By Times Literary Supplement | Created at 2024-11-14 02:17:56 | Updated at 2024-11-21 18:59:32
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DAVID ABULAFIA
In Courage and Compassion: A Jewish boyhood in German-occupied Greece (Berghahn), Tony Molho, a celebrated historian of Renaissance Italy, traces his journeys as a small boy hidden from the Nazis in Salonika and Athens. This unforgettable book is also an account of human kindness, of ordinary people risking their safety by saving from extermination a child chased for no other reason than his ethnic identity. Among history books I admired, John Haywood’s Ocean: A history of the Atlantic before Columbus (Apollo) is eminently readable. Atlantic history is too often assumed to begin in 1492, allowing for the Norse settlers who inhabited Greenland for four centuries and visited America, about whom the author has much to say. But Neolithic navigators from Orkney, legendary Irish monks and the native inhabitants of the Canary Islands and West Africa also appear, along with naked people somehow surviving in frozen Tierra del Fuego.
TERRI APTER
There is a case for reading Percival Everett’s novel James (Mantle) alongside Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Was Huck Black? Fishkin’s work, published thirty years ago, revealed close linguistic ties between Black American speech and the exhaustless, eloquent language of Huck Finn. Everett turns the screw further as he strips Mark Twain’s character Jim of his stereotypical dress to create a James who speaks and writes in a very formal English, switching into Black vernacular only as a performance for Southern whites. Should his real abilities emerge, whites might feel inferior; and, he explains to his children, the only people who would then suffer “is us”. Impudent and satirical, Everett demands courageous open-mindedness from his readers.
The unofficial power of kingmaking is usually the remit of men, but in Kingmaker (Virago), Sonia Purnell raises disturbing and enduring questions about constraints of female influence, emotional duplicity and sexual exploitation.
MARY BEARD
Don’t forget the brilliant exhibition catalogues produced every year. I am pleased to use this round-up to point to catalogues with a life expectancy beyond the exhibition itself. This year I’ve chosen two outstanding examples from my temporary home in Washington DC. First, Brilliant Exiles by Robyn Asleson (Yale) accompanies an exhbition at the National Portrait Gallery that traces images of (and by) American women in Paris in the early twentieth century. Gertrude Stein has her part, of course, but we follow the achievements of many other extraordinarily talented women who found in Paris liberation from the constraints back home. Second, Paris 1874: The impressionist moment, edited by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins (Yale/National Gallery of Art, Washington), is the catalogue for a show that started at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and has now moved to the National Gallery of Art in DC. The book documents the art of 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, showing the work, as they described it, of “the Anonymous Society of Artists … starving for independence”. But it’s one of the few books on this moment to give fair due to the traditional painters whom the young radicals were apparently challenging. Jean-Léon Gérôme is almost as much a hero of Paris 1874 as Claude Monet.
LUCY BECKETT
Raja Shehadeh’s What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? (Profile) – answer: Palestine’s existence – is a brief history of a long tragedy. Shehadeh, a lawyer, a human rights campaigner and Palestine’s best writer, was born in Ramallah in 1951 and is still there, watching the ever-diminishing land, security, freedom, connection to the ancient past and hope of his people. This measured, desperate account of what led to the horrors that have unfolded since October 7, 2023, explains, as it mourns, a great deal.
Totally different is The Quality of Love: Twin sisters at the heart of the century (Duckworth), an irresistible family memoir by Ariane Bankes, the daughter of one of the Paget twins, identical and stunningly beautiful, who were born in 1916 and dazzled some of the most interesting men of the mid-twentieth century. In their entwined lives, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, A. J. Ayer and others played key parts, behaving more (Koestler) or less (Camus) badly: a gripping, tactfully told and moving story.
PAUL BINDING
Blessings (Viking), Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel, presents a predicament of universal moral application with a near-classical concentration that endorses the identity of its central character, Obiefuna, as a unique individual. The opening scenes in Port Harcourt, Nigeria – Obiefuna’s teenage response to his father’s boy assistant, their first meaningful eye contact, his father’s witnessing of it and subsequent suppressive actions – shape what lies ahead and prefigure movements in the external world. We leave him after Nigeria has passed (in 2014) laws criminalizing same-sex activities to include even gestures of attraction. Obiefuna must stay true to himself.
Ibeh was born in 2000; Belfast-born Michael Longley turned eighty-five this year. Ash Keys (Cape), a “new selected poems”, reminds us of the consistent yet varied empathies expressed throughout this great poet’s finely wrought lyrics, extending to animals, plants, his late twin brother and the victims of the Troubles: “Ceasefire” concludes with Priam kissing “Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son”.
WILLIAM BOYD
I first went to Vienna thirty years ago to research an article about Egon Schiele. One early morning, I decided to go to the Sigmund Freud Museum in his old consulting rooms at Berggasse 19. I date my abiding interest in Freud and psychoanalysis from the time I spent alone on the stairs in the building’s small courtyard, waiting for the museum to open. Nothing much had changed. Time travel: it could have been 1913. I’m fully aware of the extent to which Freud has been discredited, and that his theories are wholly unscientific. That being said, Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the discovery of the modern mind (Abacus) is fascinating, the best book I have read on Freud and Vienna. Lucid, sceptical, sagacious, it perfectly explains how we are all, like it or not, Freudians now. Tallis’s crime novels, set in Freud’s Vienna, are also very good.
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC
In Cécile Wajsbrot’s Nevermore (Seagull), a writer and translator travels to Dresden to translate Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes” (from To the Lighthouse) into French: “a text on time’s destruction in a city once destroyed by war”. As she translates she replays scenes from her past, including the story of a friend whose death is mysteriously connected to her desire to leave Paris for a while. Tess Lewis’s elegant translation of Nevermore adds one more layer to this intriguing book.
Fog and Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the Californian poet Katie Peterson’s fifth collection. It tracks the richly diverging paths of her thoughts through real and metaphorical fire and fog: “[Fog] comes from the ocean. / It means our interior burns”. In “The Web”, a long, resonant poem about a spider’s web, she concludes, as she eases a child into her car seat without disturbing the spider’s work, “I haven’t wrecked her. / I buckle my daughter”. This is a powerful, poetically resourceful collection.
