Bowen’s take is that Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbours in 1967 (the goading that led up to it, the Arab propaganda and quasi-Messianic sense of justification it gave the Israelis, the hatred stirred up among mistreated Arabs and the problem of “administering” the occupied territories) shaped the modern Middle East. These issues began before and extend beyond 1967, but Bowen’s meticulous account, a mosaic of private stories, control-room debates and battlefield vignettes, makes a convincing case that the Six Day war saw their crystallisation.
(Pocket Books £7.99) RH
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POLITICS
by Adam Thirlwell
Opening with an explicit sex scene involving fluffy pink handcuffs, Thirlwell’s philosophical novel is about a threesome: Moshe, Nana and Anjali. Lucky Moshe, you might think, but it’s not that simple. There is something irritating about the winsomely patronising style (not to mention daft digressions about Stalin and Mao) but this unerotic book is still a comic pleasure. As for real love, it is what Nana feels for her father when he’s ill. Thirlwell’s novel is clever and “nice” (his word), and so moral that, by the end, you can’t help feeling we’d all be better off with a cup of tea.
(Vintage £6.99) PhB
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THE LAST ENGLISHMAN: The Life of J L Carr
by Byron Rogers
“I can’t think what Byron’s going to do when I’m gone,” a dying Carr reportedly said of his biographer. “He’ll run out of stories for the papers.” To judge by the fund of anecdotes packed into this enormously entertaining, frequently poignant biography, Rogers may well have exhausted his stock by now, but it was worth it. He ably captures not only Carr the novelist, author of A Month in the Country and The Battle of Pollocks Crossing, but also Carr the idiosyncratic publisher, headmaster, conservationist and paradoxically modest self-publicist. Rogers is right to suggest that Carr’s passing may represent the end of something, and that the British literary scene is the poorer for it.
(Aurum £7.99) AC
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SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD
by Joseph McBride
Thirty years in preparation, McBride’s encyclopaedic biography of John Ford, the director of classic westerns such as The Man who Shot Liberty Valance and Stagecoach, received little input from its subject, who once declared, “The truth about my life is nobody’s damn business but my own.” Despite this, McBride has managed to produce a masterly portrait of an enormously complex person, who was a bully and a monster, an unfaithful husband, a cold and absent father, and an alcoholic who delighted in reducing his actors, even John Wayne, to tears on the film set.
(Faber £9.99) SB
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THE STEALING STEPS
by John Arden
Beginning with the folkloric tale of Thickpenny the Rhymer, plunged into madness in medieval York by ghostly visits from a former lover, and tripping through Jacobean dramas and contemporary conspiracy tales, these nine stories are nothing if not varied and vital. A noted playwright, Arden tends to draw his characters from the ranks of embittered and desperate artists, actors and hacks, infusing their frequently allegorical tales with a fruity theatrical atmosphere. Each piece demands a sustained readerly attention not always needed for the slighter end of modern short-story writing, and each repays that concentration amply.
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(Methuen £7.99) AC
GRANDES HORIZONTALES: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans
by Virginia Rounding
Rounding’s exploration of the lives of four courtesans who made their mark on 19th-century French society makes fascinating reading. Her subjects are Marie Duplessis, immortalised by Dumas as La Dame aux camélias; “La Païva”, a Russian woman with a flair for business; Apollonie Sabatier, famous for her artistic but bawdy salons; and Cora Pearl, the mistress of “Prince Napoleon” (Bonaparte’s nephew). All four women began life in poverty, from which prostitution offered the only escape. Rounding makes the point that the qualities, besides their sexual appeal, that enabled them to attract wealthy and influential protectors — their social skills, wit and intelligence — were attributes that could have made them successful women in their own right, had they been born a century or so later.
(Bloomsbury £8.99) PB
THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS
by Alasdair Gray
“Success is overrated. The best proof of our worth is how we respond to failure.” Despite his wry borrowing of Herman Melville’s aphorism, Gray’s volume of stories clearly shows a writer used to triumph. Not so his characters, who are invariably touched by loss, regret or setbacks. Chief among them is the protagonist of Job’s Skin Game who, after both his sons are killed on 9/11, is reduced to obsessively itemising flakes dropping from his eczema-plagued body. At 69, Gray is more a literary éminence grise than ever, but his wellspring of acute observation has yet to run dry.
(Canongate £6.99) TL
ALBION: The Origins of the English Imagination
by Peter Ackroyd
Ackroyd on the English imagination provides a characteristic mix of the enlightening and the infuriating. Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Jane Austen, via the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the ghost stories of M R James, Shakespeare, the illustrations of George Cruikshank and a thousand other subjects, Ackroyd provides brilliant insights and unexpected connections on every page. Yet his fondness for airy metaphors (the English imagination is an “ endless enchanted circle or shining ring”, apparently) and his willingness to embrace mystical ideas of an unchanging “Englishness”, which miraculously escapes the shaping power of time and history, eventually become as exasperating as his knowledge and originality are exhilarating.
(Vintage £12.99) NR