Scotsman.com - Book reviews Feed

Book review: Perilous Question by Antonia Fraser

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:33:04 GMT

Eighteen thirty-two used to be a well-known date in British history. It was the year of the Great Reform Bill, when an outdated political system gave way to a wider franchise allowing a number of middle-class men to vote for the first time. Antonia Fraser’s latest book is a spirited attempt to bring the controversy and passion of the era to a new audience.

PAPERBACKS William Leith

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:33:03 GMT

SILA’S FORTUNE

Book reviews: The Fragile Empire| Sweet tooth| The Faithful Executioner

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:33:02 GMT

A roundup of the latest book releases

Book review: Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:32:37 GMT

Quickly described, Clever Girl, the new novel from Tessa Hadley, is the story of a woman’s life, from childhood to middle age. Like that John Lewis advert of a few years ago, it moves briskly through 50 years, touching down on experiences that will be very familiar to white, first-world women born during the second half of the 20th century.

Book review: Between Friends by Amos Oz

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:32:33 GMT

In 1954, aged 14, Amos Klausner changed his name to Amos Oz, leaving behind him his home and father, exchanging city life for the relative privations of the desert, cutting his teeth (and his new identity) on life in an Israeli kibbutz.

Book review: The Lion Rampant by Robert Low

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:32:32 GMT

With The Lion Rampant and its vivid, imaginative and blood-curdling account of Bannockburn, Robert Low, one assumes, has concluded in splendid bravura style, his sequence of novels on the Wars of Independence.

Book review: Dial H: Volume 1, Into You by China Miéville

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:32:30 GMT

To my mind, China Miéville is one of the most interesting literary writers currently working in Britain, an accolade undiminished, though perhaps sometimes obscured, by his wholehearted commitment to genre.

Book review: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Vol 1, Charles Moore

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:49:53 GMT

Sir Malcolm Rifkind hails a biography of Thatcher that finally offers an authoritative voice on the woman behind the legacy

Book review: The Round House, Louise Erdrich

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:46:13 GMT

LOUISE Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many of her novels and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin.

Book review: Dear Lumpy, Roger Mortimer and Louise Mortimer

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:44:22 GMT

A DEFTLY witty collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer to his wastrel son Charlie, Dear Lupin was one of the surprise hits of last year.

Book review: The Society Of Timid Souls: Or How To Be Brave, Polly Morland

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:41:48 GMT

IN THIS fascinating rumination on the nature of courage and cowardice, there’s a chapter titled “Crime And Punishment” in which, among other things, Polly Morland has frank conversations with two armed robbers, now reformed.

Book review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:18 GMT

They were, arguably, the first celebrity couple of the Jazz Era. She was a precocious, spoiled Southern belle and bad girl; he was a Midwesterner and Princeton dropout who had turned his experience into the novel This Side of Paradise.

Book review: Margaret Thatcher The Authorised Biography Volume One: Not for Turning

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:18 GMT

WHEN Margaret Thatcher died, the nation broke satisfyingly into factions. Both clashing armies agreed that the lady with the handbag had been personally responsible, if not for everything, then for a prodigious number of things in Britain between 1979 and 1990.

Book review: Superman and Philosophy: What Would The Man Of Steel Do?

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:17 GMT

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical? This series of books, edited by William Irwin, laudably use popular culture to explain philosophical concepts.

Book review: Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:14 GMT

There used to be a common complaint that the subject of the typical middle-class English novel was adultery in Hampstead or, perhaps, Islington. The charge was exaggerated of course; there was more variety in the English novel, even 40 years ago.

Book review: If Hitler Comes By Gordon Barclay

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:12 GMT

As German troops swept through Europe in 1940, it was reasonable to expect that the United Kingdom would be their next target. The main base of the British Home Fleet in Scapa Flow was, after all, only two hours’ flying time from Stavanger and the Nazi army was in Norway. Intelligence suggested that an invasion had already been planned.

Book reviews: Churchill’s First War| The Serpent’s Promise | Scots Who Enlightened the World

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:10 GMT

A roundup of the latest book releases

Book review: The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:56:08 GMT

There’s an interesting collision in Ruth Thomas’s second novel between comedy and reality. In her award-winning short stories, too, she demonstrates this same quiet humour that looks at the world from an angle that is ever so slightly askew yet somehow also comforting.

Book review: A Place In The Country, WG Sebald

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:17:50 GMT

When WG Sebald pays his dues to the ghosts of his literary past he reveals why his own legacy will endure, writes Stuart Kelly

Book review: The Humans, Matt Haig

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:15:02 GMT

IN THE acknowledgments at the end of his latest novel, Matt Haig reveals that he first had the idea for this story in 2000 while he was in the middle of a breakdown.