DAVID BROMWICH
Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution (Thesis) is a closely observed chronicle of a peculiar moment: the anti-Covid lockdowns of spring 2020 and the anti-racist protests and riots in the US that summer – a convergence whose after-effects have yet to be measured. Masks were a property of the lockdown as well as the riots; and by the 2020 election it was clear in the US that something like a national nervous breakdown was in process: 1,000 medical professionals signed a public letter endorsing mass demonstrations during lockdown on the grounds that racism was a direr disease than Covid. Bowles has a delicate ear for the jargon of movements and the cant of cliques. Her subtitle, “Dispatches from the wrong side of history”, gives a fair idea of the tone of a book that will be a resource for future historians.
JAMES CAMPBELL
The reader of Balzac’s Paris (Verso) by Éric Hazan strolls through the city’s boulevards and gaslit alleyways arm in arm with both the author and his subject. While Hazan studies the map, Balzac is creating the streets beneath our feet. Few people can have been as familiar with The Human Comedy as this physician turned publisher and author. Hazan knew so much about Balzac that he could state with confidence that “His Parisian society is overpopulated with blondes”. Also in abundance are heads of hair “black and shiny as satin” and “blue-black”. Brunettes, however, are “absent from The Human Comedy”. (French usage embraces both sexes.) Hazan, too, is now absent, alas. He died three weeks before the appearance of Balzac’s Paris in English. Fortunately, he left behind this illuminating, encyclopaedic work of fewer than 200 pages.
CLARE CARLISLE
Hands down, it’s All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate). As darkly offbeat as its author’s previous work, this gripping and hilarious road-trip tale of peri-menopause, marriage, motherhood and masturbation is more accessible while reaching new artistic heights. It’s a wild read, cushioned by unpretentious, impeccable prose. My girlfriends were raving about it this summer – and my husband enjoyed it too.
Continuing the four-legged theme, top of my nonfiction list is Kathryn Hughes’s Catland (Fourth Estate). You needn’t be a cat lady (I’m allergic) to relish this smart, gorgeously written cultural history, anchored in a nuanced biography of the decidedly weird artist Louis Wain. Just as Wain anthropomorphized his cats, so Hughes reveals something of the human condition as she observes the mysterious felines that walk disdainfully among us. For all their differences, Catland and All Fours are queer and joyous books, brimming with subversive intelligence and gloriously unafraid to please their readers.
ALEX CLARK
The book that I most felt changed by this year was Marianne Brooker’s Intervals (Fitzcarraldo), an account of the death of the author’s mother, Jane, who had primary progressive multiple sclerosis and who, at the age of forty-nine, decided to refuse food and drink to bring an end to her life. It is a harrowing and intense book, but one written with such clarity and humanity that it illuminates not only the experiences of mother and daughter, but also the inherent inequality of illness and treatment, and wider questions about how lives are valued. It is that rare thing, a polemic that refuses to skirt complexity, understanding that life – and death – are governed by circumstance and contingency.
JONATHAN CLARK
Identity politics today often depends on the assumption that identities are inherent, ubiquitous and therefore morally unchallengeable. But does this assumption derive from the victimhood culture, itself a consequence of the only recent proliferation of universal human rights discourse? Or does it rest securely on historical research? Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male sexual relations, 1400–1750 (OUP) is an exemplary exercise in the second, and overturns many orthodoxies. Recent advocacy scholarship has contended for the widespread incidence of the practice, leading naturally to its conceptualization: there were, and hence are, “homosexuals”. In Malcolm’s pages this practice differed greatly, from the Islamic world to Italy, Spain and northern Europe; it was encountered or defined, idealized or condemned, differently from place to place, and was seldom an unchanging orientation through life. On this evidence practice and convention trumped identity and interest-group advocacy. Do they still?
PAUL COLLIER
Economics is transitioning from predicting a rational individual. That view has dominated the Treasury in Britain, damaging our social fabric. Good journalistic books lament and lambast the outcomes. Now an academic book, Gwyn Bevan’s How Did Britain Come to This? (LSE), sets out the coruscating evidence for why it happened: the Treasury became trapped in an ideology that refused to learn from its repeated failures. Relatedly, new books by two top financial academics, John Kay and Colin Mayer, deepen the critique; but, having co-authored work with them, I am debarred from commenting. Widening the horizon, the rising global tide of violence has revealed confusion and timidity in our governments and international institutions. Dominic Rohner’s The Peace Formula (CUP) is a brave academic voice of hope.
Economics is now trying to model the relationships between diverse people facing uncertainty. In literature, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s riveting books in the Morning Star series (Harvill Secker and Vintage) depict this recognizable habitat of entanglement, bewilderment and hope.
PATRICIA CRAIG
Margaret Atwood is celebrated for her entertaining and electrifying prose works, fiction and nonfiction. Now, with the magnificent Paper Boat: New and selected poems 1961–2023 (Chatto), it’s time to take note of her uniquely fascinating poetic voice, at once affirmative and disabused, succinct and expansive. These poems carry notes of astringency and witchery. Here is the author “rebellious, growling” or “weaving histories”; here are her “forests thickened with legend”, her disturbed earth and ghost cats and global threats, all composed with wryness and subtlety, and sharp as pine needles. Beguiling and unsettling.
Sam Leith’s assured, engaging study of children’s literature, The Haunted Wood (Oneworld), gets to grips with the genre in all its riveting variety, from Red Riding Hood to the hoodlum factor in the novels of S. E. Hinton. And – still with woods and trees – Michael Longley’s Ash Keys: New selected poems (Cape) confirms his standing as one of the most compelling and luminous poets writing today.
DIANA DARKE
When the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim chooses the title Genocide in Gaza for his latest book, it is time to smell the coffee. He uses the term for the first time a year after October 7, 2023. The book (published by Irish Pages) dissects western double standards on Israel and the tepid US calls for restraint, and exposes the behaviour of the current Israeli government as a “settler-colonial project”, the architect of which, Benjamin Netanyahu, knows taking over land and displacing its natives can only be achieved through war, not diplomacy.
It documents bravely how the Hamas attack on October 7 was a response to half a century of occupation and oppression – “Israel, Hamas, and the long war on Palestine” is the subtitle. Shlaim concedes that the Netanyahu government, like Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist party in Hungary, was democratically elected, but demonstrates how it represents the antithesis of the core Jewish values of altruism, truth, justice and peace.
RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present (Allen Lane) is shot through with joy, significance, wit and inspiration. He provides a bright, even blazing account of ancient Greek historiography from the Scottish Enlightenment to the twenty-first century. The chapters on the forgotten historians John Gast and Edward Bulwer-Lytton are absorbing, while those on Jacob Burckhardt and Arnaldo Momigliano are especially fine. Murray writes with a lovely blend of self-confidence and playful humility. His book is as wise and munificent in spirit as any that I have read.
Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: W. H. Auden and the last of Englishness (Faber) is daring in its ideas, written with loving tenderness and implacably true in its revisionism. Jenkins shows Auden’s mentality to have been graven by the Great War, proves his youthful aspiration to become an English national poet and renews our sense of the numinous.
MARGARET DRABBLE
Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (Faber) is an extremely readable how-we-live-now novel set largely in various London neighbourhoods, with a huge cast of characters, for which an index is thoughtfully provided. The narrative is a mixture of the wildly implausible and the all too real, sometimes in overlapping categories. Specialists may question some of the detail – the art history/publishing thread of the plot, dealing with Vermeer and author impersonation, is a bit wild, but it is enjoyable. O’Hagan takes on some big subjects, including illegal immigration, the trans lives of the young, crooked Russian oligarchs and London property prices. He must have had a good libel lawyer. He has spoken of the influence of Dickens, and the ambition is evident. It’s a weird but satisfying mixture of the old-fashioned and the up to date. It’s good to read a book that takes on so much.
BERNARDINE EVARISTO
The Strangers: Five extraordinary Black men and the worlds that made them by Ekow Eshun (Hamish Hamilton) is a book of creative nonfiction centred on important Black historical figures such as the renowned nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, the Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, the postcolonial philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, the civil rights leader Malcolm X and the first openly gay footballer, Justin Fashanu, who took his own life in 1998. Eshun brings them beautifully, movingly, to life as mesmerizing fictionalized characters. Revolutionary Acts: Love and brotherhood in Black gay Britain by Jason Okundaye (Faber) is a fascinating, lively and illuminating social history of Britain’s gay past from a Black perspective, from the 1970s to the 1990s, through the remarkable stories of pioneer activists such as Ted Brown, Dirg Aaab-Richards and Ajamu X, who countered a deeply homophobic and dangerous society with protest, projects and community support.
FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO
As the best novel I read this year was by my wife, I can only recommend nonfiction. To the Ends of the Earth: How ancient conquerors, explorers, scientists, and traders connected the world (OUP) by Raimond J. Schulz, which I reviewed in these pages, was the work I most admired. I’m looking forward to Bruce Taylor’s new biography of an old and fascinating friend, Scholar Spy: The worlds of Professor Sir Peter Russell (Splash).
MARK FORD
Jamie McKendrick’s Drypoint (Faber) is an exquisite collection by one of our most resourceful and distinctive poets. As in his previous seven volumes, we oscillate between charm and horror, the poems skirting disasters and abysses, as well as quotidian calamities, with dry, addictive wit. While the poetic persona presented often verges on the scatty or lackadaisical, line after line is perfectly etched, unerringly balanced and precise. Highlights include a wonderful monologue by St Jerome, bitter at having to pose for an endless stream of painters – “damn their rickety easels and their prying eyes” – and a hilarious account of the ageing poet arranging to meet his younger self in a bar. All too predictably McKendrick Jr arrives late, and turns out to be a feckless fella with “no money, no job, no staying power”. One thing, however, this amiable dilettante is utterly convinced of: “never in his life would he be me”.
ROY FOSTER
Patrick Bishop follows a tradition of British and American historians interrogating aspects of wartime history that the French themselves prefer to avoid. His beady-eyed Paris ’44 (Viking) takes a panoramic view of crumbling Nazi administration, approaching armies, foreign correspondents, Resistance fighters, opportunist Gaullists and various collaborators, sharply depicting the faultlines of rivalry among the liberators. Bridget Hourican’s Finding Mangan (Gill) stylishly reanimates Ireland’s quintessential poète maudit, James Clarence Mangan, whose louche life and intermittently powerful work fascinated James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Shane MacGowan, but who has never quite found his place in the canon. In his subtle memoir The Good Boy (Cork University Press), the Irish historian Tom Dunne provides an engagingly quizzical slant on memory, ageing and history. And Andrew O’Hagan’s capacious Caledonian Road (Faber) gives us The Way We Live Now for early-twenty-first-century London – a cautionary tale carried off with bravura flourishes, in the best Victorian tradition.
PAUL GRIFFITHS
Published and read early in the year, Lara Pawson’s Spent Light (CB Editions) has burnt through the months. Caroline Potter, in Pierre Boulez: Organised delirium (Boydell and Brewer), shows how much this supreme rationalist of music was drawn to the wild, the untamed. Serialism coexisted with its near homonym surrealism, and with magic numbers, incantations and spells. Potter invites us to rehear these marvellous swirls as, next year, we celebrate the composer’s centenary.
RACHEL HADAS
Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the ancient Greeks, and me (Yale) offers pace and suspense as Edith Hall, moving deftly back and forth through time and space, works to unpeel layers of generational reticence from the buried details of more than one suicide among her forebears. Add to this narrative the contagious excitement and insight that mark Hall’s lifelong engagement with Greek tragedy, and the result is a richly multifaceted book. Family and travel memoir, pandemic project, investigative journalism and study in the application of Greek myth to family pathology: Facing Down the Furies is all these, written not only with Hall’s signature clarity, but also with candour and courage. Not a whodunnit, the book offers no snap solution or simplistic insight, yet it ends on a note of hard-earned hope. I would happily read anything Hall has written, and Facing Down the Furies doesn’t disappoint.
JAMES HALL
Hidden Faces: Covered portraits of the Renaissance (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) explores a practical and hermetic aspect of art that is rarely noticed today. Some Renaissance portraits were covered by curtains – like sacred images – to protect them from damage and prying eyes. Others had painted wooden covers, hinged or sliding like doors. Few survive intact. Like symbolic reverses of coins and medals, the covers broadcast the virtues of the sitter: fictive porphyry might indicate the durability of their fame; a coat of arms, nobility; a skull, flower or animal, piety; a Latin motto, cultivation; a mask, anyone’s guess. Best of all are the allegorical landscapes by Venetian artists, and handheld Elizabethan miniatures in elaborate jewelled cases. Two books I also enjoyed are Isabelle Tillerot’s daring take on chinoiserie, East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Getty); and Bruce Boucher’s John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Yale), about the ever-delightful Soane Museum.
