and the enthusiasm of a puppy. So she enlarges the perimeters of any walk.

The dry forest floor sounded hollow as she ran ahead, marvelling at the dazzling pink and yellow boletus, and the miniature forests of bright green moss that marched across the ground.

Like many small people, she is particularly adept at spying tiny things. She soon found ‘a weird hoverfly that looks like a hornet and makes a noise like a machine when it lands’, she explained, with characteristic precision. Her next forest discoveries were a black beetle, as shiny as a new car, and an unused lip balm.

Unlike many wildlife-idealising adults, Esme grasps that the natural world isn’t a land of peace and love, and is mildly obsessed with its peril – pondering whether fungi might be deadly death caps and on constant alert for a bloodsucking horsefly.

So when she declared she had found a tick, I was sure she was mistaken. A tiny beetle thing was crouched on a grass stem waiting to slip onto the leg of an unsuspecting walker or dog. Ah. Ahem, it was a tick. ‘I knew it,’ crowed Esme. ‘I recognised its flat little body.’

Tick avoided, we continued to the far loch, where green lily pads floated on dark water. A rising breeze sent miniature waves against the grey roots of the pines that formed the loch shore with a gentle sluice, sluice.

On our return, we admired fungi the size of a tea plate, breathed the damp woody scent, and all was good with the world. We were probably too noisy to see crested tits or red squirrels. But Esme didn’t mind.

On the car journey home, she spied an eagle. She knows her buzzards (called ‘the tourist eagle’ in these parts) and this big bird with frayed wing tips wasn’t one of those.

Eyes on the road, I couldn’t confirm her sighting but my confirmation wasn’t needed. Esme is no beginner in nature now. Like that eagle, she’s soaring – past the capabilities of her parents, for the first of what I hope will be many times in her life.

RSPB Loch Garten Nature Centre, Abernethy National Nature Reserve, Nethy Bridge PH25 3EF

X stands for the same word wherever it appears

7 Singer like this professional must keep a number (7) 8 Massage men lacking in enthusiasm, possibly (7) 10 Could Kierkegaard be one of man’s best friends? (5,4) 11 Abandon holiday (5) 12 Trick person who’s averse to cold? (5) 13 Conservative getting on train (3,6) 15 Ignorant article in Paris about a struggle (7) 17 Root giving flavour in drinks (English) (7) 18 Cheat is an awful x (4,5) 20 European surrounded by worst attack on all sides (5) 21 Wants rapid growth, with leader going east (5) 23 Barbie redesigned in tin for x? (9) 24 Bored, having lost case after European agreement for blot on the landscape (7) 25 Provided protection, being cautious (7)

1 Traffic measures may be serious about small roles going north? The other way round (5,5) 2 Indian caught x (6) 3 Excited, as to come out (8) 4 A broadcast covering centigrade scale (6) 5 William is able to heat water in this (8) 6 Smoker invested in inhalant expected to rise (4) 7 Familiar number from x unit eg, turn out (9,4) 9 Knowing nothing about thin needle gun (13) 14 Finished dispatches admitting pressure - exceeds budget (10) 16 Distant relation involved in romance stories (8) 17 Jokes about boy and right things to wear for best (4,4) 19 Heading off Darwin’s birds for these islands (6) 20 Lynx, pre-Christian, aboard ark perhaps (6) 22 Departs suffering, wife having left for good (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 14th December 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

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

Genius 418 solution

1 Spectre (5) 4 Intoxicating, invigorating (5) 8 Make a mistake (3) 9 Inflammation in throat (11) 10 Regular maintenance (7) 12 Verify; stop (5) 13 Imprison before trial (6) 14 Arachnid (6) 17 Cancel (5) 19 Displayed (7) 21 Additions (dietary) (11) 23 Thus (3) 24 Foe (5) 25 Sleepy, as if drugged (5)

1 Moveable barriers (5) 2 Possess (3) 3 Teaching, instruction (7) 4 Divided by two (6) 5 Loft room (5) 6 Dry tea -yes! (anag) (9) 7 Lorry driver (7) 11 Talk of the past (9) 13 Practical type (7) 15 Ancient Egyptian tomb (7) 16 Dale (6) 18 Slight mistake (5) 20 Sexually attractive (5) 22 Pinch (3)

Winner: James Bibby, Preston, Lancashire Runners-up: Brigid Gunn, Sparkford, Somerset; William Moore, Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear

Moron 418 solution: Across: 1 Forty, 4 Chewed (Fortitude), 9 Retinue, 10 Cruel, 11 Eddy, 12 Dreaded, 13 Ray, 14 Acne, 16 Dupe, 18 Boa, 20 Episode, 21 Scar, 24 Issue, 25 Outrage, 26 Honest, 27 Happy. Down: 1 Ferret, 2 Rated, 3 Yank, 5 Hacienda, 6 Wound up, 7 Delude, 8 Ready, 13 Recovers, 15 Crimson, 17 Relish, 18 Below, 19 Artery, 22 Clamp, 23 Etch.

When a professional bridge-playing friend of mine plays with a student, he has a code as dummy after his student has made a contract.

‘Well done’ means ‘You were successful but played it wrongly.’ ‘Well played’ means what it says: ‘You played it correctly.’

Dealer South Both Vulnerable

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

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

The bidding South West North East 1 ♣ Pass 1 ♦ Pass 1 ♥ Pass 1 ♠ (1) Pass 2 ♣ (2) Pass 3 ♣ Pass 4NT (3) Pass 5 ♣ (4) Pass 5 ♦ (5) Pass 5 ♥ (6) Pass 7♣ (6) end (1) Fourth Suit Forcing, ‘We’re going to game, partner. More information, please.’ (2) Implying his six-four shape. (3) Roman Key Card Blackwood. (4) Showing zero or (clearly) three of the ‘five aces’ (including the king of clubs). (5) Asking for the queen of clubs (logically with a grand slam in mind as the partnership are forced to Six). (6) Showing the queen of clubs and the king of hearts – perfection for South. On this month’s 7♣ from an online tournament, the declarer at Table One won West’s queenof-spades lead and drew trumps in three rounds. He tested hearts and they were four-two. Somewhat desperate, he crossed to the ace of diamonds and ruffed a diamond. He then ran his clubs.

Miraculously, on the last club, West had to discard from the jack-ten of spades and jack of hearts. If he discarded his heart, declarer’s remaining heart would be promoted. However, when he let go of his penultimate spade, dummy’s ♠ A 6 won the last two tricks, the six tantalizingly beating East’s five at trick 13. ‘Well done.’

Thomas Bessis from France, declarer at Table Two, showed the way. Winning the queenof-spades lead with the king, he crossed to the ace of diamonds and ruffed a diamond. He ruffed to the ten of clubs and ruffed a third diamond (high – as West discarded). He crossed to the queen of clubs (West discarding) and ruffed a fourth diamond. He then crossed to the ace of spades and ruffed dummy’s third spade (with his last club).

All that remained was to cross to the king of hearts, draw East’s last trump and lead to his ace-queen of hearts. ‘Well played’ – a perfect dummy reversal, ruffing four times in hand to land a seventh club trick. ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION NO 286 you were invited to write a poem with the title Pudding. I White was told by his gran not to call it ‘afters’. Con Connell’s narrator remembered ‘The day that “pudding” changed into “dessert” ’. For Vic Cole, the war was between Yorkshire and Bakewell puddings. Of the former, Mary Hodges remarked, ‘You need only eggs, milk and flour/ And a strong arm to beat it and beat it./ It won’t take you more than an hour.’ Fiona Clarke wrote of a saintly hermit, Asphodel, for whom ‘When Christmas church bells chimed, from snowy skies, / Strange puddings floated down, to her surprise.’ Commiserations to them, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to DA Prince.

I understand. You’re trying to talk about That Once-a-Year, that highlight heavyweight Which you insist Tradition must bring out And lay a hearty slice on every plate. That solid, densely dark and fruity one, Basin-ed and swaddled, tied up on the gas, Boiled for so many hours the windows run, Our steamed-up kitchen weeping down the glass. The one your mother made. You’re mistyeyed About those childhood Christmases, the snow (Pristine, of course), the crackling fireside, Et cetera. And then that pudding. No: We’re scared of swallowing the sixpence piece, Too full/polite to crack the surface cheer And whisper it’s too much – the stodge, the grease. Give up: we’re having something else this year. DA Prince

Puddings are vital to round off a meal; Pile on the calories – that’s how I feel! I pine for their sweetness; my mum’s were a dream With sponge cake and jelly and custard and cream. I know it’s quite certain which one I like best, Here’s a puzzle to name it in case you’ve not guessed:

My first in in tartlet and pastry and toast, My second in frying and grilling and roast. My third is more personal, thinking of me, My fourth is in toffee and muffins for tea. My fifth is in apples and lettuce and salad, My sixth is in breakfast – and so ends my ballad.

I’ve put in an order – I hope it comes soon. Ah! Here is my trifle. Now where is my spoon? Daphne Lester

I am a little overweight –I’m only twelve, but ten stone eight; The extra pounds affect my gait And no one wants to be my mate.

At break times they all call me names: ‘Fatso’, ‘pudding’ – never James; I’m just a bit too fat for games –The others have much smaller frames.

My mum and dad see nothing wrong In handing snacks out all day long, They say that I’ll be big and strong, But all I want is to belong.

I’m calm now, lying on my bed: I’ve cut my arms until they bled. Tomorrow brings no sense of dread; Tomorrow they will find me Anthony Young

Marriage may at times be good, Though Oscar says it’s like a long Dull meal that always starts with pud, And witty Oscar’s seldom wrong.

Pudding for starters? Oh, what bliss! Fuelling youthful loins and hearts, Love and lust sealed with a kiss And chocs and cakes and jam-filled tarts.

Then suddenly we’re in reverse Faced with spuds and peas and fish; Next comes soup and, what’s worse, Hunger’s dying, dish by dish.

Finally, once we’ve had our fill And reached the point that really hurts, A tiny mint comes with the bill, Symbolic of our just desserts. Rob Salamon

COMPETITION No 288 The drought seems a long time ago; the transport authorities tell us to carry water at all times. You are invited to write a poem with the title Always Carry Water. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 288’, by Thursday 15th December.

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QI’m sure you’ll think I’m ridiculous: I’m a 70-year-oldwoman and I’m starting to wonder if I might not be gay. I did get married and had two children whom I adore, but I’ve always felt an outsider. I’ve always had very close friendships with women and felt happier with them than I have with men. My husband and I no longer have sex – it was always fine at the time but, watching TV the other day, I saw a woman and suddenly found her very attractive. I am so confused. Should I follow up on these sexual urges – or just let sleeping dogs lie?

ABecause it’s rare for older women to discuss this kind of thing, when such thoughts enter our heads we think we’re special. Or odd. But surely we’ve all felt as if we’re outsiders much of the time – I certainly have. And what woman hasn’t occasionally felt a flaring-up of sexual desire for another woman? Even one that lasts only a few seconds – it’s not that weird. If you really feel tormented by this thought and spend your life craving to be in the arms of someone of the same sex, I’d say just accept it and carry on with life.

QI’m one of that unfortunate lot caught between two generations. I have young children – from three to 16 – who need my care. But I also have two elderly parents in their eighties who are constantly in need of my help. My husband complains he never sees me and I’m going frantic. How do others cope in this situation?

AMy feeling is that your children come first. They are completely dependent on you and, unlike your parents, they have no ability to tap into other resources because they’re too small. Failing your husband’s helping you a bit, can’t you organise some kind of help for your parents? Neighbours? A local handyman who might be able to look in on them once a week, for a small fee, to sort out minor problems? Local charities who could help with shopping? They may not think of asking anyone else because you always jump to it. Explain to them how stressed you are and encourage them to find other help. You should be the last resort. You just can’t do it all.

QI know I sound like a snob but, although he seems perfectly nice and has been very helpful to me from time to time, I am getting increasingly irritated by my daughter’s boyfriend, who spends a lot of time here. He comes down to breakfast in just his underpants and a vest, he holds his knife like a pen, he often swears quite badly and he eats crisps in front of the TV with his mouth open. My daughter, however, adores him – and he treats her, I must admit, like a princess. Am I just a snob?

AAs I suspect he wouldn’t behave like that in a hotel, I imagine he feels inferior and is all too aware of your being irritated by him and perhaps looking down on him. He’s just doing all this to make a statement and hold on to his own fragile identity – particularly in front of your daughter. Before buying him a dressing-gown for Christmas (and get him to choose one he’d like), try hard to cultivate your own friendship with him. Flatter him. Tell him how lovely it is to see your daughter so happy with him. Ask him to sort out trivial problems and then go into raptures about how clever he is to solve them. Even when we know it’s exaggerated, we all love being told how marvellous we are. And it might lessen his desire to behave like a lout.

QI’ve been contacted on Facebook by someone from Canada, who claims to be my half-sister. The dates fit – my father was in Canada at the time she says she was conceived – and her existence would fit with his odd trips abroad, when my mother would become very depressed. Both my parents died last year – so I can’t ask them. I’m in two minds about whether to reply. Do you have any advice? I’m perfectly happy as I am, by the way – married with two lovely boys – and don’t want to rock the boat. But of course I’m curious!

