The Telegraph, Saturday 19 November 2011.
Jeffrey Archer. Kwasi Kwarteng’s Ghosts of Empire (Bloomsbury £25) is the work of an assiduous scholar (Eton, Cambridge, Harvard). But this tour of the colonial outposts is so much more when seen through the eyes of a Ghanaian, who now sits in the House of Commons as the Member for Spelthorne. Too Big to Fail (Penguin, £12.99) by Andrew Ross Sorkin is an account of the fall of Lehman Brothers that reads like a thriller. The only problem is, the ending is true. Whatever Next? (Biteback, £25), the memoirs of Earl Ferrers, who served five prime ministers, is full of gems.
Ali Smith. Down The Rabbit Hole by Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos (And Other Stories, £10), translated with deftness by Rosalind Harvey, is a pint-size novel about innocence, beastliness and a child learning the lingo in a drug wonderland. Funny, convincing, appalling, it’s a punch-packer for one so small.
John Banville. The perfect gift for any aspiring poet or, indeed, for anyone interested in good writing, is Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, newly translated by Mark Harman (Harvard, $15.95). In this elegant little volume, Rilke writes to 19-year-old Franz Kappus about literature, life and the poet’s vocation with wisdom and penetrating insight.
Polly Samson. Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (Cape, £16.99) is mesmerising. An 11-year-old boy is sent to travel by sea from Colombo to Tilbury Docks. His ship sails the dreamlike space between imagination and memory as he runs wild among the adults who include a robber baron, a troupe of acrobats, a philanthropist with rabies, a botanist with a taste for khat and the mythic prisoner who appears on deck each night rattling his shackles and chains. In non-fiction, Craig Brown’s One on One (Fourth Estate, £16.99) is rich with bite-size wonders, and Laurie Penny’s book of her blog, Penny Red, (Pluto, £12.99) tells it as it is.
Roy Hattersley. David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy (Allen Lane, £25) is a serious history of that nation from Imperial Rome to the present – all in an admirably readable 400 pages. Romantics, who think of the Risorgimento as the 19th century’s most dramatic expression of the liberal, as well as the nationalist, impulse should be prepared for their illusions to be shattered. Gilmour argues persuasively that Italian unity was imposed on, rather than demanded by, a disparate people. In a year of grandiloquent books on the broad canvass of war, Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow (Profile, £25) is a refreshing reminder of the reality. The anthology of letters and diary entries – 1914 to 1918 – puts the strategic decisions into personal perspective.
Read all the selections at The Telegraph.
Roy Hattersley. David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy (Allen Lane, £25) is a serious history of that nation from Imperial Rome to the present – all in an admirably readable 400 pages. Romantics, who think of the Risorgimento as the 19th century’s most dramatic expression of the liberal, as well as the nationalist, impulse should be prepared for their illusions to be shattered. Gilmour argues persuasively that Italian unity was imposed on, rather than demanded by, a disparate people. In a year of grandiloquent books on the broad canvass of war, Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow (Profile, £25) is a refreshing reminder of the reality. The anthology of letters and diary entries – 1914 to 1918 – puts the strategic decisions into personal perspective.
Read all the selections at The Telegraph.
