CURRENT AFFAIRS
HOW BRITAIN REALLY WORKS UNDERSTANDING THE IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS OF A NATION STIG ABELL John Murray, 44pp, £20, Oldie price £13.99 inc p&p
Before becoming editor of the Times
Literary Supplement in 2016, Stig Abell was managing editor of the Sun for three years, having previously worked for the Press Complaints Commission for over a decade. For many years Abell also hosted a phone-in for the popular radio station LBC. Perhaps regular acquaintance with callers who had plenty of opinions but little knowledge to back them up persuaded him to write How Britain Really Works. Inspired by The
Reader’s Encyclopedia, one of Abell’s favourite books as a child, the book is intended as an unbiased and lighthearted primer on the workings of the nation, covering every principal area of public life from the media and the military to law, schools, hospitals, and so on.
The book divided critical opinion drastically. It may not be profound, wrote Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, but ‘what is there is cleverly chosen and nicely put together’; furthermore, ‘it’s rather soothing to read something that isn’t angrily trying to sell you a big idea and then cherrypicking its facts to suit the polemic’. In the Financial Times, Sebastian Payne claimed that ‘only a hardened anglophobe could dislike the jovial spirit. Were you to be dropped into Britain for the first time with only this guide, you would be well equipped to understand life on these isles.’
Contrast those attitudes with Lewis Jones’s review in the Daily
Telegraph, of which the standfirst will suffice: ‘smug and patronising, this might be the worst guide to Britain ever written’. In the Evening
Standard David Goodhart declared that the book was severely crippled by a lack of ‘depth and originality’, a conventional centre-left point of view and an abundance of errors ‘of fact and judgement that are in many cases so fundamental that they make you question almost everything he writes’.
DAMAGED GOODS THE INSIDE STORY OF SIR PHILIP GREEN, THE COLLAPSE OF BHS AND THE DEATH OF THE HIGH STREET OLIVER SHAH Penguin, 320pp, £18.99, Oldie price £14.24 inc p&p
Philip Green left school with no qualifications at 16 in 1968. By the early 2000s he was a billionaire retailer, but in the last few years he has fallen from grace and narrowly avoided being stripped of his knighthood following his cavalier treatment of BHS pensioners. ‘It’s entertaining stuff, pacily written,’ declared Ian King in the Sunday
Times, the newspaper where Oliver Shah is now city editor. King enjoyed the book’s ‘rich cast of characters and, in particular, the array of business people flitting in and out of the action’, but regretted that the ‘warmer side to his [Green’s] character, and especially his sharp sense of humour, does not surface enough here’. Simon English, another journalist who has sparred with Green, reviewed the book for the
Evening Standard and found it to be ‘both forensic and pacey. It’s penetrating, but it’s not unfair. If there is a benefit of doubt to be given, Shah gives it… The only small criticism I could have is you don’t get much of the funny side of Green.’ The
Financial Times commissioned a review from its management editor, Andrew Hill, who described the book as ‘a sweeping, detailed, colourful account of the rise and fall of the king of the UK’S High Street, complete with a Dickensian cast of grifters, charlatans, flunkies, the odd dogged hero, and an irresistibly obnoxious protagonist. The complex financial detail may sometimes overwhelm the casual reader… But Shah has written a hard-hitting, often funny, ultimately sobering tale...’
SUPERHUMAN LIFE AT THE EXTREMES OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL ABILITY ROWAN HOOPER Little, Brown, 344pp, £20 Oldie price £14.45 inc p&p
Rowan Hooper has received general acclaim for a newly released study of human excellence across many fields and subjects. But not all his reviewers agreed as to where his conclusions led.
At the Times Melanie Reid hailed Hooper as ‘that precious thing, an easy, fluent, funny scientist’, deeming him an ‘amiable and jaunty companion’, and the author of an ‘upbeat, clever, feelgood book’. Reid found the ramifications of Hooper’s research generally heartening for the ordinarily gifted reader: ‘all of us have greater capacity than we realise’. Dominic Lawson, writing in the
Mail on Sunday, inferred instead that Hooper had brought genes, rather than effort, back into fashion, effectively rebutting Malcolm Gladwell’s popular theory that ’10,000 hours’ of practice ensures success in any discipline. Lawson
‘Only a hardened anglophobe could dislike the jovial spirit’