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10 August 2019 THE WEEKARTS
“Almost everything about Louis XIV
was onagargantuan scale,” said John
Adamson in The Sunday Times. His
reign, from 1643 to 1715, remains
the longest in European history; at
Versailles he createdapalace that
was the continent’s largest, and is still
the world’s most visited. His military
ambitions were similarly “Herculean”, as he strove to extend his
borders and undertook the devastating War of the Spanish
Succession. So carefully was his “Sun King” image crafted that it’s
amajor challenge for any biographer to excavate the man beneath
–but Philip Mansel has done so with flair. Although he revels in
the extravagant “fêtes and fireworks” that glorified Louis’ rule, he
is never blind to his subject’s failings and absurdities. This is the
best single-volume account of his reign “in any language”.
When it comes to court rituals, palace intrigues and royal
mistresses, Mansel is certainly not an author to sell his readers
short, said David Crane in The Spectator. ButKing of the World
is also an extended moral fable–the story of howakind,
intelligent, modest boy became the self-destructive monarch who
“persecuted his Huguenot subjects,
ravaged whole swathes of Europe, and
taxed France into starvation, misery
and revolt”. Just four when his father,
Louis XIII, died, he grew up in a
country simmering with rebellion under
the regency of his mother, Anne of
Austria, and drew one conclusion from
the dominance of her deeply unpopular
first minister, Cardinal Mazarin: that a
king must exercise his own authority,
rather than rule through others. Thus
he discovered “the seductive and
corrupting appeal” of absolutism –
even if, as Mansel is careful to point
out, he was never as absolute as he
wanted the world to believe, and never
actually said, “L’état c’est moi”.
Anglophone historians tend to dismiss the Sun King as vulgar
and vainglorious, bigoted in religion and “purblind in politics”,
said Minoo Dinshaw in The Daily Telegraph. Mansel’s approach,
however, is altogether more authoritative and nuanced. He dispels
the myth that once Louis had settled at Versailles he took little
interest in the rest of his kingdom: much as the king loved
pleasure, he never neglected the business of government, and he
travelled tirelessly, maintaining several residences while cleverly
running Versailles asa“job centre” for his grasping nobles.
Above all, it is to Mansel’s credit that, for all Louis’ despicable
behaviour towards his enemies, “we are somehow inclined,
despite everything, to sympathise with the old monster”.King of the World
by Philip Mansel
Allen Lane 640pp £30
The Week Bookshop£25.99 (incl. p&p)
Review of reviews: BooksBook of the weekWhere exactly David Crosby, Stephen Stills
and Graham Nash’s voices first blended is lost
“in the distant heat haze of Californian hippy
rock”, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the
Financial Times. It may have been at Joni
Mitchell’s house in Laurel Canyon, or Mama
Cass’s. But according to Stills, when they did,
the three “started laughing hysterically –
laughing with joy”. Their gorgeous harmonies epitomised “the hippy ethos of
togetherness”; songs such asMarrakesh Expresswere secular hymns for the new
psychedelic age of liberation. Neil Young’s arrival in 1969 amplified the band’s
creativity still further–but also aggravated its internal conflicts. Peter Doggett’s
“thoughtful” biography follows the world’s first supergroup from its huge early
success to the break-up in 1974 which, despite later reunions, marked the end of
a“utopian” dream of combining mutual commitment with artistic individuality.
All four had already achieved fame before coming together, said Richard
Williams in The Guardian, but each had fallen out with his “pop family”. Crosby
had been sacked by The Byrds; Nash had grown tired of the superficial pop of
The Hollies; Stills and Young had acrimoniously parted from Buffalo Springfield.
Coming together salved their wounds, and produced an abundance of finely
crafted songs. But cracks were already showing by the time of their European
debut at the Royal Albert Hall in January 1970, and Doggett doesn’t flinch from
describing the fall-out–above all, the toll taken by the “paranoia of cocaine”.
This is an even-handed portrait, agreed Anthony Quinn in The Mail on Sunday,
by awriter who has interviewed the four many times over. “He loves the music
without being slavish, and he pays each of the musicians their due.” The songs
came ofabrief flowering; “but they remain, unquestionably, for the ages”.
Crosby, Stills, Nash&Young
by Peter Doggett
Bodley Head 368pp £25
The Week Bookshop£21.99 (incl. p&p)
Novel of the weekZed
by Joanna Kavenna
Faber 384pp £16.99
The Week Bookshop£14.99This absorbing and timely novel “brims with
manic energy”, said Philip Womack in the
Financial Times.Ahumongous, Google-style
tech company called Beetle runs all the
computing and security systems in the UK; its
“lifechain” system charts each individual’s every
move, predicting future behaviour and ordering
arrests in anticipation of future crimes. But when
amodel citizen kills his wife and sons, chaos
ensues. Beetle’s chief reacts by introducing a
new, nuance-free language, Beetlespeak, to end
misunderstandings–but only creates more.
It’s bizarre to find all this so funny, said Sophie
Ratcliffe in The Daily Telegraph, because it’s so
alarmingly close to reality.Zedspotlights “with
piercing clarity” how thoughtlessly we give up
our data. Yet for all its modernity, the plot and
characters haveawonderfully Dickensian feel
to them. Kavenna’s tale “rattles on apace” with
shootings and vigilante justice, but there’s also
aquieter, more artful story about the need to
preserve our literary and linguistic heritage. It’s
botha“joyously” page-turning thriller and one
of the cleverest books you’ll read this year.To order these titles or any other book in print, visit
theweek.co.uk/bookshopor speak toabookseller on020-3176 3835
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