Books of the month: From William Boyd’s The Mirror and the Road to Paul Auster’s Baumgartner

Martin Chilton reviews the biggest new books for November

Paul Auster, Anne Michaels and William Boyd are among November’s authors ( )

Imagine being invited out for an evening meal only to discover that your fellow guests comprised Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Andrew Neil, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. To borrow comedian Richard Lewis’s phrase, it would surely be the dinner party from hell. These five dismal men make up half of the influential leaders discussed in James O’Brien’s scorching polemic How They Broke Britain (WH Allen). O’Brien, radio host of a popular current affairs programme on LBC, also chews out Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre in his sections about a print media he believes has “grown fat on the commoditisation of hatred and othering”.

There is a chapter on Jeremy Corbyn, whom O’Brien berates for his “arrogance, delusion, stubbornness and incompetence”, while Liz Truss is the sole woman deemed “worthy” of inclusion in O’Brien’s pick of the influential leaders who wrecked Britain. The remaining target is right-wing guru Matthew Elliot. How They Broke Britain is a sweeping, dismaying read, yet it is also a persuasive, entertaining account of the damage done to our nation by this cast of creeps.

If you have an appetite for more debris, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets (Torva) is an investigative book dealing with some of the recent scandals that have engulfed the social media behemoth now called Meta. Among the cases examined by Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz are the 2019 videos that reportedly appeared under the aegis of footballer Neymar, who has more than 150 million Instagram followers. Facebook’s internal review dealt with allegations of “revenge porn” and Horwitz recounts how the company’s operational guidelines stipulate that people who post such material “should have their accounts deleted”. And yet, claims Horwitz, “faced with the prospect of scrubbing one of the world’s most famous athletes from its platform, Facebook blinked.”