AI wouldn’t be able to resist! And, at best, you’d be giving your boys an extra Canadian family to get to know. But be wary. A lot of longlost siblings – particularly of the opposite sex – can almost fall in love when they meet up with some total stranger who reminds them of family. This usually fades but it can be awkward. Why not seek help from the big adoption charity corambaaf.org.uk? They might be able to provide a counsellor specialising in this area who could point out the pitfalls and even act as a third party before the first meeting.

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

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Issue 62 Winter 2022

Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis by Max Hastings

Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown by Craig Brown

Darling by India Knight

The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome by Harry Sidebottom

After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport

Siena: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval City by Jane Stevenson

David Stirling: The Phoney Major by Gavin Mortimer

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald by Flora Fraser

Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle by Ben Macintyre

Lessons by Ian McEwan

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk

Coffee with Hitler by Charles Spicer

Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

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

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jasper Gibbons For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk A recent article in the Times asserted that ‘Mediocrities are among the most promising people in the world.’ James Mariott went on to explain that those who have achieved only moderate success still burn with the energies necessary for serious achievement. He wrote that ‘because the media makes artists into brands, modern reputations are durable. The best work of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan is decades in the past. But they will be famous until they die.’

I thought of this when the Booker Prize winner was announced last month. The winning title, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was only the second published novel by the Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka (born 1975), while the shortlisted 88-year-old Alan Garner (Treacle Walker) has written more than 25 books (see review on page 25). Philip Pullman has called Garner the ‘most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien… Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance… Our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires.’ Let’s hope Sri Lanka appreciates its writers more than we do and that both Karunatilaka and Garner, despite their success, are still burning with the necessary energies to write more great books.

The other shortlisted writers included the 65-year-old American Percival Everett (The Trees), about whom Paul Bailey writes on page 18; and NoViolet Bulawayo (born in Zimbabwe in 1981), who was shortlisted in 2013 for her debut novel We Need New Names and this year for only her second novel Glory. So seemingly neither age nor quantity matter: talent will out.

And there is certainly much talent in the following pages. Take fiction, for example: 84-year-old Joyce Carol Oates’s Babysitter is her 59th novel and reviewers were impressed by its rattling pace and thrilling twists. Lawrence Osborne was born in 1958, and his latest book, On Java Road, is his most compulsive yet, according to a reviewer. And the hugely successful 51-yearold Richard Osman continues to charm with his third novel, The Bullet That Missed. Get reading – and enjoy.

Liz Anderson

Lucy Lethbridge on Sylvia Townsend Warner

Paul Bailey on Percival Everett

Michael Barber on the debate between FR Leavis and CP Snow

Emily Bearn

US Marines rest during the Guadalcanal campaign in November 1942

FIRST IN LAST OUT – KING COMPANY FROM GUADALCANAL TO THE SHORES OF JAPAN SAUL DAVID

William Collins, 604pp, £25

For Gerard DeGroot, reviewer for the Times, Saul David understands the ugliness of war. ‘The gruesome detail is brutally accurate, never gratuitous. David is obviously fascinated by war, held in its seductive grip, yet his passion for the topic never causes him to whitewash war’s loathsome nature. David examines the Pacific War from August 1942, when the first American combat troops arrived, to the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima three years later.’ David has rendered the Pacific War ‘in painful and poignant detail’.

The Devil Dogs ‘included an extraordinary number of talented writers who recorded their experiences in diaries, letters and memoirs. Yet the real credit must go to the author who knits together this vast collection of material into a narrative that reads like war in real time. It’s war unplugged: cruelty, destruction, pain, but also love, kindness and camaraderie. I cried for these men and then thanked God that I will never have to send my son to war,’ wrote DeGroot.

In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer pointed out that ‘a parade of cheerful, courageous and heroic young Americans from one-horse towns all over the country marches through the pages of this book, the officers mainly men the other ranks would follow anywhere, the other ranks mainly tough-as-hell streetfighters who want to blast what they invariably call “the Japs”. It is like all those films you have seen of the Pacific war; but this is a scholarly work, and the copious footnotes refer the reader to the accounts showing that these remarkable events really happened.’

The jungle conditions were appalling, but the paramount danger was the enemy’s code of death before dishonour. ‘Although David superbly recreates every aspect of the atmosphere of this war short of exposing his readers to the actual physical danger, some readers may find the extensive recreations of American banter rather tedious: but that is a small price to pay for so superb a history.’

A HISTORY OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND, 1100-1300 CATHERINE HANLEY

Yale University Press, 480pp, £25

‘Written with verve and based on impeccable scholarship, Two Houses, Two Kingdoms is peppered with human stories about the struggle to maintain a dynasty,’ Helen Carr wrote in the TLS. Everything depended on the smooth succession of one king to the next. Without it, there was anarchy. Nothing illustrates this better than the capricious shifting of power between the rival royal houses of France and England during the 12th and 13th centuries, their stories irrevocably intertwined by familial feuding, war, intermarrying and attempting peace.

Katherine Harvey in the Sunday Times described it as ‘an era of dysfunctional family politics … it reads like the plot of a soap opera peopled by larger-than-life characters’. While praising ‘Hanley’s fluent storytelling and deep knowledge of the period’, she admitted that ‘it is sometimes hard to keep track of a vast cast’. However, she added, ‘the lives of these men and women are very entertaining and politically significant: their births, marriages and deaths shaped the fate of entire nations and chance events could change the course of history’.

‘In staying close to her characters, Hanley fails to bring in the wider social, economic and cultural history of the period,’ Claudia Gold complained in the Literary Review. ‘She delivers on the “Two Houses” part of her title, but not on the “Two Kingdoms”.’ She conceded that ‘Hanley’s book is enormous fun, but it’s only half a book. If you’re looking for a royal medieval Dynasty or Dallas, read it. If you want to know more about Capetian France or Plantagenet England, you might be advised to read something else.’

BEING AN ACCOUNT OF A MURDER, AN EPIC AND TWO VISIONS OF GLOBAL HISTORY EDWARD WILSON-LEE

William Collins, 352pp, £25

This is a book about Portugal’s maritime empire seen through the eyes of two very different Renaissance figures, diplomat and archivist

Damiao de Gois, and epic poet Luís de Camões. ‘At the heart of Edward Wilson-Lee’s erudite and engrossing dual biography, A History of Water, is the stark contrast between the curious, questioning world view of Damiao and that of his more famous contemporary, Luís de Camões, the author of the Portuguese national epic poem The Lusiads, an Odyssey full of seafaring heroics,’ wrote Paul Lay in his review for the Times.

‘As Wilson-Lee argues Damiao in his writings wanted to “temper the triumphalism of Portuguese and European narratives of history”; Camões flattered and celebrated his royal master’s imperial dreams.’ Wilson-Lee’s book ‘combines literary flair with deep historical insight. One of its many strengths is its vivid characterisation of people and places, not least those of Lisbon life high and low.’

Jessie Childs, in the Sunday Times, called the book ‘exhilarating’ and ‘whip-smart’. Wilson-Lee ‘presents two competing visions of global history through the lives of two Portuguese travellers: a one-eyed exiled poet with a blinkered mind and a freethinking archivist who was thrilled by new voices. The two might have passed each other on the streets of Lisbon in the 1540s, but are unlikely to have met.’

Childs thought ‘the alternating biographies give the book form and flow, allowing Wilson-Lee to cast off into the Tagus, Ganges and Mekong, probing the depths of human knowledge and revealing many wondrous things. This book is itself something of a wonder: beautifully written and utterly mesmerising. I loved every page.’

THE EXTRAORDINARY HISTORY OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA SIMON GARFIELD

Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 400pp, £18.99

A Russian émigré writing in E & T recalled that when he escaped to the West the first thing he did was buy the latest edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, so desperate was he to assuage ‘the information hunger I had been experiencing all my life in the Soviet Union’. Yet more recently Simon Garfield, when compiling this wants to understand what this cooperation has done for each country. There is more detail on the early than the later stages of the relationship: nearly 400 pages on the period 1941-1974, but less than a hundred on 1974 to the present. Smith might have written a little more about the 5 Eyes relationships. But on the whole, he has done us a great service. He is right that the real special relationship should be celebrated: but it must not be mythologised, and never taken for granted.’

Max Hastings, in his review for the Sunday Times, concluded that ‘this is a thoroughly responsible, unsensational account of the interservice relationship, which eschews harsh judgments about personalities’. However, John Paul Rathbone, in the Financial Times, emphasised Smith’s central thesis that because ‘UK and US decision makers receive the same intelligence and often share a similar worldview... they are likely to adopt a similar attitude to world events’, and that this is the real special relationship. ‘However much politicians come and go, or make bad use of good intelligence, the spies’ ties endure.’

Rathbone concluded that the history of this relationship ‘makes for an engrossing, even thrilling, read’ and that “Michael Smith, a former military intelligence officer and author of several books about spying,

history of the encyclopaedia, was offered a pristine set of Britannica on eBay for a penny. What happened?

‘Wikipedia is now the way of all knowledge and the printed encyclopaedia is doomed by its very structure,’ Rose George wrote in the Spectator. And yet, ‘Garfield’s love for Wikipedia, dismissed by snobs but used by us all, is surprising but heartfelt. He believes in the democracy of input.’ ‘Garfield is really asking: what is knowledge?’ JohnPaul Davies observed in Buzz. ‘And what is our understanding of permanence in the digital age?’

‘As Garfield shows in this witty and geekily eclectic book, the encyclopaedias of this golden age were more than stores of knowledge, they were half knowledge, half prevailing wisdom,’ Ethan Croft wrote in the Times. ‘The spiky flawed bit of encyclopaedias is what makes them such an interesting read decades and even centuries after the raw information within is disproved.’

‘Sometimes the book drags, weighed down by the encyclopaedic bounty . Perhaps, then, this is a book to be used like an encyclopaedia: to be put down but always picked up again. To be read with pleasure, but not all at once,’ George opined. ‘Because it is a pleasure. Garfield writes fluidly, cheerily and charmingly, even while breeziness does not detract from the scale of his ambition: to understand nothing less than humans’ need for knowledge and how to convey and preserve it.’ ‘The encyclopaedia may have had its day in print,’ Davies concluded, ‘but this is a book that deserves to be on the shelf of every knowledge geek in the western world.’

THE TRUE STORY OF HOW THE BRITISH AND US SECRET SERVICES WORK TOGETHER MICHAEL SMITH

Simon & Schuster, 576pp, £25

Covering the more than 80 years of uniquely close cooperation between British and American intelligence, starting with Bletchley Park and the Enigma code machine, Smith’s book is ‘frank in describing periods of tension and mistrust’, wrote Nick Fishwick in The Cipher Brief, the daily national security bulletin. ‘This book should be read by anyone who

Good friends: Roosevelt and Churchill aboard HMS Prince of Wales, 1941

handles the material judiciously and writes with élan.’

SYDNEY KENTRIDGE AND THE TRIALS OF APARTHEID THOMAS GRANT

John Murray, 335pp, £25

From a secular Jewish family and the son of a British MP, Sydney Kentridge practised law in South Africa for 30 years before pursuing a successful career back in the UK. He represented Nelson Mandela at the 1958 Treason Trial in Pretoria and represented the family of murdered activist Steve Biko at the inquest into his death.

R W Johnson, in the Times, found that ‘the book’s strength lies in its close exposition of his brilliant gifts in cross-examination, his command of voluminous evidence, his often sinuous irony and sarcasm and the way in which he led many of the champions of the apartheid state to destroy their credibility in court. Grant rightly emphasises that these extraordinary courtroom performances rested on herculean amounts of labour and an utter perfectionism about getting every detail right.’

However, Johnson felt that Grant ‘doesn’t know South Africa, and it occasionally shows’. He also betrays a ‘lack of awareness of the complicated political context’. For example, Mandela lied when he denied being a Communist (he was actually on its central committee at the time) and the decision not to impose the death penalty on Mandela was not the result of brilliant liberal advocacy but of a behind-the-scenes deal between the British and South African governments.

In the estimation of Spectator reviewer Alexander Larman, Grant’s book is ‘well-written, deeply researched and wholly gripping... full of human interest and justifiable passion for the injustice that a determined man spent his life fighting. Would that we had more Sydney Kentridges today.’

A PERSONAL HISTORY JEREMY BOWEN

Picador, 368pp, £20

As befits its title, wrote Justin Marozzi in the Times, this is a ‘very personal story, covering the period from Bowen’s arrival as a 29-year-old correspondent reporting on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 to today’. Ian Birrell in the Spectator described Bowen as necessarily ‘drenched in the blood and misery’ that soils the Middle East, a view shared by Marozzi, who described the book as covering ‘an awful lot of bloody wars, taking in everywhere from Tunis and Tripoli to Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, the occupied Palestinian territories, Baghdad, Beirut and beyond’.

