RaveThe Spectator (UK)Donne turns his scholars into lovers, and as a result books about him tend surprisingly often to rise up to the sparkiness of their histrionic, funny and endlessly fascinating subject ... Katherine Rundell’s Super-infinite is a wonderfully Donnean book. It sits in a long pedigree of loving, scholarly responses to the poet, but captures with an unusual wit the variety and richness of its subject. It is neither a strict biography nor only a critical engagement with his poems, but offers instead half a riff on his life and half a love letter to him. There is a lot in the life, and Rundell gives us a quick march through ... Rundell is a fabulous storyteller ... The moments at which Rundell is a little conventional permit us to distinguish her own true invention: and through it, perhaps, Donne’s ... The book stages an often thrilling meeting between Donne and Rundell, and its basis is this supple, flexible wordplay in which sentences jump between registers and tones, between this world and the next, between everything and something more.
Max Hastings
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)With Chastise— which was also the slightly prissy codename for the operation — Hastings wishes to give a full and rounded reckoning. Despite its occasional purple flourishes (and, again, who could resist?), the story he tells is a remarkably unsentimental and often technical one ... Perhaps Hastings’s most striking argument is that the raid was largely pointless ... The dams raid was, he suggests, a PR exercise — and in retrospect it often looks amateurish ... In truth, not much of this is new, and there is a tiredness to the writing ... But what is at stake in this revision of the old glorious narrative is something important. The debate over whether this particular raid mattered is, in miniature, the wider historiographical debate over the morals and efficacy of the whole bombing war ... This in turn is the backdrop to the great ethical and legal debates about warfare today: about the relation between technology and human heroism, about collateral damage and proportional loss, and the role of publicity stunts in terror war. The dams raid was a romantic episode as well as, in Hastings’s telling, a slightly grubbier affair. But perhaps more than either of these it is a powerful parable which might instruct us in our own confused times.
Jan Morris
RaveThe New York TimesHer affection for empire makes Jan Morris a curiously old-fashioned writer. She has written elegant, mournful studies of odd, amphibious cities ... Morris’s new book, Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony, is a culmination of all this. A study of a symbol, it is an allegory of imperial folly and decline that reads like a historical daydream: not about a city, but something almost as big ... This is not a book for military historians, political scientists or pacifists. Morris describes it at the start as an 'illustrated reverie,' and she writes as one enchanted by this grand spectacle.
Edward St. Aubyn
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksSt. Aubyn is a highly economic writer, and this is a compliment: his novels are single-sitting reads. When he addresses himself to the excesses of King Lear, then, it is little surprise that he trims so much. What is a surprise, however, is how much of the texture of the play he manages to smuggle back into his apparently unpoetic and light novel. That is: He messes up the Shakespearean plot (but who cares about Shakespeare’s plots, anyway?) but gets something deeply right about the language (and who doesn’t care about Shakespeare’s language?) … That so much is pastiche does not mean it is not moving, and, in these twisted repetitions and echoes, St. Aubyn catches something of the peculiar doubling of this play in which all things are connected strangely, and all things are an echo.
