Reviews

Barbarians to Angels, By Peter S Wells

"The names conjure up images of savagery and destruction," but Wells believes the Visigoths, Huns, Vandals had a bum rap. The Dark Ages were not so dark after all.

Inside Reviews

Chaucer's London, By AR Myers

Friday, 13 November 2009

Though "a place of dirt and violence", 14th-century London had "not yet lost a sense of community". Myers's lively panorama includes the fashionable shopping centre and take-away food joints. Wrongdoing also has a timeless quality.

The Joy of Eating: The Virago Book of Food, Edited by Jill Foulston

Friday, 13 November 2009

Sampling this banquet of all-female food writing – the sorority is justified by the editor on rather curious grounds, "in the most basic sense, women are food for their offspring" – the reader may be surprised to discover a meagre serving from the stars of literary gastronomy. Jane Grigson, Alice B. Toklas, Alice Waters and Elizabeth David are represented by a single dollop, though the latter's contribution is one of her wisest paragraphs: "If I had my way, my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of... a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of champagne on a tray in bed."

Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter, By Ingar Sletten Kolloen

Friday, 13 November 2009

The novelist, the F�hrer - and the missing pea

Esther's Inheritance, By Sándor Márai

Friday, 13 November 2009

Esther is preparing to meet her former lover, Lajos, twenty years after he revealed himself to be a fantasist and thief who married her more beautiful sister, Vilma.

The Eitingons, By Mary-Kay Wilmers

Friday, 13 November 2009

Spies, lies and a family story muffled in fur

The Lacuna, By Barbara Kingsolver

Friday, 13 November 2009

At the heart of Barbara Kingsolver's sweeping historical novel lies a reluctant writer, his recalcitrant stenographer and a Nabokovian dilemma: fragments of Harrison William Shepherd's furtively written memoir are stashed in a bank vault by his assistant, Violet Brown, and await posthumous publication despite his wish to have every last sheaf burned in his back garden.

Book Of A Lifetime: Journal of a Novel, By John Steinbeck

Friday, 13 November 2009

John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel is a book I've kept on every desk I've written at for the past 10 years. I've rarely opened it when I'm not working on a book, and never when I'm writing well. But on those days when the engine room of a first draft feels claustrophobic or static, when the words have turned brittle and the whole endeavour seems either pointless or ridiculous, that's when I'll reach again for this idiosyncratic one-sided correspondence which comes together to form a rare map of a literary mind at the point of creation.

Palestine and Israel, By Avi Shlaim
One State, Two States, By Benny Morris

Friday, 13 November 2009

Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris are both pioneer "new historians" of Israel who challenged some of the country's most potent founding myths. Shlaim's classic The Iron Wall – the one book everyone should read for a concise history of Israel's relations with Arabs from 1947 - showed, among much else, how consistently Israel pursued the imperative of negotiating from military strength, and the diplomatic opportunities it missed in the process. Morris, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, became the first Israeli historian to drive, in the words of Shlaim himself in this book, "a coach and horses through the claim that the Palestinians left Palestine of their own accord or on orders from their leaders."

Under the Dome, By Stephen King

Friday, 13 November 2009

An alien force field that hails from Planet Bush

Vitamin Ph, Introduced by TJ Demos

Friday, 13 November 2009

This survey of current photographs delineates the weird state of post-modern art – wildly diverse and personal, yet often bizarrely imitative. Skipping surrogates of Nan Goldin (nudity and scars) and Martin Parr (lurid close-up of iced buns), you encounter images that live on in the mind for their chilly resonance.

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