Birrell thought it was to Bowen’s credit that this work is not a ‘selfglorifying ego trip’, adding that a bit more of the personal might have been welcome. Colin Freeman in the Telegraph commended Bowen for ‘wearing his knowledge lightly’, going on to describe how ‘Over what must have been gallons of tea and coffee, we meet everyone from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah through to Colonel Gaddafi and President Assad. Like an erudite dinner guest, Bowen knows when to provide context and detail, and crucially, when to stop.’

NJ McGarrigle in the Irish Times said we should be thankful for Bowen’s work ‘with its rich historical detail, its composure and balance, and its readability’. Marozzi recorded that Bowen ends with a ‘clarion call to powerful states looking at the region. “Do no more harm. Then try to make things better.” But such is the force of everything that has come before, it is difficult to muster much optimism.’ In the end, wrote McGarrigle, Bowen makes no predictions and offers no solutions, but his Personal History is ‘a solid footing for anyone stepping into a complex and compelling region’ – into those lands famously described by Amos Oz as ‘pregnant with suppressed violence’.

THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER FRANK DIKÖTTER

Bloomsbury, 375pp, £25

Mao and Xi holographs in a shop in China

‘For an understanding of the getting, exercising and holding of power in the People’s Republic of China, historian Frank Dikötter has few rivals,’ wrote Isabel Hilton in the Observer. ‘His latest volume, China After Mao, is a clear-eyed and detailed account of the period between Mao’s death in 1976 and 2012, the year of Xi’s arrival in the top job.’

In his review for the Financial Times, Jonathan Fenby wrote that Dikötter is able to offer ‘a blow-byblow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies with a wealth of detail about their impact as the leadership veered between hectic growth and retrenchment... The basic lesson to be drawn... is that Chinese economic policy is a function of politics whose core concern is to maintain Communist rule. If necessary, this is by force, as in the 1989 crackdown and the continuing repressive machinery, but also in implementing policies seen to buttress the regime, however ineffective or inefficient.’

Sunday Times reviewer Michael Sheridan agreed with this judgement. ‘Breaking with the bland orthodoxy peddled in some of our finest universities, Dikötter says that China today is a Leviathan where a party, fascist in all but name, controls society using “capitalist tools in socialist hands” to enrich its elites while “financial repression” keeps the countryside down and the workers

poor.’ For Dikötter, ‘the creation of falsehood is the governing principle of the Communist Party, and he has written a revolutionary book to prove it’.

THE GERMAN VIEW OF DUNKIRK ROBERT KERSHAW

Osprey Publishing, 352pp, £20

‘The noise, my dear, and the people!’ This, allegedly, was how an equivocal Guardee recalled Dunkirk. What German troops made of it is harder to gauge because, as Robert Kershaw reveals in his ground-breaking book, almost all of those involved were later killed on the Eastern Front. Their superiors saw it as a missed opportunity to capture men as well as matériel, while acknowledging that the battle for France took precedence. But the battle-weary Wehrmacht landsers, rightly proud of their historic victory, seem to have been too eager to grab their share of the loot left behind by the BEF to engage in retrospection. Nobody, including Hitler, was aware quite how many British troops would live to fight another day.

Was Hitler’s famous ‘Halt Order’ to the Panzers an own goal? In the Telegraph, Richard Overy said this is ‘one of the main myths Kershaw sets out to assail’. The order actually came from the German commander, von Runstedt, who knew his troops were suffering from chronic battle fatigue. Furthermore, ‘the network of canals around Dunkirk, and the deliberately flooded terrain, would have been costly for armour’. But Hitler was wary. He thought ‘the French must have something up their sleeve, as in 1914’. Anxious to reinforce his armies elsewhere he believed Goering’s vainglorious boast that the Luftwaffe could administer the coup de grâce at Dunkirk, when in fact they couldn’t.

In the Times, Roger Moorhouse stressed that the swift German advance to the coast was no joyride, ‘something that the traditional British narrative – so often strangely admiring of Blitzkrieg – tends to omit’. Casualties were high, particularly among officers and NCOs. Moorhouse described Kershaw’s book as ‘a welcome rebalancing, a thoughtful, wellresearched and well-written contribution to a narrative that has long been too one sided and too mired in national mythology’.

THE GLOBAL HISTORY – 1603 TO THE PRESENT MURRAY PITTOCK

Yale, 512pp, £25

A Californian who has lived in Scotland since 1980, Gerard DeGroot was an interesting choice to review this compendious history for the Times: the Scots were once a ‘global people’, he noted, which ‘might explain why foreigners regard them more highly than they regard themselves’.

DeGroot found Pittock’s listing of eminent Scots through the ages a dull start, but urged sticking with it for the ‘forgotten multitude’ who represented Scottish soft power abroad (doctors, botanists, law students et al) after Culloden fuelled a diaspora. There is, he noted, a Yak and Yeti Burns Night in Nepal. Pittock’s discussion of the 18th and 19th centuries was the high point, tracing the origin of both ‘military’ Scotland and the ‘romantic’ brand.

Allan Massie in the Scotsman sourced Pittock’s intellectual skills to Aberdeen grammar school (‘200 years older than Eton’). He found the book’s wealth of detail ‘dizzying’ and vowed to dip into it for ‘thoughtprovoking’ morsels, though wanted Pittock to be less ambivalent about the Scots who have dominated England’s main institutions.

In the Guardian, Anna Keay was similarly engaged by a writer who could move from historical analysis to the cultural significance of Tutti Frutti, but found Pittock guilty of the ‘jingoistic exceptionalism’ he decried. The Scots, she noted, have been usefully able to choose when to be British. Alex Massie in the Spectator also picked up on a conundrum: for today’s nationalists, to be authentically Scottish the country must be ‘truly British’ in its desire to recreate the consensus Britain of the mid 20th century.

Burns statue in Dumfries, unveiled 1882

THE FIRST ROMANTICS AND THE INVENTION OF THE SELF ANDREA WULF

John Murray, 494pp, £25

‘This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparkling ideas,’ Adam Sisman wrote rapturously in the Guardian. Andrea Wulf tells the story of ‘the Jena set’, a group of writers, philosophers, poets and translators who, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris in the 1790s, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. One of the most prominent of their group was the young professor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who declared that ‘the source of all reality is the Ich’, placing the self at the centre of everything.

‘For all their progressive politics, it was the male self that the Jena Romantics mostly wanted to liberate,’ Ben Hutchinson noted in the TLS, a woman had to submit her own ‘Ich’ to her husband’s. The group’s clever and charismatic Caroline BöhmerSchlegel-Schelling was having none of that, changing her husband three times.

‘Magnificent Rebels is a thrilling intellectual history that reads more like a racy but intelligent novel or even a very superior soap opera where characters are almost all oddballs, but geniuses,’ Christopher Hart enthused in the Sunday Times. In the New York Times Jennifer Szalai noted ‘the book’s exuberant narrative happens to recount plenty of unmagnificent squabbling among a coterie of extremely fallible humans.’

‘The secret of Wulf’s achievement is in the “notes” at the end, a great wedge of a section,’ James Marriott

The pre-Romantic Goethe, contemporary of the Jena set, by Tischbein, 1787

noted in the Times, ‘the book is a triumph of unseen toil … the reader is simply presented with the bright jewels of anecdote.’

‘Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book,’ Frances Wilson concluded in the Spectator. ‘The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all … Jena was the birthplace of self-consciousness, selfishness and selfies — the whole business of me, me, me and me too.’

THE STORY OF OIL FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR KEITH FISHER

Allen Lane, 768pp, £35

Once it became apparent that oil was a better fuel for battleships than coal and that motor vehicles were here to stay, no prisoners were taken by those determined to exploit this gilt-edged resource. For instance Royal Dutch Shell literally exterminated the unfortunate Sumatrans below whose land there was a huge oil field. A similar fate had already befallen the native American tribes of New York and Pennsylvania, the fiefdom of Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller. And when, in 1885, oil was discovered in Upper Burma, oil-less Britain promptly invaded.

In the Times, Max Hastings said that ‘one of the many fascinating conclusions’ reached by Keith Fisher was that when we lost the American War of Independence, we had no inkling that we were forfeiting ‘not merely a continent, but also energy sources that a century and a half later would enable the US to eclipse the British Empire’. Hailing this ‘wonderfully detailed and colourful book’ in the Telegraph, Stephen Poole contrasted the optimism that greeted the Oil Age and its supposed benefits, e.g. ‘Cities without steaming mountains of equine dung’, with ‘the creeping disaster of global warming overshadowing us now’.

But according to the Literary Review’s Barnaby Crowcroft, Fisher’s sombre account endorsed the ‘anti-humanism of modern-day apocalyptic environmentalism … Modern industry ... has delivered global improvements in life expectancy, nutrition and literacy and reductions in poverty, infant mortality and the need for backbreaking manual labour unknown in all previous human history, making possible unprecedented gains in personal freedom. A river runs through that too.’

BUILDERS AND DESTROYERS OF MODERN EUROPE IAN KERSHAW

Allen Lane, 490pp, £30

This book contains 12 essays about 20th-century European leaders, ‘who for good, and most strikingly ill, succeeded in bending the arc of history’, wrote Philip Stephens in his review for the Financial Times. ‘Organised around a series of individual portraits, the book is more than the sum of its parts. We learn that [Thomas] Carlyle was right. To chart the place of Hitler and Stalin or Churchill and De Gaulle is to appreciate the profound impact of individuals. But Marx, we see, also had a point. Churchill and De Gaulle were among the consequential leaders made by the moment.’

Robert Service, writing in Literary Review, considered the chapter on Hitler ‘a wonderful distillation of a lifetime’s research’ and said that ‘another sparling chapter is about Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s dour first chancellor, who frequently used subterfuge to impose decisions on his ministers while pursuing the goal of postwar Franco-German rapprochement’.

Orlando Figes, in the Guardian, noted that Kershaw ‘fills his lively profiles with revealing details of the leaders’ characters, their working style and relations with the ruling

structures that supported them...’ Franco wore down the resistance of his ministers by not allowing toilet breaks in meetings that could last all day and night. His bladder control was “extraordinary”, Kershaw informs us. He also highlights the mistakes that leaders made to bring about their fall, analysing how far these can be explained by their own stubborn personalities, ideological blinkers, or by the hubris that affects so many leaders, especially dictators, when they’ve been in power for too long.’

However, Figes thought that each of the seven countries represented here were too different for ‘any general lessons to be learned’.

Signing in: Margaret and Denis Thatcher visiting Northern Ireland in 1982

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes is a tale of witchery, devilment and transformation. What starts as a beady, satirical comedy of manners about a poor and eccentric middle-aged spinster dependent on her relations takes a sudden turn into chaos and surreality. Miss Laura ‘Lolly’ Willowes, odd but very much her own person, loses her beloved father and is moved (because she is not expected to make decisions for herself) from her beloved childhood home in Dorset to London to live with her pompous brother and his family. In their stifling household, the years unfold with unremittingly timetabled dreariness, Lolly enduring stoically the dutiful care of a family which regards her as pet oddity and useful appendage.

Then, halfway through the book, when Lolly is 47 and the reader is wondering how she is ever going to escape (can she summon up the energy after a life so sapped?), she makes a decision to leap into her own nature. And, like many a yearning fictional woman before her, she takes a cottage. Lolly’s is in the Chilterns, in a village called Great Mop. Now, the novel stirs into new life with its heroine: it becomes wild, strange and full of faerie.

The inhabitants of Great Mop, thoroughly conventional countryfolk on the outside, turn out to be joyful pagans, devil-worshippers given to midnight dances on the witches’ sabbath. The seductive figure of Satan, so appealing to Lolly’s naturally wild and primeval nature, is the figure behind the book’s alternative title, ‘The Loving Huntsman’. Warner’s Satan has a particular affinity for women who have rejected marriage and domestic conformity: he arouses a kind of loving pity in them, and she depicts him as a nocturnal gamekeeper roaming the beechwoods of the Chilterns hunting for souls to assuage his loneliness. It is only at the end of the book that he reveals himself in his true ambiguity to Lolly and she is freed for the second time by the mastery of his indifference …. Into exactly what, however, the reader never finds out.

Witchy women are a prevailing theme in feminist fiction – but in Lolly Willowes, although it contains all the familiar ingredients (herbal potions, cats, spinsters, old wives, antiquarians and naked dancing), Townsend Warner gives her witches a wittier, spicier, stranger take: they are the world’s true innocents. In the novel, the occult lurks just below the surface of everyday life making ordinary activities, to those who know how to really see, seem suddenly very peculiar. She is very good on these sudden moments of peculiarity. Lolly is a singular person whose ‘secret country’ of the imagination is given form by her memories of the real country of her rural childhood. We come to expect Lolly to be peculiar, but seeing the world through her eyes we also come to see how peculiar almost everyone and all life is. Take Lolly’s sister-in-law Caroline who is constantly alluding to how much she has to do: changing library books, reading the Times, embroidering cushions. ‘In her house-keeping and her scrupulous account books she expressed an almost mystical sense of the validity of small things.’ Warner’s prose is delightfully spare and telling. When Lolly marvels at the tidiness of the linen cupboard, we are told: ‘We have our example,’ said Caroline. ‘The graveclothes were folded in the tomb.’ Caroline is pinned to the page.

