the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 13enormous energy who’s never afraid of
being entertaining.Hidden Hands: The Lives of
Manuscripts and Their Makers
by Mary Wellesley Quercus, £25
“A manuscript is like a crime scene,”
Mary Wellesley writes, “a tissue of
minuscule clues to a forgotten history,
which needs to be examined with
forensic care.” It tells secrets not
just about the people who made
it, but also about its countless
readers. This book, packed
with wonderful stories
beautifully told, is an
expression of the author’s
love for medieval texts.
It’s deeply intimate and
delightfully self-indulgent.
Wellesley invites us into her
world, allowing us to share
her breathless excitement.The Burgundians: A Vanished
Empire by Bart Van Loo
Head of Zeus, £30
Burgundy was an immensely wealthy
region, sandwiched between France
and Germany. It would eventually be
dismembered as a result of the dynastic
rivalries of early modern Europe.
Bart Van Loo charts 1,100 years of
Burgundian history, a period littered
with scandal, treachery, war and
romance. He’s a beguiling storyteller who
peppers his narrative with weird and
colourful detail. Bizarre characterswith her subject and a wise observer of
her small but so important world.Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me:
Her Life and Long Loves by John
Sutherland Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
Poor Monica Jones, swotty, speccy,
sent up as Margaret Peel in Kingsley
Amis’s Lucky Jim and doomed to cook
uneaten dishes of duck stuffed with
prunes for her lover Philip Larkin. John
Sutherland knew Jones when he was an
undergraduate at Leicester in the 1960s
and she was a tough young lecturer who
wore tartan when teaching Macbeth. He
is also the first biographer to have had
access to the thousands of letters written
by Jones to Larkin. This is a poignant
period piece about thwarted ambition,
unrequited love and the heartbreaking
bathos of a pair of satin pyjamas.The Turning Point: A Year That
Changed Dickens and the World
by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Jonathan Cape, £25
The year is 1851, the Crystal Palace has
thrown open its glass doors and Charles
Dickens is about to start writing his great
novel of fog and legal pettifogging, Bleak
House. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst makes
the case that this was the year that made
Dickens. Boz could certainly bustle. We
find him editing a journal, staging a play,
co-writing a cookbook, walking 20 miles
in a day and instructing fallen women in
the virtues of truthfulness, industry,
temperance and punctuality.Burning Man: The Ascent of DH
Lawrence by Frances Wilson
Bloomsbury, £25
Frances Wilson is on flaming form in
this fierce and crackling life of DH
Continued on page 14 Wand fallen women
PA; ALAMY
abound. This book is the literary
equivalent of a huge gourmet meal —
opulent, indulgent and thoroughly
satisfying.The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy,
Revenge and the Murders That
Stunned an Empire by Julie Kavanagh
Grove Press UK, £18.99
On May 6, 1882, two British government
officials, Thomas Burke and Frederick
Cavendish, were brutally murdered by
Irish nationalists in Phoenix Park,
Dublin. It was a stupid and pointless
crime that had painful consequences for
Ireland. The story of these murders is
not unfamiliar, but it has never been
recounted so well. Julie Kavanagh takes
the time to describe characters and
places in exquisite colour and detail.
A gripping tale is rendered beautiful
because of the tiny ephemera only a
sensitive author can appreciate.Devil-Land: England Under Siege,
1588-1688 by Clare Jackson
Allen Lane, £35
England was once a failed state, a
kingdom neither peaceable nor stable.
Foreign observers called it “Devil-land”,
a place where evil abounded and
everything went awry. Between the
Spanish Armada and the Glorious
Revolution the English suffered civil war,
incompetent rule, bankruptcy, plague
and fire. Yet this was also a period of
immense creativity and innovation.
Clare Jackson offers some acute insights
on an era of failure and ferment, weaving
together an impressive narrative of a
time when the English seemed suddenly
to have lost their minds.The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph,
a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
by Wendy Lower Head of Zeus, £20
Wendy Lower witnessed a murder — a
crime that occurred 70 years ago, long
before her birth. She found a photograph
that was not supposed to exist, showing
the execution of a Jewish family in
Ukraine. She then embarked on a
forensic quest to discover the identities
of the victims and perpetrators. The
gargantuan horror of the Holocaust is
distilled through a meticulous
reconstruction of a single
shocking crime. Justice,
although delayed, is achieved,
but that horror lurks like a
menacing fog.The Warrior and the
Prophet: The Shawnee
Brothers Who Defied a
Nation by Peter Cozzens
Atlantic, £25
General William Henry
Harrison called his nemesis
Tecumseh “one of those
uncommon geniuses which spring
up occasionally to... overturn the
established order of things”. Peter
Cozzens thinks no Native American ever
posed a bigger threat to white expansion.
The author deeply admires this
extraordinary man, but does not ignore
his flaws. A wealth of detail is woven into
an enthralling and tragic biography of
Tecumseh and his younger brother,
Tenskwatawa, the “Shawnee Prophet”.
The reader can almost smell the
gunpowder, blood and loamy forest floor.A Swim in a Pond in
the Rain: In Which
Four Russians Give
a Master Class on
Writing,
Reading and
Life by George
Saunders
Bloomsbury,
£16.99
This is a treat. A tin of caviar sort of a
book. The Booker prizewinning novelist
George Saunders gives a one-to-one
tutorial in seven stories by four Russian
novelists: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy
and Gogol. Not necessarily the “best”
stories, but stories that Saunders finds
“eminently teachable”. He guides, prods,
nudges, urges you to disagree. “God
save us from manifestos,” he writes,
“even mine.” It’s better dipped into one
essay at a time rather than read in a
single deep dive, but it will stay with you
and transform how you read story by
story, sentence by sentence.The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
by Paula Byrne
William Collins, £25
Spinsters, Horlicks and... swastikas?
In her life of the novelist Barbara Pym,
Paula Byrne gives us not just an
excellent woman, but a resolute,
romantic and sometimes foolish one.
Byrne uncovers Pym’s tendresse for
Friedbert Glück, an SS officer, and her
admiration for Germany under the
Nazis. Then there are her unsuitable
attachments to vain, married and
otherwise unattainable men. Pym, so
wise a narrator, could be passionately
silly in life. Byrne is beautifully in tuneThe private lives and
loves of great writers
Sex, fascism, globe-trotting and gardening all
feature in the lives of Laura Freeman’s p i cks
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