Book Reviews

Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers. Believe me, in the exalted literary company Boyd keeps, that kind of generosity of spirit is as rare as hen’s teeth (try asking Sebastian or Salman for a jacket quote and see how far it gets you). So I’m not about to give Boyd a stinking review. Waiting for Sunrise could have been a sub-Da Vinci Code catastrophe,

Editorial conferences are fraught affairs. There is a rush of facts, opinions and suggestions. It’s a brave man who trusts his memory to retain all the information. ‘S’, a young Russian journalist who lived between the wars, was one such brave man. He could recall perfectly each name, number and hint that his editor had mentioned. This came naturally to him, but at a cost. S had to try to forget every sight and sound that he encountered in everyday life. He was a savant. S’s gift for memory was phenomenal, but it is not unobtainable. A few years ago, an American journalist called Joshua Foer wrote a book ostensibly

Not so long ago narrative history was on the way out. Academic historians, ever more specialised, looked set for a solipsistic future writing only for colleagues ploughing the same narrow field. Yet the commercial and critical success of the likes of Antony Beevor, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Amanda Foreman (none of whom is a member of the academy), has demonstrated the continuing desire among the public for serious but accessible history. Here are five outstanding examples of the narrative historian’s art: 1) John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 (Penguin, 2008) Asia is given equal footing with Europe in this timely, anti-whiggish account, which begins

More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year’s. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing’s tendency to value quantity over quality.   Over 150,000 books were published in the UK last year, an increase of nearly 50 per cent on a decade ago. Not all of this is down to the growth in self-publishing. The book industry appears to have taken trendy longtail theory — increase profits by selling less of more

The Leveson inquiry was convened to ‘examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media’. Most of the inquiry’s time has been devoted to newspapers, particularly tabloid newspapers. To date, no publishers have been called to give evidence, although they may yet be. I very much hope that they are, because a new book published by Faber, Aftermath by Rachel Cusk, raises questions about publishers’ ethics and privacy law. Aftermath is Cusk’s account of the end of her 10-year marriage. It is extremely frank, sparing little of her erstwhile husband’s privacy or that of her children, over whom the warring parents have been fighting. Extracts from the book have been run in the

There are two notable diamond jubilees this year: the obvious one and Jewish Book Week (JWB). The festival opened last weekend and will run at Kings Place in London until Sunday evening, when David Aaronovitch and Umberto Eco will end proceedings with a discussion about the latter’s novel, The Prague Cemetery. JBW is a celebration of literature; but, as one might expect, Jewish identity is central to most events. Yesterday afternoon saw Dennis Marks and Michael Hofmann debating the life and work of Joseph Roth — one of that band of writers (Kafka, Mann and Zweig) who described southern and eastern Europe during and after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.