Oh, such critical fun to be had with Nigel Farage’s “campaign memoir”, The Purple Revolution. First and foremost, reviewers were awed by the scale of the battering to which the Ukip leader subjects his liver. “His boozing is epic,” wrote Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times, possibly with some admiration. He likened the book to “sitting next to Farage in the pub”, and found that “there is a much better book to be written about the rise of Ukip. But if you admire Farage, this is definitely the man himself.” Whether that’s a selling point remains to be seen. In any case, it turns out not to be the man himself, as the Times’s Daniel Finkelstein pointed out that the book was ghostwritten by his Times colleague, the business journalist Suzy Jagger. (She “has done a good, clear writing job for him,” he said loyally.) More shockingly, Finkelstein argued that the book showed Farage to be what he has always maintained he is not: “a political anorak”. Even the drinking failed to impress him: “He regards it as amusing, but it is a little chilling when you learned that his father was an alcoholic.” In the Mail on Sunday, Toby Young seemed to be on the point of staging an intervention. “Farage has set out to write a tubthumping political tract, but it reads more like a cry for help,” he wrote. “Beneath the grinning caricature lies a bruised and battered human being.”
Andrew Scull’s Madness and Civilisation, a cultural history of insanity, details historical cures for madness, from “chains, manacles, beating and starvation to more imaginative expedients such as a small iron cage called the Chinese Temple, which could be lowered into water with the patient inside,” wrote John Carey in the Sunday Times. “Its inventor, an 18th‑century Dutch physician, expressed the hope that the sensation of near drowning might shock patients back to reality.” Not that more recent treatments have been much more humane or effective, according to Carey, as the book amounts to a “blistering attack on current beliefs”. In the Financial Times, Sarah Wise was also “sickened” by “the inhumanities” of 20th-century treatments for mental illness, which are “more chilling than any medieval casting-out of demons”. Oliver Kamm sounded a more positive note in the Times: “Just as the ancient Greeks sought wisdom through Socratic dialogue, so modern therapies seek to replace destructive ways of thinking with better ones. It’s a noble enterprise. Scull’s book is an outstanding illumination of how we have arrived at it.”
Vanessa and Her Sister, Priya Parmar’s fictional reimaginging of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her elder sister, Vanessa Bell, won many plaudits. For Lucy Scholes, in the Independent, it was “a richly compelling and extraordinarily sympathetic portrait of a woman struggling to extricate herself from her sister’s loving but desperate clutches, and live, for want of a better phrase, a life of her own.” In the Independent on Sunday, Lesley McDowell found the book “deliciously gossipy (while occasionally wonderfully prurient), and almost too beautifully written, to stop at 339 pages,” although “just a tiny little more bite, perhaps, would have been perfect”. Meanwhile the Observer’s Stephanie Merritt commended it as “a remarkable achievement, all the more so for being only Parmar’s second novel”.