Among the many enchanting aspects of Lolly Willowes is Lolly’s imperviousness to received wisdoms. Even when her life is crushed by ‘small things’, she retains the integrity of her own inner gaze. She sees the silliness of conventions with an unexpected steeliness. Townsend Warner’s portrait of witchiness is both extraordinary and very ordinary – it really exists only in a kind of ‘seeing’ – that below the washing up and the linen-cupboard tidying and the piety expected of women, there lies in witches a deep knowledge of how things really are and a demonic refusal to toe the line. Witches in Great Mop are embodiments of the secret passions simmering beneath everyday routine.

Townsend Warner thought if witches were to be found they would be among the apparently unremarkable. ‘When I think of witches,’ she once wrote, ‘I seem to see them all over England, women growing old, as common as blackberries, and as un-regarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members and blacksmiths and small farmers and puritans …. Doing, doing, doing till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife.’ Or as Lolly herself remarks to Satan: ‘Women have such vivid imaginations and lead such dull lives.’

Lolly Willowes was published (to critical acclaim and high sales) in 1926, in the age of the single woman. ‘I was born to be a spinster and by God, I’m going to spin,’ wrote Townsend Warner’s contemporary Winifred Holtby. The novel made witches all the rage and it was fashionable in literary circles to wonder how Sylvia (redoubtably unmarried though from 1931 in a lifetime’s relationship with Valentine Ackland) knew so much about witchcraft. At a dinner, Virginia Woolf asked her straight out and Sylvia answered, ‘Because I am one.’ Lolly Willowes is now the novel by which she is best remembered. A lone woman, a cat and a cottage – and the sly but winning blandishments of devilry: it’s a tale for all time.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, top

HOW THE BALLETS RUSSES ENTHRALLED THE WORLD RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN

Faber, 374pp, £25

‘Part biography, part history of ballet in the 20th century, the book looks at how the larger-than-life impresario was able to take what was at the end of the 19th century the “childish business” of ballet and not only drag it, often through sheer force of will, into artistic maturity, but also establish it as “a crucial piece in the jigsaw of western culture”.’ So wrote Bryan Karetnyk in the Spectator.

In the later chapters, Christiansen takes ‘a wide-angle view of Diaghilev’s many rivals, survivors and successors, marshalling an impressive range of memoir, private correspondence and journalism to provide a convincing and genuinely illuminating sense of the many fields – ballet, art, literature and film – in which his legacy ebbs and flows today.’ Not only is it ‘written with sympathy and wit’ and ‘judiciously researched’, but ‘more crucially, it draws on a lifetime of balletomania, giving readers the benefit of exceptional range. It is also a delicious read into the bargain.’

Kathryn Hughes, in the Observer, noted that Christiansen ‘comes to his subject with a head stuffed full not just of pas de deux and grands jetés but also all the gossip and scandal that trailed in Diaghilev’s choppy wake’. Furthermore, he ‘is not an author who feels the need to spare the feelings of his subjects and one of the great joys of this compulsively readable book is his ability to skewer people in a few choice words. So, he informs us that sex with Diaghilev, who was happily gay and went in for “gentlemen’s mischief” with the boys from the ballet, was like having a cuddle “with a nice fat old lady”. In return the ageing lothario liked to give his young friends presents of plus fours. You could always spot who was the current favourite by the width of his trousers.’

In her review for the British Theatre Guide, Vera Liber was delighted ‘to spend time vicariously in Diaghilev’s dazzling, constantly evolving company, rub shoulders with its dramatis personae, eavesdrop on their petty volatile squabbles... Scandalous, riotous behaviour there is galore, Satie sentenced to a week in gaol for sending abusive postcards…’

Diaghilev by Valentin Serov, 1904

THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT MY CRAZY CHILDHOOD (AND HOW I DISCOVERED 35 NEW SIBLINGS) CHRYSTA BILTON

Monoray, 320pp, £16.99

Chrysta Bilton’s far from normal life story has generated many column inches. She has not just 35 new siblings (strictly speaking, halfsiblings) but potentially hundreds, even thousands. All, including her younger sister Kaitlyn, share a father, a male-model-beautiful Californian called Jeffrey Harrison – ‘Donor 150’ – who supplemented his small income as a strippergram with twice-weekly deposits at a sperm bank.

As Marianne Power noted in her Times review, the characters in Bilton’s account of her upbringing deserve a book each. Some already have one, as they include Warren Beatty and Jeff Bridges, early boyfriends of Bilton’s mother Debra, before she came out as a lesbian. Harrison is a conspiracy theorist, convinced aliens will come to harvest women’s eggs. The real star of the book was Debra, who paid him for his sperm (he reneged on his promise to keep his donations exclusive to her) and to show up on the girls’ birthdays.

Debra, for Power, was ‘one of the great characters of the Western world’: ‘Men loved Debra, women loved Debra, and Debra loved a good adventure.’ Bilton’s love letter to her was ‘beautiful, warm, funny’, a testament to human resilience, forgiveness and humour.

In the Washington Post, Janet Manley compared Debra to Forrest Gump, in ‘bridging social eras in a changing US’. Facing down the conservative thinking that saw lesbianism as a mental illness, she willed her children into being, ‘doing her best to create a sense of family, despite her hardships and addictions’. Manley noted that all the other Harrison offspring owed her a huge debt too.

A VERY ELUSIVE WOMAN LUCY WORSLEY

Hodder & Stoughton, 432pp, £25

Lucy Worsley’s new biography of Agatha Christie is, as viewers of

Worsley’s television documentaries would expect, accessible, readable and page-turning. In the Times Literary Supplement, Kathryn Hughes admired a ‘kind, lucid biography’. The mystery of Christie’s famous ‘disappearance’ is here treated as Christie wanted it to be: not as a stunt or a revenge trick on her adulterous husband but, wrote Hughes, ‘Worsley asks us to do something “radical”, which is simply to take Agatha Christie’s behaviour and her explanations for it at face value. These “lost” days of confusion and despair were nothing more or less than a mental health crisis.’

However, reviewers were for the most part in agreement that claims that Worsley’s Life was ‘groundbreaking’ fell short of the mark. In the Observer, Alex Clark noted one particularly ‘eyebrow-raising’ passage in which Worsley argued that Christie’s work had ‘common ground with the modernists whose defining moment came as her first novels were published’. Clark wrote wryly: ‘If you are going to rescue one writer from misunderstanding, it’s as well not to visit the same ignominy on another. And as much as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ingenuity relies on the disruption of accepted narrative convention, I don’t think it has a lot in common with Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.’

The inevitable whiff of a future television series hung over the book for many. In the New York Review of Books, Frances Wilson found ‘It reads as though it were being spoken to a camera: ideas are expressed as simply as possible; there is no argumentative rigor; the tone is upbeat until, at the end of each chapter, it becomes ominous; the lexicon is limited (“dark” and “darkness” are her refrain); and there are goofy asides to the audience.’ And in the Literary Review, Lucy Lethbridge thought some of the jolly asides frustrating: ‘Worsley says, for example, that Christie’s thrillers are “rather tiresome”. Why?’

MEGHAN, HARRY AND THE WAR BETWEEN THE WINDSORS TOM BOWER

Blink, 452pp, £22

Tom Bower’s evisceration of the Duchess of Sussex received so much coverage that it can hardly have mattered to his sales that actual reviews of the book tended to be either lofty or lukewarm. It was, wrote Melanie Reid in the Times (which had serialised long extracts of the juiciest morsels) an ‘eye-popping demolition job’. Anita Singh in the Daily Telegraph thought the takedown ‘so relentless that getting to the end feels like a slog’. But Singh still detailed the ‘best and most convincing’ accounts from ‘the little people in Meghan’s line of fire’. Stories of her bullying behaviour are apparently legion: a British literary agent called Meghan ‘one of the most unpleasant people we’ve ever dealt with’.

In the Observer, Catherine Bennett dismissed the book as ‘tawdry gossip’ but as Reid noted, Tom Bower (author of a bookshelf of unauthorised biographies skewering the rich and powerful) ‘didn’t get where he is by being nice’. Too right. According to Reid, ‘Meghan’s burnished image doesn’t survive beyond page 5.’ As Bower’s sales (nearly three months after publication, Revenge is still in Amazon’s top 100 list) testify, tales of Meghan’s monstrous behaviour are catnip for royalists – and sales must have had a boost at a time when royalty is getting unprecedented attention.

‘His book depicts Meghan as a merciless opportunist,’ wrote Reid, ‘who found in Harry the perfect vehicle for personal advancement, and in doing so caused irreversible damage to a thousand-year-old monarchy. It’s an undeniably gripping read, but it’s also brutal and ultimately sad.’

Wedding waves: Harry and Meghan

THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLIE WATTS PAUL SEXTON

Mudlark, 344pp, £25

Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times found this generous portrait of the Rolling Stones’ drummer frustrating: ‘There was clearly a turbulence behind [Watts’s] pristine façade and Sexton describes his eccentricities without ever quite unpicking them. His fastidiousness extended far beyond a preference for handmade shoes and suits that once belonged to Edward VIII... He sketched every hotel bed he ever slept in.’

‘Watts was borderline OCD,’ explained Mick Brown in the Telegraph, and remarkably

contradictory, ‘an essential part of the group, yet at the same time curiously apart from it. He described playing with the band not as a vocation but “a job”, for which he dutifully turned up for work, drummed brilliantly and largely kept to himself.’ A frustration for Brown was that ‘the book largely skates over his dabbling with drugs in the 1970s and 1980s (tactfully avoiding the word heroin)’.

Neil Spencer in the Guardian also picked up on the drummer’s contradictions: ‘Watts’s ambiguity was there from the outset. He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed, cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes saxophonist Charlie Parker and drummer Chico Hamilton.’

And he refers to Watts saying,

Charlie Watts: borderline OCD

‘In the Beatle period, when people used to scream at you, girls running down the road, I hated that, used to hide. But there’s nothing like walking on a stage and the place is full of screaming girls’ – a perfect example of the drummer’s sometimes perverse duality.

THE STORY OF AMERICA’S MOST UNCONVENTIONAL DYNASTY JAMES REGINATO

Gallery, 336pp, £20

JPG I and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll

‘How cheap was the oil tycoon J Paul Getty?’ asked Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Times, before listing the legendary examples of his meanness, such as installing a pay phone for visitors to his Tudor mansion and refusing to pay the ransom for his kidnapped grandson John Paul Getty III. These myths are debunked in this ‘brisk and sympathetic chronicle of the man and his many descendants’ by Reginato, writer at large for Vanity Fair. His aim, Jacobs told us, is to ‘shake the dust from the name and show us that the majority are not drug-addled wastrels but productive citizens’.

The problem though, wrote Constance Craig Smith in the Daily Mail, is that the younger generation of Gettys are ‘not as interesting as the monstrous paterfamilias and, sensibly, wouldn’t speak to Reginato’. Craig Smith related how in 1914 J Paul Getty’s father gave him $10,000 to invest in the oil business and within a year he had made his first million. By his sixties, he was the richest man in the world. Aged 30 he married his first wife, who was 19. Then came two 17-year-olds, followed by a woman he had first spied when she was 14. Creepy, or what?

Nevertheless, divulged Kathryn Hughes in the Sunday Times, he ‘managed to stay friends with all his exes, even sending them roses on their birthdays’. Several children and grandchildren died of substance abuse but ‘many of the current crop are living fine upstanding lives’. By this point, complained Hughes, the narrative ‘is beginning to sound like a Christmas round robin, the tone coolingly banal, like a family retainer terrified of giving offence’. Reginato may have fulfilled his brief but, she concluded, the Gettys are nevertheless ‘hardly an advertisement for the life styles of the rich and famous either’.

THE WINNER NICK THOMAS-SYMONDS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 544pp, £25

According to Nick Thomas-Symonds, whoever said that the Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx must have had Harold Wilson in mind. Wilson believed that the Party was ‘a moral crusade or it was nothing’. So although, as a staunch Congregationalist, he was wary of what he called ‘too many “Guardianisms”’ when speechmaking, he presided over a series of enlightened social measures like the Sexual Offences Act that liberalised Britain.

Wilson was also, to quote ThomasSymonds again, ‘a winner’: the only person in the past 120 years to have been returned to Downing Street four times. Yet despite this, as Vernon Bogdanor argued in the Telegraph, ‘Wilson has never been admitted to Labour’s pantheon of heroes.’ Mistrusted by the Right, derided by the Left, he did himself no favours with a tainted resignation honours list that set a dubious precedent. Thomas-Symonds acknowledges this, but as Francis Becket said in the Spectator, he also ‘demolishes a few myths put about by Wilson’s many enemies. He never claimed to have gone to school barefoot. He never had an affair with Marcia Williams. And he didn’t invent a plot by the security services to undermine him. He didn’t have to. It existed.’

