There’s nothing oriental about this hefty collection of reviews and other nonfiction from Boyd, which takes its title from a Chinese proverb: “Plant one bamboo shoot — cut bamboo for the rest of your life.” Boyd means that once you start on journalism you’ll end up doing a hell of a lot, and there are less pleasant metaphors that he could have used. Many of these 130-odd pieces are workaday stuff, framed with a rather self-regarding commentary — he has chosen them, he says, for the light they shed (“sometimes strong and clear, sometimes oblique and occluded”) on his own work and they can be pedestrian and laboured. He’s better on painters, oddly enough, with interesting pieces on the likes of Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin and Pierre Bonnard.
(Penguin £10.99). PhB
THE PRINCESS AND THE POLITICIANS
by John Charmley
In Europe in the decades immediately after Waterloo, the great power brokers in politics and diplomacy were, with one exception, all men. The one exception was Princess Dorothea Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador to Britain. She knew all the movers and shakers of the age, from the Austrian chancellor Metternich to the Duke of Wellington, and she slept with most of them. As Charmley demonstrates, the princess’s pillow talk was most likely to be of the destiny of nations. His absorbing book is not, however, a prurient peek into the sex lives of the great and good but an original account of European politics in the post-Napoleonic era, seen from the perspective of one remarkable and surprisingly influential woman.
(Penguin £9.99). NR
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THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece
by John Harris
Owned by one in five households in Britain, and now strongly redolent of 1970s suburbia, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is among the most loved and hated records of all time. Harris excavates its creation in almost more detail than anyone would want, but still manages to be interesting. We discover that Clare Torry — the singer whose extraordinary vocal improvisation on The Great Gig in the Sky makes the track — finally sued the band after being fobbed off with £30 (she is now credited as the co-composer of the song), and we even see a photograph of Gerry O’Driscoll, the old Irish janitor at Abbey Road studios whose soundbites, “I know I’ve been mad, like the most of us . . . Very hard to explain why you’re mad”, for example, were collaged so effectively into the mix.
(Harper Perennial £7.99). PhB
THE DIVIDE
by Nicholas Evans
In his fourth novel, Evans, the author of the bestselling The Horse Whisperer, provides a forensic examination of how the idyllically happy marriage of Ben and Sarah Cooper, a professional couple with everything going for them, collapses when Ben leaves his wife for another woman. When the couple’s ecoterrorist daughter Abbie is found dead, having been on the run from the FBI for murder, Sarah is able to snarl at Ben: “Abbie died because of what you did to us all.” How they reached this position makes a convincing and moving novel interlaced with wonderful descriptions of the Montana countryside.
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(Time Warner £6.99). SB
IT IS BLISS HERE: Letters Home 1939–1945
by Myles Hildyard
Hildyard undoubtedly had a “good war”. Stationed in, among other places, Palestine, El Alamein and Normandy, he participated in some of the main events of the second world war, and gained an MC for a daring escape from Crete. As he himself admits in this collection of his letters and diaries, he had a thoroughly enjoyable time. In the early extracts there is little sense of the horror of battle, and his account is shot through with an unpleasant casual snobbery. By 1945, however, the author’s greater maturity leads to a more realistic appraisal of war, making this a valuable personal record of a soldier’s experience
(Bloomsbury £8.99). IC
THE TRIBES OF BRITAIN: Who Are We? And Where Do We Come From?
by David Miles
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The questions posed by the subtitle are clearly in the air at the moment. Miles is a much respected archeologist, so his history of the British naturally focuses on the sticks and stones of our development rather than the airy-fairy cultural aspects — although, arguably, the latter are of importance in determining any nation’s sense of self. Nevertheless, coming at a time of surely historical levels of immigration, his hugely detailed survey, which utilises up-to- the-minute research and charts the influences coming from outside the British Isles, provides a vital background to any discussion of why Britain is the way it is. It will certainly warm the hearts of increasingly beleaguered multiculturalists.
(Phoenix £9.99). PW
THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES
by Paul Auster
Nathan Glass, to quote a previous Auster title, is in the country of last things. A former insurance salesman, he travels to Brooklyn “looking for a quiet place to die”, but is regenerated by a series of encounters that forces him to question his yearning for mortality. Among the kindred souls giving his life belated purpose are his long-lost nephew, Tom, a scholarly dropout, and Lucy, Tom’s silent nine-year-old niece, whose former porn-actress mother the two men quixotically set out to rescue from a religious zealot. There is more than a hint of Auster the Hollywood screenwriter about the plot, and while the cold philosophical intelligence of his earlier fictions, such as The New York Trilogy, is still tangible, it is noticeably leavened by a warm afterglow of humanity. The result is the author’s most accessible novel to date.
(Faber £7.99 ). TL
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