the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 17
successes this year, the international
pharmaceutical industry is broken. He
also suggests how to fix it.Stop Bloody Bossing Me About: How
We Need to Stop Being Told What to
Do by Quentin Letts Constable, £9.99
Remember Peter Finch in the classic film
Network declaring: “I’m as mad as hell
and I’m not going to take this any
more”? That is the animating spirit of
this polemic by the Times parliamentary
sketch writer. Quentin Letts targets
officialdom’s finger-waggers and
bossocrats such as Nicola Sturgeon,
Professor Neil Ferguson, Matt Hancock,
the Archbishop of Canterbury, hospital
bureacrats, National Trust curators...The Unusual Suspect: The Remarkable
True Story of a Modern-Day Robin
Hood by Ben Machell Canongate, £16.99
The Times writer Ben Machell tells
the quirky story of Stephen Jackley,
a student with Asperger’s syndrome,
who, obsessed with Robin Hood, became
a bank robber. He committed ten
robberies in southwest England and
banknotes marked with “RH” began
finding their way into the hands of the
homeless — yes, he was stealing from
the rich to give to the poor. The police
had no idea who was responsible until
Jackley’s ambition got the better of him.Empireland: How Imperialism Shaped
Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
Viking, £9.99
The Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera
takes on the volatile issue of Britain’s
imperial legacy. Rather than taking
sides, he rejects the reductive “balance
sheet” approach in which colonial crimes
such as torture are weighed against the
elimination of slavery, foot-binding and
female genital mutilation.The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker
Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99
A psychological thriller about female
friendship, secrets and revenge by the
fashion editor of The Times. Lizzie calls
off her wedding in the south of France a
week before the big day. Her university
pals decide to go to the château anyway,
persuading the bereft Lizzie to join them.
Alas, the château is still immaculately set
up for the wedding. Lizzie retires to her
room in distress, only to find the next
morning that her mates have taken full
drunken advantage of what was laid on
and have trashed the place. Worse still,
someone is playing malicious tricks.Don’t Laugh, It’ll Only Encourage Her
by Daisy May Cooper
Michael Joseph, £20
Daisy May Cooper’s BBC sitcom
This Country ran for three years,
with a US remake in the works.
Yet as this amusing and
revealing memoir shows, success
didn’t just land in her lap. She
and Charlie, her younger brother
and collaborator, grew up in
Cirencester with no money.
After Cooper’s torrid time at
Rada, the siblings shared rooms
and wrote sketches while doing
cleaning jobs by night. Cooper
is casual and caustic as she
looks at the bright side and
darker underbelly of showbiz.
Before & Laughter:
A Life-Changing Book
by Jimmy Carr Quercus, £20
A stimulating and amusing
mix of memoir and
self-help, even if Jimmy
Carr makes sure to mock
self-help books — they
all essentially just say
“prioritise later over
now”, he suggests. Sure,
there is some of the
callousness of his
stand-up in here, yet Carr is a true
scholar of his craft, and what he has to
say about how he has achieved what
he has achieved can have resonance
for anyone. All this plus a cracking
Bruce Springsteen anecdote.Sidesplitter: How to Be
from Two Worlds at Once
by Phil Wang
Hodder Studio, £20
Like Katherine Ryan, Phil
Wang relays his life lesson
by theme, not chronology.