The Literary Review’s Anne Perkins said Thomas-Symonds had set out to remind ‘today’s Labour movement of the virtues of subordinating differences to the cause of winning power … But political parties also need to agree on what power is for. Wilson’s Labour party rarely agreed on anything. It was only his capacity for political sleight of hand that sometimes made it seem as though it did.’

ART, LOVE AND RIVALRY IN 1920S PARIS MARK BRAUDE

Two Roads, 304pp, £20

Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Prin in 1901, was one of the queens of the rackety, seedy, riotously creative artistic scene in Paris in the Twenties. A chanteuse and artists’ model, she is most famous now for providing the gorgeously curved, cello-shaped nude back in her lover Man Ray’s famous photograph. But was Kiki also an artist in her own right? Mark Braude seems to think so and Joanna Scutts in the New York Times seemed to agree: ‘This exuberantly entertaining

biography sets out to rebalance the much-told story of Left Bank Paris, in which Kiki – model, memoirist and muse – is usually cast as a bit player. He brings that milieu to life in all its grit and energy – but also the larger sociopolitical pressures that myopic mythmaking leaves out.’

Kirkus Reviews relished Braude’s portrait of Man Ray’s muse and ‘her physical presence, her erotic charms, her joyfulness, and her mental quickness’. Only Roger Lewis in the Times begged to differ. He enjoyed Braude’s ‘ lively study’ of Kiki but didn’t buy his argument as to her superior talents. ‘I think Kiki seemed

Kiki: model, memoirist and muse

a self-indulgent ratbag, as depressing as Dada’s atonal music, gibberish poems and meaningless films. She died in 1953, a “ruined romantic figure”, “a reproachful shadow”, in the words of Ronald Searle. Clearly, Kiki didn’t belong to the modern world for a single minute — she was a leftover from the lithographs of ToulouseLautrec.’

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND GARDENS OF A FORGOTTEN GENIUS SANDRA LAWRENCE

Blink, 352pp, £25

In 1897, Ellen Willmott was due to receive the RHS’s Victoria Medal but never turned up. Willmott, famous for her alpines, her bulbs and her talent for growing the ungrowable, was an ill-tempered eccentric who boobytrapped her bulb beds with shot guns and whose habit of sprinkling her rivals’ gardens with the seeds of an invasive sea holly gave rise to the plant’s common name ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’.

Reviewing Sandra Lawrence’s biography in the Spectator, Anne de Courcy observed: ‘She had a happy childhood in an affluent family of the rising Victorian middle class; from the age of seven she would come downstairs on her birthday morning to find on her plate a cheque for £1,000 (today worth £126,588) from her rich godmother. Unsurprisingly, she never learned the value of money and thereafter simply bought what she wanted.’ By the end of her life, Ellen had run out of cash and slept on benches when visiting London, carrying her tiara in a paper bag.

In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin enjoyed Lawrence’s approach to a prickly subject. ‘Every chapter is triggered by an object – the gold medal, the fur-lined sabots, a silver key – that Lawrence uncovered during her excavations of the Willmott archive.’ Gardening blogger Paddy Tobin adored a ‘brilliant story, fabulously researched and presented with insight, understanding, a beautiful turn of phrase, and good humour’. And de Courcy concluded: ‘Lawrence calls her “a genius as a plantswoman, a nightmare as an individual”. Both verdicts are undoubtedly correct.’

Freeman thought Wilkins ‘Pooterish and pedantic’ but was moved to tears by his account of Pratchett’s final months. For Saunders, he ‘waffles on a bit, and his jokes are sometimes effortful, but crucially he understands the difference between humour and wit. In Pratchett’s words, humour “needs deep soil. You can grow wit on a damp flannel”.’

A LIFE WITH FOOTNOTES ROB WILKINS

Doubleday, 448pp, £25

By the time Terry Pratchett died, of a rare form of Alzheimer’s (he called it ‘the embuggerance’), in 2015, he was a storytelling phenomenon. As Laura Freeman said in the Times: ‘He wrote more than 50 books – 41 set on the Discworld – and sold more than 100 million copies in 37 languages. He kept a picture in his office of WH Smith’s book-pulping machine as a warning against too much writerly pride. The man with no degree to his name was given so many honorary doctorates he ended up Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Dr Pratchett, not forgetting the professorship (2010) and the knighthood (2009).’ Pratchett started the book and it has been finished by Rob Wilkins, his devoted assistant and amanuensis.

In the Observer, Frank Cottrell Boyce was impressed by this account of an author he compared to Swift and Chesterton – ‘he has that Chestertonian quality of merriment, of intellectual play’. This is not a hagiography, however: ‘the Pratchett who emerges can be curmudgeonly, vain and infuriated and puzzled by the way the world has underestimated him’. In the Daily Telegraph, Tristram Fane Saunders also admired Pratchett’s world: ‘What matters is what he called “headology” – the commonsensical psychology behind the petty acts of cruelty and kindness that comprise most human behaviour. What matters are the uncomfortable woollen socks his hero Sam Vimes wears, uncomplainingly, because his wife Sibyl knitted them.’

SCENES FROM AN UNPREDICTABLE CHILDHOOD KIT DE WAAL

Tinder Press, 394pp, £16.99

‘If you want to find out how the sweet, clever, uncertain Mandy grew up to be Kit de Waal, bestselling author and tireless amplifier of working-class voices in literature, then read this book,’ wrote Lynsey Hanley in the Observer. ‘She grew up in 1960s Moseley, where her parents, a little woman from Wexford and a bus driver from St Kitts, raised five children without ever really growing up themselves.’

Despite their financial struggles, described Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, Dad Arthur would blow his earnings on a pair of Chelsea boots or a fancy suit, while the children were hungry – always. In an effort to make sense of her life, mother Sheila becomes a Jehovah’s Witness, which for the kids involved ‘interminable hours spent at weekly meetings where they nearly die of boredom’.

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman pondered the serendipity of this being the third memoir he had read recently of growing up a Jehovah’s Witness. For him, ‘Neither creed nor colour determines the book: it is far stronger, far angrier on poverty, with margarine a luxury and the logistics of choosing bus stops to minimise the fare.’ For Sturges, the working-class upbringing depicted was ‘entirely of its time: children shoved outdoors from breakfast to teatime; men returning from work to find dinner on the table...’ The memoir takes her up to early adulthood and the moment her boss gives her a list of his favourite books. ‘In doing so,’ wrote Sturges, ‘he sparks in De Waal a love of literature, and, with it, a new life begins.’

Lionel Shriver: dauntless combatant

Borough Press, 304pp, £20

The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver has become one of the most dauntless combatants in a culture war so vicious that fainter hearts have left the field altogether. Reviewing this collection of essays in the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon noted that Shriver’s ‘ornery observations’ have ‘brought upon her the full flaming rage of the Twittersphere. Unhappily for her enemies, she is not on social media, and her professional associates have stood by her, so the conflagrations have left her unsinged.’

‘Abominations is organised thematically rather than chronologically, so the act of reading it means toggling in time. Before 2015, as one is reminded, it was possible to participate in cultural debate and literary comment without thinking about identity politics, freedom of expression or gender ideology. Since 2015, these topics have become inescapable […]

‘Ms Shriver’s roving curiosity, her libertarian inclinations and her trans-Atlantic orientation [...] make her a rare voice, someone who challenges orthodoxies in the way that many journalists and public intellectuals claim to do but don’t.’

The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke found Shriver’s journalism bracing even where she found herself in disagreement. ‘Among the subjects Shriver tackles in Abominations are free speech, identity politics and the language of gender ideology, though if this sounds hard going – another culture wars slog – the mix is leavened with pieces about her addiction to exercise, what it feels like to break up with a friend and a droll skit on all the things she didn’t do during the first lockdown (learn airing of private passions’… for example, ‘marmalade, which sparks a revelation that Morris eats the stuff with apples when she is being austere, and sausages when seeking hedonism’.

Russian, read Proust, take a virtual tour of the British Museum).

Looking back to Shriver’s first ‘cancellation’ – when she jokily brandished a sombrero at a speech to the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016 – Cooke marvelled: ‘Even five years ago I would have mocked the idea that a writer in a country such as Britain could be considered “brave”; save your tears for those living under totalitarian regimes, I would have said, waving my PEN membership. No longer.’

Faber, 207pp, £14.99

The late Jan Morris was writing right up to the end of her life, and the posthumously published Allegorizings collects a final grab-bag of her whimsical and upbeat essays. Her guiding principles, says Morris in an Introduction, are the importance of kindness and the notion that everything, read right, is allegorical.

The essays collected here are ‘vivid’, ‘funny’ and ‘cheerful’, full of ‘pleasure and sensuality’, thought Prospect’s Sarah Moss, though she cautioned that to a younger generation Morris’s flippant view of Empire might be ‘problematic’: ‘Readers who love Morris’s work do so not because she is a professional historian or because she moves with the times, but because she celebrates her intellectual and aesthetic pleasures in deeply considered and grammatically gorgeous prose.’

Writing in the New York Times, Sarah Moss (for it was she) shared Sarah Moss’s high opinion of the book: ‘Some fine writers, granted the luck of long lives and clear minds, go on publishing after it would have been kind for someone to tell them to stop, but a precious few report with wisdom, kindness and intelligence from the end to which we shall all come — travel of a different kind. This is such a book.’

The Guardian’s ‘Alex Clark’, who may or may not be a pseudonym for Sarah Moss, declared: ‘Among the several pleasures of Allegorizings are its shifts in tone and mood; alongside ideological and philosophical argument come Morris’s self-conscious indulgence of her own idiosyncrasies, and her

Profile, 224pp, £16.99

Mary Gaitskill is the American novelist and short story writer whose novella This Is Pleasure supplied perhaps the most morally subtle and shocking response to the MeToo movement. Her new collection of essays is no less searching and spiky. Taking in music, films, the Bible, American sex scandals, and Nabokov’s Lolita, among other things, it amounts to ‘a shadow autobiography’, thought the Guardian’s Abhrajyoti Chakraborty.

‘Gaitskill skips over nothing on the page. Her sentences are leavened

by a novelist’s spirited discontent with mere facts, a distrust of transparent surfaces.’ ‘With Gaitskill, you scarcely get or sometimes even expect popular opinions, regardless of whether she is riffing on Chekhov or the Clintons,’ Chakraborty added. ‘Gaitskill is gloriously trenchant, but never gimmicky.’

The Irish Times’s Huda Awan found Gaitskill’s crosspatch, searching approach to the world ‘mentally invigorating’.

‘Gaitskill did not choose the title of her latest book, Oppositions, a collection of essays first published in the US in 2017 as Somebody with a Little Hammer,’ noted Ellen Peirson-Hagger in the New Statesman. ‘But she sees why her publisher thought it appropriate... In neither her writing nor her conversation does Gaitskill bend to meet expectations.’

Mary Gaitskill: gloriously trenchant

TALES FROM THE FRONTLINE OF THE MOST UNEQUAL BOROUGH IN BRITAIN EMMA DENT COAD

Quercus, 256pp, £20

Four days after Emma Dent Coad was elected MP for Kensington in 2017 she awoke to the Grenfell Tower disaster. The blame, she argued, lay firmly with Conservativerun Kensington and Chelsea council, so that by her own admission the book is written ‘with unremitting anger and frustration’. Interviewing Dent Coad in the Guardian, Zoe Williams agreed ‘there is a lot of controlled fury’ in the book.

‘I admire Dent Coad’s passion,’ Harriet Sergeant wrote in the Telegraph, ‘but query her partisanship and conclusions.’ Sergeant argued that ‘she is right about the shocking levels of inequality in this tiny borough’, but never speculates as to the reasons. While the global super-rich compete to buy trophy homes in the borough, migrants of every nationality, many illegal and undocumented, cram into former council flats sold to private landlords. ‘It is disingenuous of Dent Coad to make out this scandal is unique to Kensington and Chelsea. It is going on throughout London,’ she added.

Hugo Gye in the Spectator pointed out that ‘questions have arisen about her part in the refurbishment of the tower’. Dent Coad, a Labour councillor for 16 years sitting on committees where plans for the work on Grenfell were discussed, denies any responsibility.

‘Large swathes of the book are dedicated to Dent Coad’s time as an opposition councillor,’ Charlotte Ivers noted in the Sunday Times. ‘Her documentation of the council’s failings is extensive, perhaps too extensive for a general audience … [this] is not an attempt to use the borough as a microcosm through which to understand the wider social issues our country faces,’ she concluded.

‘Dent Coad’s inside story of a rotten borough is the breath-taking indictment of the divisions that rend this country,’ thundered the Morning Star. It ‘provides a unique, evidence-based critique of the profound flaws in UK local educational progress should be slowed accordingly – the current system effectively discriminates against males. Writing in the Times, David Aaronovitch, who found the book in turn ‘fascinating, irritating and eccentric’, thought this explanation ‘problematic and his remedy impossible’. Statistics should come with a health warning, wrote Aaronovitch. ‘We’re talking averages not individuals.’

government … it should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the pressing case for meaningful local democracy — and how far Britain falls short of it.’