CLAIRE HARMAN
“Nowhere is simply itself”, Alexandra Harris says at the beginning of her topographic tour de force, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex landscape (Faber), the most engrossing, resonant and beautifully written book I’ve read this year. Harris returns to the patch of West Sussex where she grew up and sifts through layers of its history, dropping in and out of the present and the past, touching on (and being touched by) the lives of, among others, an anchorite, a water bailiff, Polish refugees; she manages to draw together incredibly varied material through the quality of her observations, her discriminating sensibility and the intensity of her interest. And the way she talks about paintings (notably, in this book, those of Ivon Hitchens) makes you long to see them too; I don’t know anyone who can describe colour and light better.
SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH
In his latest book, The Message (One World), Ta-Nehisi Coates lyrically evokes the craft of writing and the ways stories shape and distort our reality. These are discussed through accounts of his visits to the island of Gorée in Senegal, South Carolina and occupied Palestine and Israel, where he connects the erasure and oppression of the Palestinians with the legacies of racism, slavery and colonialism. Coates refuses to make excuses for injustice and barbarity, and his historical perspective and universal humanism are compelling.
I would also mention two other books: Nat Turner, Black Prophet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by the late Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory Downs is a magnificent reconstruction of the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion as a biblical warrior, framing his thoughts and actions in a distinct Black Christian evangelical tradition. And Marlene L. Daut’s The First and Last King of Haiti (Knopf) is an impressively researched biography of Henry Christophe, a former lieutenant of Toussaint Louverture’s who became one of the leaders of post-revolutionary Haiti.
MICHAEL HOFMANN
Every year I read one Drumpf book, and hope it’s for the last time. (Not the fault of the books: they’re good books.) This year it was Lucky Loser (Bodley Head) by the New York Times journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. They follow the money, or rather, the IOUs. The Drumpfs were a brazen and pitiless dynasty of scofflaws, interstitial, parasitic, corrosive and vain: the émigré madam, the builder-swindler and the pathetic name-giver. I don’t think they’ve yet had the shame they deserve; perhaps there’s not enough shame in the world for that. The one thing the story was missing was an English villain (or is it you, Sebastian Gorka?). But lo, here he is, Mark Burnett, the great soul that brought us product placement (what had we done without it?), producer of The Apprentice, the basis not only of Drumpf’s fatuous reputation, but also of much of his current fortune, such as it is. I hope by the time these words appear he is voted away, gone and forgotten. I’d like to go back to normal books. “Freedom / is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name”, Joseph Brodsky once wrote. [No dice. Ed.]
TOM HOLLAND
This spring, when I travelled for the first time to Orkney, I made sure to stock up on books about the archipelago’s Neolithic and Norse history. Arriving there, however, I immediately began to wonder about Orkney after the Vikings. Then, that evening, walking the streets of Stromness, I saw a poster advertising a talk by Peter Marshall, the great historian of the Reformation, on his new book – and what should it be about but early modern Orkney! I went to the lecture, handed over my money, then enjoyed one of those perfect reading experiences in which book and setting are in complete accord. Storm’s Edge: Life, death and magic in the islands of Orkney (William Collins) is a brilliantly sweeping and gloriously detailed history of Orkney that is also a history of Britain, and ultimately of the world. Memories of the sheer pleasure it gave me are warming me still.
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
Though Peter Brown’s memoirJourneys of the Mind: A life in history (Princeton) was published in 2023, I hesitated to buy it, feeling that 700 pages was far too long for the memoirs of a scholar, no matter how distinguished. I was wrong. The book is gripping from start to finish, written with the verve and generosity of spirit that characterizes all of his work. Unlike most popular historians, Brown has always understood that the ancient world at least until the Renaissance is utterly unlike our own, not because the people were so different, but because their world-view was. Drawing on the work of anthropologists such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Mary Douglas, he has, in the course of a long and productive life, reconstructed for us the lineaments of the world of late antiquity from the eastern Mediterranean to modern-day Iran. Again and again in this book he finds the words to convey the thrill of his encounters with distant landscapes and cities and with scholars from Arnaldo Momigliano to – of all people – Michel Foucault. I loved it and felt on coming to the end the sort of pang one feels when finally putting down a great novel.
NELLY KAPRIÈLIAN-SELF
Now we know: Edouard Louis is working around the idea of escape. What does it take to find the strength to run away from one’s milieu, social class, family, from any form of domination? Monique s’évade and L’Effondrement (Seuil), one published in April, the other in October, are like two faces of the same project. The luminous Monique s’évade tells how his mother manages to run away from an abusive relationship with the help of her son, while L’Effondrement is the dark tale of his brother’s inability to leave. My favourite is L’Effondrement, which takes the form of an investigation into his estranged brother, in order to understand how a thirty-eight-year-old man can drink himself to death. A very complex, very beautiful reflection on freedom, choices, social or psychological fate and how we get to know our loved ones often too late.
JOHN KERRIGAN
In New England for the summer, I went back to Emerson and Thoreau, helped on my way by two enthusiastic, distinctive studies. James Marcus’s Glad to the Brink of Fear: A portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Princeton) is biographical but lit up by ideas, and perceptive about disease and mortality, self-reliance and the tardy advance of abolitionism. Lawrence Buell’s Henry David Thoreau (OUP) is a short but capacious text, the judicious, timely product of decades of thinking about ecocriticism. Both show how scholarship can harness what looks topical in the past to raise questions as well as answers. Did Emerson confuse Nature with God? Should the freedom-loving Thoreau, deep in the Maine woods, be the mascot of environmentalism or of the libertarians?
