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Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn by Brett Anderson – a cold eye on Suede’s glory years [27 Sep 2019|06:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/27/afternoons-with-the-blinds-drawn-brett-anderson-review ‘We overdid it.’ In the book he swore he’d never write, the singer-songwriter reflects on debauchery, the limits of his talent and his band’s best songs Last year, Brett Anderson – the lithe and elegantly brooding frontman of Suede – revealed himself as a lithe and charming memoirist. Coal Black Mornings was an anti-rockstar chronicle, dedicated to his eccentric childhood on a housing estate in Haywards Heath in Sussex; his gruff, depressive, Liszt-obsessed father; his arty, stifled mother; his first forays into music and creativity. It detailed the early days of Suede, in the late 1980s and early 90s, the poverty, the failures, the bad decisions and inept songwriting. It ended, with admirable perversity, the day the band got signed. Distancing devices, and their invitations to read between the lines, imbue this book with an almost novelistic quality Continue reading... post comment

Hitler by Brendan Simms and Hitler by Peter Longerich review – problematic portraits [27 Sep 2019|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/27/hitler-only-the-world-was-enough-and-hitler-a-life-review Was Hitler obsessed with destroying capitalism? Did he drive policy ‘even down to the smallest detail’? Two new biographies fall into different traps “Hitler was a socialist,” has become a mantra for the “alt-right” in the US as it seeks to discredit Democratic politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left expounded this claim at length in 2017, comparing points of the Nazi party’s 1920 programme with policies put forward by modern Democrats. So, anyone who claims to be a socialist is really a Nazi who wants to set the country on the road to totalitarianism, war and genocide. Obamacare is only the start; enslavement and death will be the end. It’s a claim that has spread through the Republican party and has been echoed by Donald Trump Jr. Now it has found its way across the Atlantic in the form of Brendan Simms’s new book, the central argument of which is that “Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union and Bolshevism”. Everything in his life can be traced back to this obsession. “Hitler wanted to establish what he considered racial unity in Germany by overcoming the capitalist order and working for the construction of a new classless society.” Throughout his career, “Hitler’s rhetoric” was “far more anti-capitalist than anti-communist”. Simms asserts “the centrality of the British Empire and the United States in the gestation of Mein Kampf”, just as he claims of Hitler’s long unpublished Second Book that “the main focus of the text was the overwhelming power of Anglo-America, and especially of the United States”. Continue reading... post comment

Caroline Criado Perez: ‘No one ever changed the world by being nice’ [27 Sep 2019|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/27/caroline-criado-perez-no-one-changed-world-by-being-nice The journalist and campaigner on the book that made her realise she was in an abusive relationship and the comforts of Nancy Mitford The book I am currently reading Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living. After years of reading almost exclusively men, I’m now addicted to sharp female writers like Levy who write about what it is to be a woman. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of the excitement of recognising how I see the world in a book. The book that changed my life Where There’s a Will There’s a Way or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire. Part literary analysis, part self-help book, reading this made me realise I was in an abusive relationship – which was the first step to getting out. Continue reading... post comment

'I felt changed': Max Porter on the book everyone should read about grief [27 Sep 2019|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/27/max-porter-way-though-grief-denise-riley Written after the death of her son, Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow finds radical and consoling ways to understand bereavement I wrote a short novel about grief. One of its central conceits was that two siblings who had lost a parent would speak in one voice, for each other, against each other, in a state of play. A language game of ever-mourning. For them, time was unfixed. Their childhoods, their growing into teenagers then adults, their notional futures as parents and as dead men themselves, this was all present in the nowness of their storytelling. These children were an autobiographical device. I had been trying to find a way of writing about what it is like to lose a parent. About growing up in cahoots with my time-travelling co-conspirator (my brother) along our illusory and twisting lateral axis, backwards and make-believe-forwards, about what seemed like a distinct way we had of seeing other people, granted to us by the absence. To us it seemed as if we had our own time and our own sight, defined by what we shared. And I had wanted to write about that, in an attempt to better grasp it. Continue reading... post comment

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman review – Lyra grows up [27 Sep 2019|11:01pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/28/secret-commonwealth-philip-pullman-review In the second volume of the Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra is a student on the trail of a dangerous mystery, and Pullman’s target is as much intolerant rationality as intolerant theism We all get older, and so do our books. Two years ago, Philip Pullman met the challenge of returning to the world of His Dark Materials by going back in time. La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his planned trilogy The Book of Dust, was a prequel, telling how, as a baby, Lyra Belacqua was saved from the deadly agents of the Magisterium, the authoritarian church that is always seeking to extend its powers. Her rescuer was the heroic but thoroughly human Malcolm, an 11-year-old living with his parents in a pub on the river outside Oxford. Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, the second volume of The Book of Dust, Pullman does something riskier: he jumps forward 20 years – a decade on from the memorably sad, satisfyingly inevitable ending of The Amber Spyglass – to give us the story of Lyra as a young adult. Now she is a student in that familiar-yet-strange Oxford of Pullman’s alternative world. (This book stays in that world and never crosses to our own.) She has become very intellectual and a little solemn and has fallen out with her daemon, Pantalaimon. But she cannot retreat into her books, as she soon realises that she remains a person of interest to the Magisterium. The book’s gripping opening chapter moves between sinister machinations among leaders of the church in Geneva, and a clumsy murder in night-time Oxford. The murder victim, Lyra discovers, is a botanist – mystical botanical lore is at the heart of this tale. He had recently returned from a research trip to Central Asia where, we strongly suspect, we will eventually be led. Continue reading... post comment

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