WHY THE MODERN MALE IS STRUGGLING, WHY IT MATTERS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT RICHARD V REEVES

Swift Press, 352pp, £20

Modern male: with an eye to the future Gloomy statistics show that male violence is increasing and academic attainment decreasing. In his warm review of Richard Reeves’s Of Boys and Men in the Guardian, Andrew Anthony laid it out: ‘Males are much more likely to feel socially excluded, and far less likely to thrive after divorce (if they don’t remarry). At the same time, girls are outperforming boys in most academic disciplines, and rapidly closing the gap in those in which boys lead, not just in schools but in universities across the western world. In the US, 57 per cent of bachelor degrees are now awarded to women.’

In the opinion of Nina Power in the Literary Review, ‘The great strength of Reeves’s book, apart from his extensive use of contemporary data, is the way he treats the multiple difficulties facing boys and men as problems in their own right. The question of how sexual differences play out is often enmeshed with our personal experiences and political commitments. We don’t see “men” or “boys”; we see “my obnoxious male boss” or “the boyfriend that treated me poorly” and generalise from there.’ The Left tend to take too little account of biological determinism in male behaviour and the Right takes too much.

Reeves argues that because boys mature later than girls, their

HOW BRITAIN HAS RESOLVED EVERYDAY PROBLEMS, FROM DOG FOULING TO DOUBLE PARKING TIM NEWBURN AND ANDREW WARD

Robinson, 360pp, £18.99

It wasn’t all that long ago that office workers regularly put back a couple of pints at lunchtime and dog-owners left their pets’ poo on the pavement without a second thought. Now, as Orderly Britain points out, we have almost imperceptibly altered habits that once seemed set in stone.

The book’s authors, Tim Newburn, professor of criminology and social policy at the London School of Economics, and Andrew Ward, cover the contentious subjects of dog-fouling, queues and alcohol because, as Emma Duncan in the Times put it, although these issues ‘seem trivial, but because they are so close to home, they matter more to people than many higher-level political issues. They are therefore of interest to anybody who studies society – or indeed lives in it.’

Duncan applauded behavioural progress. ‘Notwithstanding the general tendency to believe that it is hurrying to hell in a handcart, society has, by and large, become more orderly in recent decades. Dog poo has been, if not removed from public places, at least concealed in little bags that some peasants fail to throw away. Smoking in public has basically been abolished. Drinking is on the decline. Drivers grudgingly accept the need for, and the authority of, traffic wardens.’

But in the Daily Mail, Mark Mason wasn’t sure that we hadn’t lost more than we’d gained. ‘The opposite of order is mess, and without mess you wouldn’t have creativity of innovation or fun.’

‘To accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it,’ Percival Everett once observed in a rare interview. His extraordinary novels and stories are brimming over with the everyday absurdities of life, alongside unfunny matters like terminal illness and casual cruelty. His most recent comic masterpiece, The Trees, which was short-listed for this year’s Booker prize, is as fine a literary balancing act between outrageous farce and deep seriousness as can be imagined.

It opens in Money, Mississippi, the town in which the 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched and murdered in August 1955, after a young white woman named Carolyn Bryant accused the boy of ogling and touching her in her father’s grocery store. (She would retract the accusation decades later by admitting that he never made contact with her.) Her brother Roy and their half-brother JW Milam were put on trial and subsequently found not guilty by an all-white jury. That doleful episode of American history is at the core of this truly remarkable book.

The Trees is a crime novel of sorts, with a plot that accommodates a series of gruesome killings, the first being that of Junior Junior Milam, a descendant of JW. Second in line is Wheat Bryant, the good-for-nothing grandson of the infamous Roy. The mutilated victims are discovered with the beaten-up corpse of a black man in close proximity, his hands clutching their severed testicles. A pair of Mississippi state detectives, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, arrive in Money to question the locals and that’s when the fun really begins.

Their conversations with the likes of Sheriff Red Jetty and his sidekicks in uniform Delmore Digby and Braden Brady; the Reverend Doctor Fondle and the mortician Otis Easy (‘Easy sat behind his massive oak desk and smiled with all the teeth a person is supposed to have and then some’) deliver a shock of recognition as well as laughter. When the sleuths are hungry, they visit the Dinah, which was opened by a woman called Delores, who ‘could fry a hell of a catfish. Couldn’t spell worth a damn,’ according to the waitress, who sports the name tag Dixie, but was christened Gertrude. Dixie/Gertrude will turn out to be a more dynamic presence in the pages that follow her initial wisecracking appearance in the increasingly helter-skelter narrative. The murders proliferate, spreading from the South to the Northern and mid-Western states. Sometimes the accompanying corpses are of Asiatic origin.

I have no wish to spoil the crazy pleasure future readers will experience as they read The Trees, so I will only reveal that each revelation – each twist, as it were – is completely unpredictable and yet wholly convincing. There’s method in the madness Everett accounts for with such keen attentiveness to its every manifestation – the way in which a character will stop himself from using the word ‘nigger’ by hesitating after ‘ni-‘ and then substituting a term that’s almost equally racist, for example. He is a recorder of what he sees and hears and never comments self-righteously on his findings. If he has a message, it’s deeply imbedded in the story, waiting to be discovered.

This exemplary novelist has no patience with fiction that openly displays its moral purpose, preferring rather to give his often-monstrous creations the free rein they have in the real world. He draws inspiration, it is safe to assume, from the incomparable wordsmith who added ‘covfefe’ to the English language.

Percival Everett is in his midsixties. His first novel, Suder, was published in 1983 and he has barely stopped writing since. I have read seven of his many books, three of which I rate very highly. Wounded (2005) is not a funny book by any means, even though humour is not entirely absent. It’s set in Wyoming and might be described as a western. The protagonist is John

Hunt who lives with his uncle Gus on the ranch where he trains and breeds horses. Hunt is as far from the conventional rancher as it’s possible to be. He owns a small painting by Paul Klee and a watercolour by Kandinsky. He and

Gus are black, a fact that’s established on page 52, before which it hasn’t even been alluded to. Hunt is a widower, who continues to feel guilty about his wife Susie’s death in a riding accident.

The prose beautifully encompasses the steady pace of life in the great outdoors, which is disrupted by the arrival of three rednecks who lynch and fake the suicide of a young gay farmhand and return to leave another gay man, the son of Hunt’s best friend in college, on the verge of death in a cave. Wounded contains information on subjects of which most authors are ignorant, like horse training and carpentry, but it’s also a subtly reflective study of the nature of love. It’s a world away from the ferocious brilliance of Erasure (2001), in which Thelonious Ellison, a writer of unsaleable experimental fiction, finds himself penning at great haste a novel in ghetto speak under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh that’s snapped up by a major publisher.

Just as hilarious is I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) about a man christened Not Sidney Poitier by his mother Portia. She dies when her son is still very young, and the boy is adopted by her friend Ted Turner, although his wife Jane Fonda is too busy exercising in and out of her leotard to notice him. It’s hard not to love Not Sidney Poitier and to laugh at the people he meets as he tells them he’s not who he seems to be.

Mourners at Emmett Till's funeral, 1955

A TALE OF EXILE, JUSTICE AND BRITAIN’S COLONIAL LEGACY PHILIPPE SANDS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 208pp, £16.99

The Chagos Islands are an archipelago that was formerly part of the British colony of Mauritius. When Mauritius was granted independence in 1965 the Chagos Islands were separated from the rest of the territory and forcibly depopulated, because one island, Diego Garcia, was leased to the United States as a military base.

This ‘powerful and elegantly written book’, wrote Tomiwa Owolade in the Sunday Times, ‘uses the story of one Chagossian woman in particular, Liseby Elysé, to tell a broader story about colonialism and international human rights from the 20th century to today... To this day, despite the international court rulings, the UK government insists that it retains sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.’ Sands has ‘provided an essential account of a continuing and little-known area of injustice’.

According to Tim Adams in the Observer, the book ‘highlights the post-colonial hypocrisy that continues to use UN human rights conventions as a basis for sovereign selfdetermination of the people of the Falkland Islands, or Gibraltar, but which for decades has wholly disregarded the application of those conventions in the case of the Chagossians’. Sands ‘makes a steely and forensic case, laced with human empathy, against successive British foreign ministers’. He ‘also sketches out the history of the international court of justice in The Hague, and its incremental role in dismantling colonial structures around the world, the inching forward of freedoms’.

However, argued James Goss in Literary Review, while Sands ‘writes about the ideas and legal principles relating to self-determination and decolonization’, he does not ‘balance this with a proper discussion of sovereignty, the fundamental doctrine in both international law and international politics. That core concept is about the exercise of absolute rights over a polity. Under the doctrine, a state rightfully exercising sovereignty cannot be told – or advised – what to do (though, in practice, politics inevitably shapes this).’ Although it is ‘beyond contest’ that the forcible removals were ‘shameful and wrong’, the book is ‘a bit of propaganda’ and ‘readers should approach it with caution’.

Hutchinson Heinemann, 176pp, £16.99

Michael Palin: man of letters

Sir Michael Palin, now aged 80, went to Iraq for his most recent travel series (and book). This is the moment when the reviewer reaches for the words ‘National Treasure’. Patrick West in the Spectator wasn’t having any of it: Palin he said is ‘more than this. He is one of this country’s most distinguished men of letters.’ The dreaded NT is ‘patronising, twee and demeaning’, thundered West, and ‘distracts from the fact that he’s one of the finest writers of our time, whose elegant and erudite prose is known for its rich, mellifluous yet uncluttered style’.

In the Daily Telegraph, Jasper Rees noted among a touchingly surprising aspect of Palin’s writing, ‘an appealingly vulnerable habit of noting down others’ compliments to him’. Any journey with Palin, thought Rees, is ‘to some extent a portrait of the man. You’d get a harder-nosed narrative from a different reporter. While Palin doesn’t altogether shy away from these subjects, there would probably be more on corruption, torture and endemic sexism. But you wouldn’t get the warmth, the self-mockery, the granddad jokes, or the conversation with a donkey, which was no more talkative than that parrot he once sold to John Cleese.’

And Hugo Rifkind in the Times, reviewing Channel 5’s Into Iraq, simply marvelled. ‘Go to Italy, you mad old fool. Visit a nice museum. But nope, there he is up a mountain in Akre, while locals celebrate spring by shooting tracer bullets into the sky and running about with giant torches. “Getting a bit warm,” he says, mildly. The real wonder of his being in Iraq is that he is, indeed, full of wonder. Like all the best travel presenters, Palin is a hell of a journalist who never quite lets on that he’s doing journalism. In the rubble of Mosul he speaks to children who survived life under Islamic State occupation. He’s shocked enough to swear, but he’s Michael Palin, so even his horror is genial.’

THE SECRET LIFE OF LONDON PRIVATE MEMBERS’ CLUBS SETH ALEXANDER THÉVOZ

Robinson, 375pp, £25

This ‘compendious and entertaining’ account of the history of London’s clubland is, wrote Sue Gaisford in the Financial Times, ‘the result of thorough research, lightly worn. Thévoz writes with energy, conviction and amusement at the ever-changing variety of human congregation and its foibles. Virtually everything you might think you know about these clubs proves to be false. There were women’s clubs by the 1860s and mixed clubs soon afterwards; strict dress codes only came halfway through the 20th century and these days membership of the olderestablished clubs consists of 10 per cent regulars and the rest “show-offs”, who pop in occasionally to impress their friends.’

Alexander Larman in the Observer was also diverted, noting that in fact this is a story of decline. ‘Seth Alexander Thévoz offers a barrage of statistics that may suggest that their heyday has long since passed. We discover that nine out of ten “traditional” establishments have gone bankrupt over the past century and that the 40 or so clubs that survive today do so because they tend to boast a distinctive culture or identity, whether their appeal is to actors (the Garrick), the armed forces (the In and Out Club) or, of course, Conservative MPs.’

The blog BuzzMag hailed a ‘wonderful, impressively wellinformed tour guide’ but wished the

book had been more indiscreet: ‘there’s often the frustrating sense that the juiciest secrets remain untold’. However, Jonathan Parry, reviewing the book in the London Review of Books, took the opposite view: ‘What lies behind Thévoz’s closed doors isn’t power but lowgrade sleaze. His book is a fairminded overview of three hundred years of club history, neatly researched and quite fact-heavy, but overwhelmingly preoccupied with carnal and financial appetites.’

HOW TO SAVE OUR OCEANS CHARLES CLOVER

Witness, 261pp, £22

Veteran environmental journalist Charles Clover is the founder of Blue, a marine conservation charity which, according to Callum Roberts in the Telegraph, ‘champions small-scale, low impact, community-based fishing and also, at the other end of the spectrum, of enormous protected areas where wildlife can thrive, free from interference and harm’. Reviewing Clover’s ‘powerful’ new book, Roberts reflected on how the history of our relationship with the sea is packed with accounts of sea creatures both real and imaginary. Now, the teeming life of the oceans is under threat from industrialised fishing and urgently needs protection.