OLIVIA LAING
The most reckless, exhilarating thing I read all year was Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel. Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree) is set in Syracuse in 412BC, which, as any fan of Thucydides knows, is the setting for a particularly grisly episode in the Peloponnesian War: the mass imprisonment and slow starvation of thousands of Athenians in a stone quarry after their failed invasion of Sicily. Lennon remakes this story by telling it from the perspective of two theatre-obsessed local lads who realize that some of the prisoners have the plays of Euripides by heart. The pair speak in modern Dublin slang, a decision that illuminates both the city’s rapid gentrification and the contemporary resonance of humans in exile being taunted and tormented. The writing is supple and gorgeous, but it’s the mad ambition of Lennon’s project that will stay with me a good long time.
MICHAEL LAPOINTE
There simply isn’t another writer like László Krasznahorkai, whose Herscht 07769 (Tuskar Rock), translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, is a single sentence amounting to some 400 pages and telling of Florian, a man who is convinced that all physical matter is on the brink of extinction, and who initiates a one-sided correspondence with Angela Merkel in a vain attempt to stave off apocalypse, all while living at the beck and call of “the Boss”, the head of a neo-Nazi gang and zealous devotee of Bach who has become maddened by attacks on statues of the composer throughout Thuringia – a plot, if you can call it that, so far out on the horizon of realism, with characters whose passions and obsessions are exposed so nakedly, that the novel, like the best of Krasznahorkai, takes on the cast of a sinister fable, its sentence rushing headlong over a cliff, into a void.
SAM LEITH
It’s a hell of a thing to presume to step into the shoes of John le Carré – and probably the more so if you’re his son. But that’s what Nick Harkaway has done in Karla’s Choice (Viking), a new George Smiley novel set between the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Even as an admirer of Harkaway’s work, given how consciously different his SF/fantasy stuff has been from his father’s writing, I was astonished by how well he has done it. He has a spryer sense of humour than the old man, but the spirit of le Carré is absolutely here. The world is foggy, the prose elegantly wood-panelled, the Cold War moral murk and our protagonist’s griefs and compromises all present and correct – and it’s a cracking story. Smiley lives.
LEO LENSING
James (Mantle): the cool economy of Percival Everett’s title for his devastating rewriting of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) is now beginning to dawn on me. Very much in arrears, I’ve just finished reading Paul Beatty’s hilarious but deeply disturbing novel The Sellout (2015), in which one of the villains has written an updated version of the classic novel with the title “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit”. Could this have been added provocation for Everett, who seems not to have been overly concerned with reducing the n-word count from its infamously famous use 219 times in Twain’s novel? No matter. He has given us an unambiguously white-and-black Huck and a Jim whose fearsome transformation is marked not only in the title, but also in its final words – “‘Just James’”.
CLAIRE LOWDON
Although I have complained in these pages about the ubiquity of the trauma plot in contemporary fiction, two of the best books I read this year happened to be about the lifelong effects of trauma. Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament (Verso, translated by Charlotte Barslund), which I named as a summer read, did not disappoint: exploring the impact that childhood incest can have on a family decades later, Hjorth’s autobiographical novel is an elegant yet excoriating study in negative space. Falling Is Like Flying by the Dutch writer Manon Uphoff (Pushkin, translated by Sam Garrett) is a perfect companion piece. Uphoff takes the opposite approach in her brilliantly uncowed account of a young girl being raped repeatedly by her father. Ablaze with specificity and unique material, this novel-cum-memoir lovingly conjures up the textures of a lost childhood world and lays them in powerful contrast to the brutality at the heart of the parent-child relationship.
ELIZABETH LOWRY
Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath (Norton) presents a difficult, brilliant, intensely personal and dazzlingly illuminating perspective on Plath’s work and mythology, and is hands down the most gripping thing I’ve read this year. It dismantles the usual tired (and unsatisfying) critical attempts to set up a causal relationship between the writing of Ariel and Plath’s suicide, and at last gives full due to her rage at the end of her short life, which it considers in all its glittering weight. Van Duyne’s positioning of her subject as a survivor of marital violence – both emotional and physical – is unanswerable and challenges a culture “that still discounts the stories women tell about their lives”. The facts, as Van Duyne points out, have been hidden in plain sight all along. Buy her book, read it, believe it.
NOEL MALCOLM
Judgment at Tokyo (Picador), by the Princeton historian Gary J. Bass, is an extraordinarily impressive account of the Tokyo War crimes trials of 1946–8. Bass has dug deep in the archives of seven countries, and guides the reader with unfailing authority –and narrative zest – through the overlapping fields of warfare, politics and law. Strangers Within (Princeton) by Francisco Bethencourt, Charles Boxer Professor at King’s College London, is another richly researched work on a huge subject: the world of the “New Christians” (converted Iberian Jews), and their widely scattered financial and mercantile diaspora, from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. In their very different ways both books represent the kind of fundamental, painstaking historical work that is increasingly being squeezed out of the academic system by box-ticking exercises, opportunistic fashion-following and bureaucratic demands for the constant production of “outputs”.
ALBERTO MANGUEL
My favourite novels of the year are three: Anne Michaels’s Held (Bloomsbury), a beautifully written argument for still trusting the human spirit; Hans von Trotha’s Pollak’s Arm (New Vessel), which rescues one of the Just from History’s distracted oblivion; and Anita Desai’s Rosarita (Picador), a memorable lesson in empathy across cultures. Nonfiction: A Marvelous Solitude (Harvard), Lina Bolzoni’s magisterial defence of reading as the art of resurrection; and Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo’s essential How the Spanish Empire Was Built (Chicago), which reconsiders eruditely what we thought we knew about the rise and fall of the Spanish conquista. Finally, a collection of poetry from one of the best poets of our time: Albert Goldbarth’s History: And pre- (Lynx House) translates our everyday exchanges into the classical realm.
KEITH MILLER
The exact weighting and flawless, Mozartian symmetries of Adam Phillips’s prose can seem like a distraction from his material, as if he were a disturbingly good-looking film star who’d somehow nabbed a character part. On Giving Up (Hamish Hamilton) asks what we’re really playing at when we renounce something: what we commit to in the giving up, what it is about the given-up thing that stays with us. I couldn’t put it down, ironically. Spectator Low Life: The final years (Quartet) by Jeremy Clarke is also concerned with endings; it chronicles the rakish, rumpled, latterly cancer-stricken diarist’s last decade with clarity, humour and what reads, at least, like that rarissima avis, honesty.
