Reviews

101 Albums That Changed Popular Music, By Chris Smith

Though its textbook appearance suggests that this is yet another volume from America's burgeoning rock academia, Smith is actually a US music journalist. He can write well and has a keen eye for a good quote. Bono: "Some bands went to art school. We went to Brian Eno."

Inside Reviews

Kick the Animal Out, By V�ronique Ovald�

Friday, 10 July 2009

A first-person novel that pivots on the vanishing of a disturbed teenage girl's flaky mum sounds like a recipe for gritty realism. Yet this sensuous and sinister French r�cit delivers a more artful punch.

Beware Invisible Cows, By Andy Martin

Friday, 10 July 2009

Perhaps as a surfer you are more in touch than most with the scale of nature. Waves the size of houses can crush you to a pulp or send you gliding into that zonal nirvana of oneness with the higher powers which is the object of all that paddling around watching and waiting.

Book Of The Week: Moral Clarity, By Susan Neiman

Friday, 10 July 2009

Moral clarity is something that everyone claims to admire, so it is always useful to find out what they mean by it. In the case of Susan Neiman, one need not look very far. In the first chapter of her "guide for grown-up idealists", discussing the crimes of the last century, she writes: "Arbitrary imprisonment, famine, and murder were not new, though the scale seen in the 20th century was. What was devastating about Soviet crimes was that they were committed in the name of principles most of us hold dear. The rebuttal to this is easy enough: Theoretically speaking, Stalin's Gulags no more undermined the legitimacy of socialist ideals than the Inquisition undermined Christian ones."

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please, By Julian Norridge

Friday, 10 July 2009

If you're bemused by the British mania for sport (watching rather than participating, of course), it is consoling to learn that this is nothing new. In 1824, a crowd of 30,000 watched the 77-round punch-up between Tom Spring and Jack Langan.

Chastened, By Hephzibah Anderson

Friday, 10 July 2009

"Only my book in bed/ Knows how I look in bed," laments the narrator of Lorenz Hart's terrific "Why Can't I?" (1929 ). Told that "what you need is romance,/ Something in pants", she realises that "two feet are ever cold; / Four feet are never cold". Some have assumed that Hephzibah Anderson, in eschewing men for a year, donned bedsocks, turned up the electric blanket and slurped Ovaltine with another book against her chest. In fact, Chastened contains much more than at first apparent. A journalist as often in Manhattan as London, Anderson reached a point when she found that "sex and its pursuit seem to have become such blood sports, their rules so confusing... that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it's worth it".

The Fire Gospel, By Michel Faber

Friday, 10 July 2009

In writing this playful noir thriller-cum- The Da Vinci Code pastiche, the versatile Faber shows he can pen an off-the-cuff satire, when needed.

Friendly Fire, By Alaa Al Aswany trans. Humphrey Davies

Friday, 10 July 2009

Excused from games until his day of shame, an obese and bullied schoolboy finally has to squeeze into singlet and shorts. His classmates' mockery intensifies until "we were now laughing simply to cause him pain". Gripped by a jealous rage, a man who has worshipped his wife beats her up; bruised and tearful, she simply asks "May I go now?"

To Heaven by Water, By Justin Cartwright

Friday, 10 July 2009

You sometimes wonder if there is much novelty left in Justin Cartwright's novels. The Song Before It Is Sung (2007), a pointed re-telling of the Von Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler, was a genuine departure, but To Heaven by Water takes us back to Cartwright-land, a vexed and debatable territory awash with angst, pessimism and mid-to-late-life elegy. Everything one has come to expect is here, from the sixtysomething reaching an accommodation with past time (see The Promise of Happiness) to the misty Soho luncheons with old chums (In Every Face I Meet) and the self-finding trips to Africa (Interior, Masai Dreaming). There is even the dangerous animal – not White Lightning's malign baboon, alas, but a rogue elephant brought in to trample the male lead's brother to death out in the Kalahari desert.

The Importance of Being Trivial, By Mark Mason

Friday, 10 July 2009

The clever thing about this is how someone managed to string together an amusing book about trivia, just as the clever thing about QI is how someone managed to make a TV programme about it.