Sideswipes at veggie fascism hit the mark, but this is a more universal satire on morals, health and business.A Way in the World by VS Naipaul, Minerva pounds 6.99. Disillusion and betrayal seam Naipaul’s set of nine stories about colonialism, which include Raleigh on his last doomed voyage to the West Indies, a political agitator into the Guyanese jungle and a Trotskyist prophet facing the corruption of an African regime he’s supported. In each case, we see the entropy of political idealism into cynicism, aggrandisement and folly.Women & Ghosts by Alison Lurie, Minerva pounds 6.99. Lurie’s ghosts – avengers, wreckers and sometimes murderers – come to mock our pretensions and vanities. Lurie carefully inks-in the context of the hauntings: a US Embassy in West Africa, timid girl moving in with male-chauvinist, Halloween in Edge City, the cult of dieting. This vigourous Life sets out to show how much we can still learn from a man whose life was chaotic but his mind so clear.Louis MacNeice by Jon Stallworthy, Faber pounds 25.
The Irish one in the Macspaunday poetry corner is 32 years dead, so this first biography comes not before time – a sympathetic, elegant narrative, keen to play down the ’30s context in favour of the Irishness, but not generally overanalytical about a great writer who has been sorely neglected.Riding the Retreat: Mons to the Marne, 1914 Revisited by Richard Holmes, Cape pounds 20. Needless to say it’s a gem.POETRYBest of all summer reading: get details from your bookshop on new volumes by Ted Hughes, Peter Porter, Christopher Logue, Michele Roberts, Glyn Maxwell, Katherine Pierpoint and many others. Waterhouse has knocked out some of the best novels about growing up since the war. Now we can enjoy a browse through the source material: his account of his own early life in Leeds in the Thirties and Forties, from short trousers to rookie journalist. The airborne division of the US Forestry Service’s worst disaster, when 13 “firejumpers” were killed by a fire 45 years ago in Montana, is related here by an author who died with his work unfinished. Feeling with its fingertips towards the essence of tragedy, this is a great book, rich in metaphor, philosophy and adrenalin.City Lights by Keith Waterhouse, Sceptre pounds 6.99. Brilliant material: part reportage, part fiction, wholly extraordinary.Romans: Their Lives and Times by Michael Sheridan, Phoenix pounds 7.99.
“There are no real Romans left” Sheridan writing about the eternally changing stock-pot of the city’s population. Sheridan, who was the Independent’s Rome correspondent for ten years, provides acute sketches on, among other topics, the Latin heritage, the Papacy and the Red Brigades.Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, Penguin pounds 6.99. In fact, one look at Spain’s knackered economy and Hitler was glad to leave Franco to one side.Speed Tribes: Children of the Japanese Bubble by Karl Taro Greenfeld, Boxtree pounds 7.99. Tokyo is the most pulsating leisure market in the world but whether for a techno-clubbing office girl, porn video star, Japanese Hell’s Angel, drinks hostess and her drooling executive clients, yakuza debt-collector, drug pusher or hard-right revolutionary, fun is a tough business. That the Caudillo cared more for himself than his people is the theme of this exceptional biography. In reptile terms, he was a boa constrictor, liking to squeeze his opponents to extinction.
His banal mind was proud of its Galician peasant ambivalence, allegedly responsible for Spanish WW2 neutrality. His style – radical, fluent, incisive and cynical – appealed over the heads of his historian peers and made him almost a popular hero. Sisman is good on his character: emotionally tangled and not likeable, but extremely singular.Franco by Paul Preston, Fontana pounds 9.99. Taylor provoked much academic venom, revelled in it and never minded appearing inconsistent. Her platonic life with the gay Lytton Strachey, whilst dangling other lovers, was a solution, yet it led to her suicide at 40. This is a useful annexe to her matchless letters and diaries; La Thompson’s film opens in the autumn.A J P Taylor: A Biography by Adam Sisman, Mandarin pounds 7.99.
Ormerod wants economists to be less like astrologers and more like weatherman. Great fuel for those holiday arguments.Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington by Gretchen Gerzina, Pimlico pounds 10. Carrington was an affectionate, vital and original woman who yearned for love, violently attracted men but was evasive about sex. Schnabel’s approach is scholarly, deadpan.The Man in the Ice by Konrad Spindler, Phoenix pounds 7.99. Four years ago in the Tyrolean Alps, a half-naked body was found protruding from the ice. Having lain dead for 4,000 years, it was remarkably preserved with shoes, clothing, weapons and other personal items. The archaeologist in charge here offers priceless insights into European life back beyond the historical horizon.The Death of Economics by Paul Ormerod, Faber pounds 6.99.