Ungainly as Hanif Kureishi’s memoir Shattered (Hamish Hamilton) may be in places, it’s a uniquely powerful expression of writing at its limits. Hospitalized and paralysed after a life-changing accident at the end of 2022, a consciousness without a body, Kureishi managed nearly every day to dictate a few words to his family, who posted them online. They had then, and retain in this more polished iteration, a shocking urgency: part animal howl, part incantation, part prayer.
SARAH MOSS
It’s been a good reading year. Great names published great books, and some quieter publications command attention: I want to be able to discuss Lara Pawson’s Spent Light (CB Editions), which is very dark and has great love for the world and its inhabitants, and for English prose; Rosalind Brown’s Practice (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), which is gloriously single-minded in its attention to a young woman spending one day (not) writing; and Caroline Eden’s Cold Kitchen (Bloomsbury), which thinks about food and appetite and cooking in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones. Like any good book about the domestic arts, Cold Kitchen is a sermon against despair, despite/because of the author’s familiarity with places of war.
ANDREW MOTION
Richard Flanagan’s memoir Question 7 (Chatto) fuses an account of the author’s upbringing in Tasmania with reminiscence of his father’s time as a Japanese prisoner of war, a meditation on the genocide carried out by the British against the Aboriginal population of his native island, a response to the American bombing of Hiroshima, a résumé of the love affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, and a terrifying description of his own near-death by drowning in the Franklin River. It’s a lot – and the swirl of events could easily have become fragmentary or simply confusing. But Flanagan’s narrative control, the calmly cohesive gravity of his prose and the skill with which he explores connections between causes and their effects combine to make an exceptionally powerful autobiography – at once subtle, moving and trenchant.
PAUL MULDOON
The standout biography this year was Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A cool queer life (Faber), a portrait of a poet whose birth name, Guinneach, which means “piercing”, gives a new poignancy to his great early poem “The Wound”. The most interesting poetry debut of recent times is Scott McKendry’s Gub (Corsair), a collection notable for its mouthiness, myth-swanking and swazzle moves. Linguistic bravura is a staple of the work of Kevin Barry, whose terse, tender western The Heart in Winter (Canongate) is set partly among the immigrant Irish miners of Butte, Montana. At the heart of Andrey Kurkov’s wonderfully gritty whodunnitThe Silver Bone (MacLehose, translated by Boris Dralyuk), which unfolds in Kyiv in 1919, is a prosthetic femur mined from the same wacky vein that runs from Butte to Berehove.
JEREMY NOEL-TOD
Three book-length works by poets this year fascinated and moved me with the different ways they drew so much verbal life and dark comedy from contemporary landscapes of poverty and violence. Rachael Allen’s God Complex (Faber) painted corrupted depths of love with a brush streaked in bright toxins and ironic wrongness (“Cute and early bruise”); Timothy Thornton’s Candles and Water (Pilot Press) told of queerness and ghostliness, addiction and grief, in short prose of great imaginative richness and honesty, dropping immaculately modulated phrases on every page (“the flicker of ghost water meeting itself along a shear”); and Gboyega Odubanjo’s posthumous debut, Adam (Faber), took the story of the torso of a Black boy found in the Thames in 2001 and explored its symbolism for the poet’s youth in a London where “the streets are paved with cousins”. It’s a profound loss that his first book is also his last.
PETER PARKER
The Island: W. H. Auden and the last of Englishness by Nicholas Jenkins (Faber) is a dense, detailed and hugely rewarding account of the making of this very English poet before he became an American one. As critical biographies should, it sends you rushing back to the poems – not all of them well known, some even abandoned, but all illuminated by fresh and acute insights. Particularly good is the account of Auden’s crucial years as a schoolmaster, and of his affair, hitherto largely passed over in silence, with the teenage Michael Yates, a former pupil who inspired some of his most beautiful and moving poems.
The Logaston Press represents independent regional publishing at its best, and the enthralling Old Words of Herefordshire, edited by Richard Wheeler, brought back to me the voices of my rural childhood, where people talked of spadgers, wapsies and cattle bellocking beneath the stoggle oak, and complained when the weather turned glemmy or fences were found to be daddiky.
SEAMUS PERRY
Katherine Bucknell’s remarkable Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (Chatto) displays an unmatched familiarity with the enormous range of Isherwood’s writings, published and unpublished, while simultaneously offering a striking portrait of an extremely complicated, self-contesting and not always winning personality. His work is such a strange and compelling mixture of self-exposure and self-invention, and Bucknell gets that brilliantly, tracing his unlikely path from English squire-in-the-making to Californian Vedantist with exemplary sympathy and wit. My other book of the year is the last from John Burnside, a great poet who died this year. Ruin, Blossom (Cape) is a beautiful collection of meditative lyrics, the articulation of a religious sensibility persisting in the absence of all the structures of religion. His poems hauntingly evoke moments in which the absence of meaning somehow trembles on the verge of meaning, “a changeling on the cusp of something else”, as though emptiness and plenitude were a hair’s breadth apart.
RACHEL POLONSKY
Giuliano da Empoli’s Le Mage du Kremlin (Gallimard), a prizewinning bestseller in France, is a sophisticated fictionalization of the reign of Vladimir Putin (the Tsar), from his rise to power to the war in Ukraine. Its jaded philosophical narrator, Vadim Baranov, is a lightly camouflaged portrait of the Kremlin political strategist Vladislav Surkov. Other key characters – Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky – have their real names. Willard Wood’s translation, The Wizard of the Kremlin (Pushkin), is an elegant read, bringing this fine work of imaginative perception to an English readership that so far appears less interested than the French. Equally frightening, A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014–2019 (prouddiplomat.com) is the memoir of the disenchanted former British emissary Ian Proud. In patchwork fashion, redacted by the Cabinet Office, he delivers a brutal insight into the hapless, wilfully ignorant and self-defeating character of British diplomacy over the past decade.
FREDERIC RAPHAEL
The death of my oldest friend, Peter Green, happened a few months before his 100th birthday and a stade or two from completing a translation of Herodotus. We will have to wait till next year for the masterpiece of a prolific and unequalled classical scholar and inspiration. Peter’s death sent me back to Paul Scott’s Raj tetralogy, in which an undisguised young Green is a key character, and reminded me of its enduring quality. The brevity of Anthony Rudolf’s The Binding of Isaac (Shoestring) condenses biography, criticism and encomium of the poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg, killed in the trenches in 1918, his quality saluted by T. S. Eliot from his imperial place in the ranks of Tuscany. Lea Ypi’s Free (Penguin) is an all but faux-naif account of emancipation from Albanian Stalinism.