In the Times, Christopher Hart praised a ‘fabulously well-informed survey’ and a ‘rollercoaster of a read’. He went on: ‘It’s exhilarating to learn how easily the seas can recover their natural richness if only we step back and let nature do her thing — which, from the plentiful evidence here, seems to be essentially to produce life and more life in endless abundance.’

David Profumo in the Spectator also admired Clover’s optimism – and wished he could completely share it. But the challenge is daunting. ‘The vast long-range fishing fleets of China and the EU are among Clover’s “Enemies of Progress”, as they shamelessly exceed their catch limits, especially around the African coasts. Trawlers release as much CO2 as the global aviation industry, and their detrimental impact on the ability of the seabed and its denizens to soak up carbon is one of the book’s abiding themes.’

Can we reverse the damage? The murder... Darker still, like many old ballads,The Captain’s Apprentice is based on a true story. In the 1990s the researcher Elizabeth James identified an account in a newspaper of a cabin boy called Robert Eastick from King’s Lynn, who was badly treated, “fell overboard” and drowned in 1856.’

Christiansen said Davison’s ‘animated, entertaining essay rambles in fashionable style between personal memoir, topographical wandering, archival research, semi-fictional speculation and rigorous musicology. At times it seems to lose its focus.’

Simon Heffer in the Spectator agreed: ‘Davison is to be commended on the detail she produces about the composer’s visit to Norfolk, the people he met there and the songs they sang to him…But then the book diverts into a biography of the composer’s early years, much of which is familiar, and into ruminations on the effect on the author herself of the song that gives her book its title.’

Heffer was scathing about Davison’s insertion of herself into the story: ‘[She] appears to have benefited (if that is the word) from a “creative non-fiction” course at a university. The effects of this are, I fear, seen in other diversions, where she amplifies contemporary reports of court cases about cruel sea captains with her own imagination of aspects of what else happened. There will be some who think this is a good idea. I am not one.’

West Indian Sea Egg and Reef Urchin Literary Review’s Peter Coates was cautiously optimistic: ‘Clover is an ardent believer in a revamped version of laissez faire: leave nature unfettered and wondrous things will happen quickly. These achievements are examples of marine rewilding. Using an elastic definition of rewilding (he’s at pains to keep on board fisherfolk who would never describe themselves as rewilders), Clover presents several case studies of inspirational undertakings.’

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE STORY OF A FOLK SONG CAROLINE DAVISON

Chatto & Windus, 400pp, £20

‘Davison’s book circles round The Captain’s Apprentice, a narrative ballad about the torture [and death] of a teenage cabin boy that Vaughan Williams first heard in 1905, sung by a fisherman in a rough quarter of the port at King’s Lynn,’ explained Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph, ‘subsequently he would incorporate its modal melody into his first Norfolk Rhapsody.’

Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times said the song ‘depicts, in modern terms, child abuse and then

Mention ‘culture wars’ today and people assume you’re talking about ‘woke’ issues like race or sexuality. This was not the case 60 years ago when the messianic Cambridge don, FR Leavis, denounced the novelist and former physicist CP Snow, who in 1959 gave a lecture called ‘The Two Cultures’ in which he deplored the ignorance and suspicion towards science shown by leading men of letters, whom he called ‘Luddites’. Scientists, said Snow, had ‘the future in their bones’. Rubbish, said Dr Leavis. An abrasive figure who lectured in an open-necked shirt, Leavis saw literature as a guide to conduct. Would science, he asked, teach you how to behave?

Although his days as a boffin were long behind him, Snow retained the belief, common to scientists before the war, that science alone could guarantee economic prosperity. This utilitarian approach infuriated Leavis. He did not equate ‘the good life’ with material wealth, insisting instead that the study of, and response to, great literature was the only worthwhile pursuit for an intelligent young person, many of whom not only took him at his word but also contrived to spread it. Armed with copies of Scrutiny, the magazine their magus founded, Leavisites not only infiltrated the country’s classrooms and common rooms, they also, said Peter Hall, had a huge influence on the English stage.

But Leavis was not content simply to refute Snow, whom he called ‘a public relations man for science’. He set out to prove that far from being ‘a genius’ and a ‘master-mind’ who could speak with authority on both science and literature, Snow was ‘intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be’. He then asserted that as a novelist, Snow ‘didn’t exist’ – this despite the reverential treatment accorded to Strangers and Brothers, Snow’s ponderous, semi-autobiographical roman fleuve. No wonder a modern critic would later write: ‘A malevolent deity, setting out to design a single figure in whom the largest number of Leavis’s deepest antipathies would find themselves embodied, could not have done better than to create Charles Percy Snow.’

And yet, as Leavis must have known, he and Snow had much in common, being clever boys from modest provincial homes who had to make their own way. Both won scholarships to Cambridge, where Leavis remained for most of his working life. Both loathed Bloomsbury and its snooty ‘coterie culture’. And both rejected the ‘experimental’ literature of the Modern Movement, which Snow, wearing his boffin’s hat, compared to indiscriminately mixing up all the bottles in a school chemistry laboratory. (Though determined to become a novelist, Snow read Science at Cambridge because it was the only subject his grammar school taught for university entrance.)

When war came Snow swapped the Cavendish laboratory for the corridors of power, a phrase he himself coined. Tasked with recruiting scientists for the defence industry he later became a Civil Service Commissioner and in 1957 was knighted. Rotund and avuncular, with a large shiny cranium and a measured delivery, he was many people’s idea of a pundit – hence the trouble Leavis took to disabuse them.

But why did Leavis wait three years before putting the boot in? Well, for one thing he subsequently found that copies of Snow’s lecture enjoyed a far wider circulation than he’d imagined possible. People were taking it seriously enough to recommend that sixth form English scholarship candidates read it. Even worse, these youngsters were also encouraged to read Snow’s novels. Leavis would certainly have regarded all this as trespass. The best and brightest were his turf.

Leavis was not alone in thinking Snow overrated as a novelist. But the consensus was that he had gone too far. His tone, said the distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling, was ‘impermissible’. To his credit Snow did not object when copies of Leavis’s lecture went on sale, this despite his belief that it probably cost him a Nobel prize. He may have been consoled by the award of a peerage in 1964 and a brief spell in Government as 2 i/c of Harold Wilson’s short-lived Ministry of Technology.

It’s now realised that what the debate should really have been about was the curriculum, which required pupils to choose between science and the humanities at the age of 16, or even earlier. This is no longer the case: A Level candidates can mix and match. But meanwhile the goal posts have shifted. An Oxford English graduate recently complained that while graduates in science and technology were walking into well-paid jobs, ‘English graduates were faced with the prospect of fighting a thousand other applicants for a six-week unpaid internship at a home appliance catalogue in Slough.’

The government seems to have taken note of this, not least because it wants as many graduates as possible to pay off their loans. ‘Stem’ subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – are to be encouraged, while the Humanities must prove their worth to employers or be starved of funds. So the hard-nosed approach recommended by Snow is now common practice, but I doubt whether he would have welcomed it unreservedly. However scathing he was about Luddites, he thought the two cultures could and should co-exist.

CP Snow: many people’s idea of a pundit

Understanding Russian history ‘and how Russians see it is crucial to shaping any western response’ to Putin’s aggression, wrote Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. In Rodric Braithwaite’s Russia: Myths

Past (Profile, 288pp, £16.99), ‘the author quotes the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1782, which described Russia as ‘very large...governed by a complete despotism and inhabited by vicious and drunken savages’. Readers seeking a more nuanced view will find Braithwaite’s brisk and readable account very valuable. The book covers more than 1,000 years of history, culminating in what Putin termed the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the collapse of the Soviet Union.’

As Roger Boyes argued in his review for the Times, ‘Russia’s capacity to overestimate its virtues, to demand unearned applause, is one of the threads that runs through Rodric Braithwaite’s elegant portrait of the country that he has followed for so long, as an ambassador, prime ministerial adviser and writer. This short book, a masterpiece of compression, extracts lessons about the present invasion by trawling through Russia’s extraordinary history.’

Another concise study is Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia (Bloomsbury, 368pp, £20). ‘Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted,’ wrote Bridget Kendall in the Guardian. But the purpose is ‘not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present... The idea that Russia has a sacred spiritual destiny sits uneasily with its sense of where it fits into the world. As Figes meticulously charts, throughout its history there has been a running debate about how the country relates to foreigners and, above all, to Europeans... The question we are left with is whether Putin is still able to control the narrative, or if he has become a victim of his own myths about the “Russian world”.’

For Gregory Feifer in the New York Times, Figes ‘makes a key point about how the challenges of geography and climate have reinforced a long-held perception about the need for collective responsibility and strong autocratic leadership’. In the early development of the Muscovite state, the czar had a central role as arbiter between ruling clans. ‘In an important distinction from Western practice, the boyars – Moscow’s version of nobility – held status and property solely at the czar’s pleasure, with no rights of private ownership. “It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day,” Figes writes. “Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.”’

One such oligarch, briefly Russia’s richest man, then her most famous political prisoner, and now an exile living in London, is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose life has been ‘a dramatic story, one that might make an enthralling autobiography’, wrote Neil Buckley in the Financial Times.

(WH Allen, 352pp, £20) is ‘not, quite, the book that he has written. Instead, with co-author Martin Sixsmith, Khodorkovsky weaves together a pared-back account of his life with an astute dissection of the Putin system. It is part polemic, part selfjustification, and part manifesto for a different, post-Putin Russia. It is an intriguing mix, if a sometimes unsatisfying one.’

While he ‘writes confidently of how to secure freedom in post-Putin Russia... his brief depiction of life in the camps of Russia’s modern-day gulag, largely confined to a single chapter, left this reader wanting more. Perhaps one day Khodorkovsky will tell the full, warts-and-all tale – worthy of a Russian novel – of how he built a business empire, lost it all, then found a form of redemption in the camps of Siberia and in exile.’ In his review for the Times, Marc Bennetts said that ‘despite his experiences and insider knowledge, this is not a gripping book’ and his ‘caution means that he glosses over, or simply ignores, some of the most intriguing episodes of his eventful life’.

John Sweeney’s Killer in the

(Bantam Press, 304pp, £16.99) is ‘not a disinterested biography of Vladimir Putin’, wrote Seamus Martin in the Irish Times. ‘It is, instead, a polemic relating not only to Russia’s president but to many other aspects of the politics of Russia and Ukraine. At its best it points to some of Putin’s most execrable traits and at its worst elevates the author to the position of the book’s leading character.’

It ‘largely consists of digging up everything possible that shows Putin in a bad light, which admittedly is not a difficult task, but suggestions that he was simultaneously a paedophile and a womaniser, a supplier of arms to the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a hypochondriac and the richest man in the world are all open to question’. Times reviewer Roger Boyes called it ‘swashbuckling... a parade of adventures, told at breakneck pace, full of righteous indignation and an eye for the absurd’.

Vladimir Putin takes the presidential oath of office, 2000, with Boris Yeltsin watching

4th Estate, 152pp, £8.99

At 160 pages and only 15,000 words, Treacle Walker is a slip of a novel but lovers of Alan Garner’s half century of story-telling magic will recognise the landscape – fairy story, fable and a touch of medieval morality tale – which awarded him a place (at 88) on the Booker Prize shortlist. In the Times Literary Supplement, medieval literature scholar Carolyne Larrington thought it a ‘remarkable achievement, somehow encapsulating a long lifetime’s work’.

A young boy, Joe Coppock, lives alone and when the pedlar Treacle Walker calls by with his horse and cart, it sets off, wrote Larrington, ‘a chain of mysterious happenings that seem both inexplicable and inevitable’. Susie Goldsbrough in the Times wasn’t sure who it was actually for. ‘The story slips into that particular, snug pocket of children’s literature about sick or lonely children who stumble into magical worlds.’ But the language, she thought, was ‘tricky (if delicious – flustifaction, Clanjandering) and the plot scattergun’.

But in the Daily Telegraph, Sam Leith simply loved it. ‘Garner knots together a whole range of mythological and fairy-story motifs, and tropes from children’s stories – double vision, looking-glass worlds, wise fools, monsters that can’t cross a threshold unless invited in, obscurely understood magical objects – to create a small universe absolutely charged with meaning. It’s a glimpse of a world suffused with magic, of which our own day-to-day experience seems to be a flickering instantiation.’

Alan Garner: Booker-shortlisted Racial mourning: ‘existential absurdity gives way to a parable...’

Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £12.99

‘One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.’ This is the opening sentence of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel. In the Washington Post, Ron Charles was impressed by a ‘discomfiting little book’: ‘The novel’s existential absurdity quickly gives way to a parable of what might be called racial mourning. The darkening that befalls Anders is happening all over this unnamed town. Everywhere, formerly White people are waking up with skin “a deep and undeniable brown”... It’s too sincere for dystopian satire, too earnest for cultural parody. It describes the apocalypse long feared by white supremacists by subjecting that paranoia to blistering attention.’

As Guy Gunaratne in the Guardian put it: ‘The loss of privilege that comes from being perceived as white, and no longer being able to view the world from within whiteness, are some of the anxieties examined here.’