As a British-Malaysian
comedian who lived in
Malaysia until he was 16,
he brings an outsider’s eye
to issues of culture and
belonging, writing with scope
and nuance. He has amusing
insights on British culture,
and the lingering impact of
empire, but this look (not a
memoir, he insists) at divided
identities never goes for
the obvious. For instance,
he is all for cultural
appropriation (done right),
and even defends the
1970s sitcom Mind Your
Language, a hit in
Malaysia.histories, styles and techniques as they
developed in Italy over almost 400 years.Albert & the Whale by Philip Hoare
4th Estate, £16.99
Five hundred years ago Albrecht Dürer
set off on an adventure to find a beached
whale. His trip proved fruitless; the
leviathan had been washed away by the
time he turned up. But the voyage
marked a pivotal moment for an artist
moving from the medieval world to the
modern. Philip Hoare follows his
journey, revelling in the wonder and
weirdness of nature, poring over the
facts and freaks of science, riveted by
the range and diversity of culture. This
is far from a conventional art history. It
reconnects the dusty bones of academic
investigation, clothes them with sinew,
nerve and muscle, and brings them
leaping to life.Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the
Artist’s Rise to Fame by Martin Bailey
Frances Lincoln, £25
This final volume of a trilogy deals with
the last, feverishly prolific 70 days of
Vincent van Gogh’s life. The artist
painted 70 canvases in this impetuously
creative period, among them some of his
most stunning works, all of which are
beautifully reproduced. Did he kill
himself or was he murdered? Debate has
long raged. But I think you can trust
Martin Bailey to have found the right
answer when he delivers it at the end of
this scholarly and captivating book.The World According to Colour:
A Cultural History by James Fox
Allen Lane, £25
Here’s a book to brighten the dullest of
winter days. The art historian and TV
presenter James Fox focuses on seven
colours, examining the cultural
meanings that humanity, over millennia,
has ascribed to them. Optics, chemistry,
philosophy, psychology, literature,
neuroscience, fashion, religion, magic and
myth are shaken up in this scintillating
rainbow mix of a study. Did you know
that the Mursi cattle herders of Ethiopia
have 11 colour names for cows and none
for anything else? Didn’t think so.speak of an early modern world in
which distinctions between amateur
and professional, art and science
were decidedly blurry. The only
disappointment is that so many of
the species that Catesby devotedly
recorded are extinct.
The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece
by David Ekserdjian Yale, £60
Among the most beautiful of all
Renaissance creations, the painted
altarpiece was for centuries a focus for
Christian prayer and contemplation. In
today’s secular world, although all too
frequently displaced and dismembered,
they seem to retain their power. This
densely scholarly but lavishly illustrated
volume offers an overarching study of
the Renaissance altarpiece, examining its
showing the murder of Thomas Becket
If War Should Come: The Origins of
the Second World War from the Times
Archive by Mark Barnes Crecy, £24.95
Mark Barnes, a veteran picture librarian
at The Times, has trawled through this
newspaper’s archives to create this
pictorial account of Britain and Europe
in the run-up to the Second World War.The Dictator’s Muse by Nigel Farndale
Doubleday, £16.99
Nigel Farndale, the obituaries editor of
The Times, has resurrected one of Nazi
Germany’s most interesting characters in
his new novel. The muse of the title is
Leni Riefenstahl, the director of The
Triumph of the Will. We also meet a
(fictional) English athlete who sells his
soul to Mosley’s Blackshirts for financial
support; his girlfriend, a spoilt socialite
and fascist sympathiser; and a
communist spy in the Blackshirts’ midst,
who befriends the couple. Their paths
converge with Leni’s at the Berlin
Games, with explosive consequences.Greenwich Park by Katherine
Faulkner Raven, £12.99
A twisty psychological thriller written by
the head of news projects at The Sunday
Times. Helen, her husband, brother and
sister-in-law are a gilded quartet: couples
since Cambridge, now colleagues and
expectant parents. They live in enviable
houses (inherited, or bought with
inherited cash) near Greenwich Park. At
an antenatal class, gabby working-class
Rachel latches on to Helen, then
insinuates her way into their lives. Why?Mending the Mind: The Art and
Science of Overcoming Clinical
Depression by Oliver Kamm
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99
The Times leader writer Oliver Kamm
documents his experience of — and
recovery from — severe clinical
depression. After a romantic break-up,
he spiralled into months of despair. But
this is no misery memoir; it is also a
study of what we know about depression
and what works in alleviating it.Sick Money: The Truth About the
Global Pharmaceutical Industry
by Billy Kenber Canongate, £18.99
Price fixing, bribery, profiteering and too
little innovation: Billy Kenber, the Times
investigations reporter, builds a powerful
case that shows that, despite its vaccineTimes journalists
Best of Times: books by our writers
country lass
Daisy May
Cooper... and one
cartoonist
Desperate Times
by Peter Brookes
Biteback, £20
Brexit and Megxit,
Trump and Covid:
relive the past two
turbulent years as
seen through the eyes
of Peter Brookes. A
biting and irreverent
collection of his best
cartoons from The
Times curated by the
great man himself.