ANDREW ROBERTS
The Price of Victory: A naval history of Britain 1815–1945 (Allen Lane) by N. A. M. Rodger is the third and final volume of a thirty-year enterprise telling the story of our country and her navy. This one covers the period when Britannia really did rule the waves globally, and masters logistics as well as strategy. In Pursuit of Love (Bloomsbury) by Mark Bostridge is ostensibly about Victor Hugo’s troubled daughter Adèle, but it also affords fascinating insights into the biographer’s art and, to a surprising degree, into the life of Bostridge himself. Ronald Hutton’s Oliver Cromwell: Commander in chief (Yale) is the second volume of the Lord Protector’s life, covering the period between early 1647 and his dismissal of the Rump Parliament in April 1653. Deeply researched and beautifully written, it is – like my other choices – immensely intellectually satisfying.
ANNA KATHARINA SCHAFFNER
Most conflicts in life come down to our need for just the right balance between autonomy and intimacy. They are not happy bedfellows. We may feel this tension in ourselves or in our relationships, especially if our desires clash with those of our loved ones. Miranda July’s brilliant, courageous novel All Fours (Canongate) focuses on an artist’s quest to integrate security, partnership and motherhood, and on her need to create, explore, desire and be desired. We never quite know whether, during a strangely stalled road trip that comes to a halt just outside her home town, she blows up her secure life for a sexual-artistic infatuation with a younger man, or finds a daring third way beyond traditional relationship options. This is a disturbingly compelling reflection on the vagaries of female desire, artistic quests, menopause and what we might discover if we were honest about our fantasies and needs.
RUTH SCURR
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (Chatto) is a spectacular advance for creative nonfiction. Inspired by one of Chekhov’s unanswerable questions – who loves longer, a man or a woman? – the author assembles an intricate textual tapestry from disparate threads: the affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West; the invention of the atomic bomb; the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; his father’s survival as a slave labourer on the Japanese Death Railway; his memories of his childhood in Tasmania and his evolution as a writer. “Facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory – its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions – is who we become”. Flanagan, like Chekhov, writes to frame questions correctly, not to answer them or shut them down. “That’s life” is the recurring refrain in this beautiful and riveting book.
NAT SEGNIT
The Canadian author Sheila Heti had been keeping a journal for a decade when she decided to upload the entries to an Excel spreadsheet, order them alphabetically, and spend a further decade editing them down from half a million to 60,000 words. The resulting Alphabetical Diaries (Fitzcarraldo) fall somewhere between a medieval abecedarius and Joe Brainard’s anaphoric classic of constrained writing, I Remember. Through her painstaking efforts at excision, juxtaposing entries that in a chronological journal might appear pages apart, Heti has produced a kind of commonplace book that is all but miraculously faithful to mental drift, the randomness of existence and, indeed, the discrepancies of self-identity: “To give up on the idea of children, which was becoming the next thing to race to. To have his child and soon”. Some critics have confessed to being bored, at times, by Heti’s Oulipian experiment. I loved it from A to Z.
ELAINE SHOWALTER
Choosing the best book of the year is usually a test – there’s an unspoken challenge to find a masterpiece that no one else has read. But this year Percival Everett’s James (Mantle), a paradoxically original reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, told from the eloquent perspective of the runaway slave Jim, is so dazzling that it deserves wide appreciation and acknowledgement. It has been shortlisted for international prizes and will surely become a classic to be read alongside Twain. In nonfiction I admired and enjoyed A Wilder Shore: The romantic odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri (Viking), which sees the much-maligned and older American divorcee Fanny Van de Grift as a dynamic and creative partner to Stevenson, an adventurer and essential companion.
NICOLA SHULMAN
The best thing I’ve read this autumn is Rupert Everett’s “The End of Time”, in his new collection of stories, The American No (Abacus). It’s a script for the first two episodes of a proposed multi-series TV treatment of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu, and easily the best adaptation we have (including Pinter’s). Beginning in Paris in 1918, it then homes back to Marcel’s bedroom in Combray. It elides the historical Proust with the fictional Marcel in ways that establish a proper understanding of the gender ambivalences to come. Everett gets Proust: his social and intellectual range, his eyes and ears, his modernity, his voyeurism, his sublime observational comedy; also, the spike of erotic rankness that lurks, like the whiff of ordure that wine people find in great burgundies, throughout this great book. Alas, the theme of The American No is of things that didn’t happen. If only this could happen.
WESLEY STACE
It’s always scary to walk into a dark room – and the world of horror film theory represents just such unknown territory for me. So it’s good to have a hand to hold. Anna Bogutskaya’s Feeding the Monster: Why horror has a hold on us (Faber) offers that reassurance. If you’d like to feel the pulse of this vital genre – through familiar recent classics such as Midsommar, Titane, Get Out and The Menu, but also many more you’ll want to watch – then this rich collection of short, cleverly themed essays, written in an intimate yet authoritative first-person voice, is definitely the place to start. The world may still wonder “What’s wrong with you?” for liking horror, but there’s nothing wrong. Horror makes you feel less alone; this book does too.
A. E. STALLINGS
The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, translated by Christopher Childers, is staggeringly ambitious – it aims to cover a representative chunk of all Greek and Latin lyric poetry – and an enlightening read. Worth the price of admission for the witty and erudite prose alone, the book offers translations that are real poems in English. Ingeniously, Childers connects poems across time and tongues by matching subgenre to formal choices. A book of original poems that knocked my socks off was V. Penelope Pelizzon’s A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye (Pittsburgh). These are poems haunted by climate collapse and personal mortality, but also rich in music. Pelizzon’s also funny: has there been a finer poem about farting than “Orts & Slarts”? “Nothing’s less romantic than a dish of lentils/ amped up with ramps and garlic/ turning you into a wind instrument sprawled/ across the couch in torment.”