Several reviewers remarked on Hamid’s distinctive prose style, summed up by Mia Levitin in the Spectator as ‘paragraphs often made up of one long sentence, the narrative propelled by a cadence of commas’. Hamilton Cain in Oprah Daily loved it. ‘Most (not all) of his paragraphs are single beautiful sentences that purl and flow over punctuation scattered like pebbles, with repetitions and cadences that tow the reader forward, gently.’ But it didn’t work for Sameer Rahim in the Telegraph who just found it ‘tedious’.

Levitin thought The Last White Man ‘can be savoured in one long, thought-provoking sitting’ but Namwali Serpell in Atlantic Monthly just found it provoking: ‘What Hamid’s novel actually offers isn’t education but recognition, a selfcongratulatory reconfirmation of ideas like “migration is a death” and “race is a construct”, which are true enough but also truisms by now.’ And for Rahim, ‘Hamid’s moralising tone leaves the novel dead in the water.’

Fourth Estate, 432pp, £18.99

This is 84-year-old Joyce Carol Oates’s 59th novel, but reviewers agreed that she shows no sign of running out of writerly puff. Her thriller about a serial killer on the loose in Detroit in 1977, where a rich socialite has embarked on an affair, impressed Kate Saunders in the Times with its rattling pace, thrilling twists and surprising ending. Oates

Joyce Carol Oates: rule breaker had an ‘extraordinary grip’ on her story and characters. It was ‘never quite the novel we think it’s going to be’ and she cleverly used our prejudices and assumptions to confound our expectations.

Kimberley Long in the Financial Times praised in particular the social dimension to the novel, its depiction of the paranoia of white middle-class America of that period and the racial and class tensions simmering beneath its glamorous surface. It was a ‘compelling study in the most ugly aspects of human desire’, though its true horror, she claimed, lay in ‘the torture endured in the futile search for connection’.

For Julie Myerson in the Guardian, this torture was both appalling — ‘one of the most harrowing descriptions of a prolonged sexual assault I can remember reading’ — and yet impressive for the sheer ‘astuteness’ of the writing. Oates’s prose style she saw as ‘insolently alive’ and rulebreaking, and the result was ‘magical’.

Granta, 416pp, £20

AM Homes’s latest opens on 4th November, 2008, and the confirmation of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president. The Republican party’s high command are in a state of outrage and confusion. It is Republican bigwig Hitchens, known as Big Guy who is the novel’s chief protagonist and he is determined to launch a campaign to bring the conservative faction back into power.

Homes, opined Alex Clark in the Spectator, is a ‘funny, funny writer’. In the Guardian, Xan Brooks enjoyed the comic tone: ‘veering between barbed satire and nuanced domestic drama like a train clattering over the points as it homes in on DC’. In the Observer, Jonathan Myerson found himself getting bogged down: ‘At first this oblique, metaphorical banter has a seductive silliness: these conspirators know what they’re talking about and the reader is invited to eavesdrop, even if we don’t yet possess the codebook. But by the third or fourth conclave, you can’t help but feel such doggedly nonspecific language is militating against the narrative: what exactly are they planning and when and how?’

John Self found it hard going. ‘It is all delivered in long scenes of trivial, roundabout dialogue that never go anywhere. It goes on and on and on for an eye-watering 400 pages,’ he wrote in the Times. ‘Above my head a presiding spirit kind of admired Homes’s boldness with all this conversational minutiae, and nodded at the hidden literary nuggets of goodness. Yet down on the sofa, my bum was getting numb waiting for something to happen.’

Canongate, 348pp, £16.99

There are two intersecting narratives, separated by three and a half centuries and united by two motherless children. The first concerns the 1628 shipwreck of the Batavia bound for the Dutch East Indies but which founders on an island off the coast of western Australia, after which an adult Lord of the Flies scenario develops with one of the passengers seizing women as sex slaves and massacring children. The main protagonist here is Mayken, daughter of a merchant whom she is to join after the death of her mother; hero of the second narrative is Gil, who after the death of his young mother is sent to live – on the same island – with his grandfather.

Stephanie Merritt described in the Observer how the two stories ‘unfold in alternate chapters, linked by repeated phrases and talismans’. AK Blakemore in the Guardian found this ‘bifurcated architecture’ frustrating; Christian Edwards, in the Times, agreed, adding that, ‘Part of the reason the narrative feels lukewarm is to do with the novel’s form.’ He considered the overlaps between the two characters ‘more biographical than temperamental, so the attempts to force them into ever closer alignment are strained’.

Marinka Swain in the Telegraph enjoyed the fact that the novel was ‘strong on body horror, from pus-filled boils to a skull found beneath a washing line’. Nevertheless, she felt the reader was ‘ultimately overwhelmed by a sort of soggy morality: straightforward goodies and baddies instead of the lurking dark side of human nature’.

Hogarth, 231pp, £16.99

Fans of Lawrence Osborne’s thrillers will be delighted to know that Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times thought On Java Road, his ‘most compulsive yet’. Tom Williams in the Spectator was also full of praise for this story of British journalist Adrian Gyle, his rich Chinese friend Jimmy and the mysterious disappearance of Jimmy’s mistress Rebecca. ‘Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their backdrops, from Macau to Greece, are often glamorous and exotic. Like any British novelist who deals with morality in foreign places, he gets

compared with Graham Greene, but On Java Road, his sixth novel, owes much to Patricia Highsmith too. At its heart is a crime – the disappearance of a young woman in contemporary Hong Kong – but this, as much as anything, is a structural device on which to hang an examination of moral courage. What, Osborne asks, is required to protect democracy when doing so comes with great risk?’

For the New York Times reviewer Chris Bohjalian it was ‘the palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum that kept me turning the pages’. As Kemp put it: ‘Shades of Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith fall across his colourful pages. Like both, he has a nomadic imagination strongly responsive to the lure of the foreign and enthralled by duplicity, mistrust and betrayal.’

Viking, 413pp, £20

The Bullet That Missed is the third novel in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, which features four retirement-home amateur detectives. His first two each sold more than a million copies. As Alison Flood wrote in the Guardian, ‘it is hard not to be charmed by the eccentricities and the resourcefulness of [Osman’s] creations’. She continued: ‘Writing genuinely funny prose is not at all easy; it is rare that I find a book that has me actually laughing out loud, but I snickered so much reading this one that it was remarked upon by my family.’

The unsolved murder this time is that of a television reporter who was researching a VAT fraud when her car was driven off a cliff. Suicide was ruled out when her body wasn’t found. So the Thursday Murder Club’s four intrepid pensioners set out to investigate.

Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph was also charmed by Osman’s books: they ‘are obviously intended to be crowd-pleasers but never seem confected, with a genuine warmth that readers clearly respond to. Every bookshop will be as crowded as the post office on pension day when this one is released, and Osman deserves that success.’ However, a dissenting voice came from Joan Smith in the Sunday Times, who thought that although there was ‘nothing wrong with cosy crime, which has a distinguished pedigree going back to the 1920s’, there were more accomplished modern exponents… ‘Cosy crime is, anyway, a misnomer,’ she wrote; ‘the best examples are deadly serious, as [Agatha] Christie indicated when she characterised murder as the worst crime imaginable. Nothing could be further from the whimsical musings of the Thursday Murder Club.’

Picador, 272pp, £16.99

Jim Crace has won numerous awards for his fiction and, as Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman put it, his novels are ‘wonderful enigmas. They are fables without evident moral apothegms, or allegories that refuse to reveal their key… His latest, eden, is in his signature limpid style and prompts the same delightful befuddlement in the reader.’

The inhabitants of Crace’s eden live in a ‘kind of horticultural detention camp’, wrote Peter Kemp in the Times. They tend to the garden, overseen by angels (large, blue-feathered birds) but one of the gardeners has disappeared...

As Max Liu in the Financial Times explained: ‘Crace’s eden is no paradise for most of its inhabitants who belong to a rigidly hierarchical society in which an under-class of human labourers serve the “winged nobility” of brutal angel overseers. The “gardeners of eden” have sacrificed their freedom in exchange for eternal life. They have escaped the mortal world outside the garden which is said to be full of hardship and death.’

‘Despite describing himself as a “North Korean style atheist”’, Jon Day wrote in the Spectator, ‘religious themes are nothing new for Crace. Nor is the ambiguity with which he treats them here, which is likely to infuriate believers and unbelievers equally.

‘His real interest, however, isn’t theological but moral, and eden isn’t about God at all. Instead, it’s about how stories are a direct result of our mortality, endlessly recyclable and reinterpretable.’

Kemp concluded: ‘eden suffers – ironically – from the main drawback Crace sees in eternal life: it goes on too long in the same way.’

Books & Publishing

Jaspergibbons@theoldie.co.uk

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Books & Publishing

Princesses and pirates are facing stiff competition from grandparents who are the current stars of children’s fiction, with ever more picture books focusing on the transformative bond between old and young. Found by Sam Usher (Templar, 40pp, £12.99) is a charming example, telling the simple story of a boy and his grandfather as they discover the wonder of the natural world during a day beside the sea. (‘It was the best sandcastle I’d ever seen! Grandad said, “I think we deserve an ice cream, don’t you?”’) And young readers will love peeking under the flaps in Cat Family Christmas by Lucy Brownridge (Frances Lincoln, 24pp, £24.99), in which we join three kittens as they help their grandparents tackle a raft of cosily familiar Christmas chores. (‘So little time left and so much cooking still to do!’)

And it wouldn’t be Christmas without Julia Donaldson’s beloved Stick Man, whose Homeric journey home to the family tree has now been translatit intae Scots by James Robertson. In Stick Mannie (Itchy Coo, 32pp, £6.99) our beleaguered hero ‘bides in the faimly tree / Wi his Stick Wifie Love and their stick bairnies three’. But ‘wan day, when Stick Mannie is oot for a jog, he has so many adventures he begins tae wonder if he’ll ever get hame again …’

In board books, The Twelve Days of Christmas by Rachel Piercey, illustrated by Freya Hartas (Magic Cat Publishing, 10pp, £7.99), is an engaging reinvention of the traditional song, in which we follow Bear on a festive present hunt. ‘On the tenth day of Christmas, Santa gave to me: ten snowballs flying …’ And for a gentle lesson in road awareness, A Practical Present for Philippa Pheasant (Walker, 32pp, £12.99) by Briony May Smith is the skilfully suspenseful story of a warm-hearted pheasant who dreams of becoming a lollipop lady and making her forest safer. Can our plucky protagonist source a yellow jacket, and help her friends to cross the road?

For chapter book readers, feminist retellings of fairy tales are still coming thick and fast – and The Little Match Girl Strikes Back (Simon & Schuster, 208pp, £12.99), in which the historical novelist Emma Carroll reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a matchgirl who dies on the city streets, stands out from the rest. In Carroll’s version (illustrated by Lauren Child), the heroine leads her fellow match factory workers on strike, marches on Parliament – and lives to tell the tale.

Fantasy lovers meanwhile will find plenty of inventive high jinx in The Spectaculars (Usborne, 368pp, £12.99) – a new trilogy by the debut author Jodie Garnish. In the first instalment we meet our heroine Harper, whose special powers lead her to a mysterious theatre school in which she is plunged into magical adventures. Meanwhile in

Ghosts (Simon & Schuster, 272pp, £6.99), the first in a new series by Steven Butler, a young girl stumbles into a haunted theatre and finds that she and its ghosts have more in common than she could have supposed. (‘For the first time in her life she had a whole gaggle of exciting friends to love, both living and not-soliving.’)

Stowaway (Faber and Faber, 288pp, £7.99) is an historical adventure by Judith Eagle, telling the story of a girl in Edwardian Liverpool who accidentally stows away on the RMS Glorious. (‘A giant boom split the air: Surely the ship wasn’t about to set sail?’) Can Patch remain hidden and solve the ship’s intrigues before she arrives in New York? And fans of detective fiction should not miss Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire, an ebullient new series by Sarah Todd Taylor about a young girl who works in a bakery by day, and spies by night. In the first instalment, A Recipe for Trouble (Nosy Crow, 272pp, £7.99), our inexhaustible heroine sneaks onboard a French train dressed as a pastry chef.

For slightly older readers, The Chestnut Roaster by Eve McDonnell (Everything with Words, 324pp, £7.99) is an historical thriller set in the catacombs of 19th-century Paris, which tells the story of a girl burdened by a supernatural memory. (‘Starting on All Fools Day, twelve years ago, I remember everything. EVERYTHING. That was a Tuesday, and that was the day I was born.’)

Children’s self-help remains one of the fastest growing genres – and for a Christmas message of peace and goodwill, look no further than the Mr Men, who are the subject of a new series of books intended to help young readers manage their emotions. Toddlers feeling fractious on Boxing Day might take inspiration from Be Kind (Farshore, 32pp, £4.99), in which Mr Mean discovers that being nice can have unexpected consequences: ‘Mr Mean felt a strange sensation. A warm glow which started in his chest and spread outwards. A small act of kindness really had made him feel happier too.’

From top: A Practical Present for Philippa Pheasant, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Stick Mannie, Be Kind