It’s the Autumn Books special in the Critics section of this week's New Statesman. Our lead book reviewer is Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff from 1995 to 2007. Powell reviews Kofi Annan’s memoir Interventions. “I don’t think Annan has anything to apologise for,” Powell writes. “The problem is not with the man but with the international community.” Former Conservative foreign secretary Douglas Hurd also considers the future of the international community in his review of Governing the World by Mark Mazower. “The UN has endorsed the notion of ‘the responsibility to protect’”, Hurd notes. “As on many similar occasions, the baptismal name is misleading. The responsibility to protect is not so much about protection as about intervention.”
In the Books interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to D T Max about his biography of the late David Foster Wallace. Max considers the charge that Wallace fabricated details in his non-fiction. “David’s stuff is taught in journalism classes and I do feel a bit uneasy about that,” he confesses. “Of all David’s pieces, the falsifications that bother me most are in his long essay on John McCain”.
In her “Personal Story”, the American novelist A M Homes explains how growing up amid the tumult of Nixon-era Washington DC shaped her fiction. “It was a strange time and place to be a child,” she writes. “A multi-layered existence with shifting standards, exceptions, and different rules for different people.”
Also in Autumn Books: the Business Editor of ITV News, Laura Kuenssberg, reviews John Gapper’s Wall Street thriller A Fatal Debt; former controller of Radio 4 Mark Damazer reviews How Do We Fix This Mess? by Robert Peston; historian Richard J Evans on History in the Making by J H Elliott; the NS’s pop critic Kate Mossman reviews Philip Norman’s biography of Mick Jagger; poet Christopher Reid on The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett; Linda Grant reviews Colm Toibin’s retelling of the story of Mary, mother of Jesus; and John Banville pays truibute to Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, “the finest novel ever written by a far-right sympathiser”.
Elsewhere in the Critics: Ryan Gilbey is impressed by Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; Rachel Cooke reviews the BBC2 documentary I Was Once a Beauty Queen; and Antonia Quirke is entranced by a Radio 4 programme about the Irishness of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.