RAYMOND TALLIS
This year has largely been one of re-reading, with one exception. A few years ago I received Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The invention of philosophy in English (Penguin) as a Christmas present. Misreading the title as “Witchcraft”, I put it to one side. When it recently resurfaced following a house move, I opened it at random and was at once hooked. In more than 700 pages of small-print text, Rée weaves an engrossing story of the evolution of philosophical thought in this offshore island, illuminating a rich hinterland of minor figures behind the familiar giants. Big ideas, small disputes, arguments, passions and visions are attached to personalities, movements, communities and historical trends. I have never read anything like it. My emotion on coming to the end of Witcraft was almost one of bereavement, so it is good to spread the word about this brilliant work of scholarship.
D. J. TAYLOR
In The Quality of Love: Twin sisters at the heart of the century (Duckworth), Ariane Bankes supplies a succinct and affectionate portrait of the interconnected literary worlds inhabited by her mother, Celia, and aunt, Mamaine, who, while hobnobbing with everyone from George Orwell and Cyril Connolly to Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, remained distinctive personalities in their own right. The wild-eyed indie kid who lurks inside of me was overjoyed at the appearance of Steve Diggle’s Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock (Omnibus), in which Joyce, Dostoevsky and songs with titles such as “Orgasm Addict” march bras dessus, bras dessous through the chaotic world of mid-1970s Manchester and beyond. And it was good to see a reissue of S. T. Haymon’s Opposite the Cross Keys (Propolis), an evocative memoir of a childhood lived on the margins of 1920s-era Norwich, first published in 1988.
COLIN THUBRON
In her remarkable Anima: A wild pastoral (Cape), the narrative writer and poet Kapka Kassabova recounts her living among the last nomadic herdsmen in the mountains of her native Bulgaria. She describes a life by turns gruelling and euphoric. Along with a single shepherd and eight Karakachan dogs – an ancient, imperilled breed – she herds 600 sheep in a region rife with wolves and bears. Her days are alternately enhanced and blighted by the shepherd with whom she cohabits; but her lyrical evocation of a dying way of life lingers long in the mind.
MARION TURNER
Colm Tóibín’s Long Island (Picador) has stayed with me more than any other book I read this year. He returns to the world of his earlier novelBrooklyn: the main characters are now middle-aged, disillusioned, scarred by what has happened to them. Tóibín is a master of (often hilarious) detail, but also a genius in what he does not say. Crucial scenes happen out of sight and are left to the imagination; there is a lot of plot, but not much resolution. Long Island moves between the perspective of three main characters, expanding the psychological scope of the book, shifting our perspective and sympathies. Small-town 1970s Ireland is comically, affectionately and claustrophobically drawn. Somehow Tóibín makes a book like this – sparely written, elliptical, ambiguous – as immersive as the richly detailed biographical novels that he has written in recent years. He is a magician.
MARINA WARNER
Granada: The complete trilogy by Radwa Ashour, Egyptian scholar, writer and activist, unfolds brilliantly the fate of Andalusia after 1492, and the forced expulsions and conversions, through the lives of a bookseller’s family, daughters and descendants. Translated with supple clarity by Kay Heikkinen, Ashour uncannily persuades us that she remembers it all. (The book is published by the American University in Cairo – disclosure, I was asked to write the foreword.) The novella Célina by Catherine Axelrad (Les Fugitives, translated by Philip Terry), is a quiet tale of a young servant in Victor Hugo’s household; it pierced me to the heart. Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov did not know each other, but paired in Birds, Beasts and a World Made New (Pushkin Press Classics), with commentary by the virtuoso translator Robert Chandler, they light bright flares – of affection, humour, defiance and hope.
SARA WHEELER
Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux (Faber), a new Life of Paul Gauguin, is a wonderful portrait of a wonderful portraitist. The author refuses to judge her man by contemporary standards, setting him instead in the context of his time. A biography that makes the colours shine even brighter. The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat by Michael Goldfarb (Envelope) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2005 (under the title Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace), and this year appeared in the UK for the first time, with updated material. Essential reading on the multiple nightmares of modern Iraq.
ROWAN WILLIAMS
Charles Taylor, still impressively active in his nineties, has added another enormous volume to his long succession of magisterial studies (including Sources of the Self and A Secular Age) in the making of the modern imagination. His book on Cosmic Connections (Harvard) muses on the rise and fall of a particular model of the mind as a solitary device for processing atomized elements of data delivered from outside, so as to optimize our use of the raw stuff we confront. From very early on this “disenchanted” picture has had passionate critics; Taylor tracks the critique from the first Romantics through to T. S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz, with close readings of a range of poetry in English, French and German. Despite the sprawling exposition (some of the detail could have been trimmed), this is a brilliant diagnosis of some of the most corrosive weaknesses of modernity – political as much as literary.
A. N. WILSON
In Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the war between science and religion (Bodley Head), Michael Taylor tells what must be one of the most interesting stories in the world – how the intellectuals of the nineteenth century came to confront the discoveries of modern science, in many cases losing their religious faith in the process. I would say that, having written a book on the subject (God’s Funeral). Taylor has had the brilliant idea of crafting his history against the background of the “bone wars” – between palaeontologists on both sides of the Atlantic, who were unearthing ever more enormous dinosaurs. The story is told with brio and humour, but not without a sense of the pathos of Doubt. The title, of course, is equally applicable to Carnegie’s diplodocus as to Richard Owen; to Thomas Huxley as to Tyrannosaurus rex. I relished every word.
ZINOVY ZINIK
The short-story author and memoirist Nadezhda Teffi (1872–1952), a Dorothy Parker of the first wave of Russian exiles after the Bolshevik Revolution, had to wait posthumously thirty years to be translated into English, and fifty years to be published again in Russia. A new selection of her prose, translated and annotated by Robert Chandler, And Time Was No More: Essential stories and memories (Pushkin) is a witty and profound account of an adventurous émigré’s travels through Russia’s disastrous history. The celebrated author of In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova, arrived in Europe in the fifth wave of the Russian intelligentsia’s exodus to the West – this time following the invasion of Ukraine. The traditional plot of a long-distance journey as a Kafkaesque horror story is given a new context – of national guilt, a sense of complicity and identity loss – in Stepanova’s new short novel, Fokus in Russian, translated into German as Der Absprung (Suhrkamp).
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