MUST READS  – Nov 21, 2019

THE IRISHMAN

by Charles Brandt (Hodder £9.99, 336 pp)

Martin Scorsese’s film The Irishman debuts on Netflix this Monday. It tells the story of Mafia hitman Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and his role in the unexplained disappearance in 1975 of Jimmy Hoffa, a union activist and president of the Teamsters Union, with links to organised crime.

Scorsese’s film is based on an account by Sheeran’s lawyer, Charles Brandt, who composed the book from hours of recorded interviews with his client, by then an elderly man with an uneasy conscience, before his death in 2003.

The result is a chilling and fascinating account of the making of a professional hitman, from Sheehan’s Irish Catholic childhood in Depression-era Philadelphia to his experiences in WWII, when he helped liberate Dachau, and his subsequent career as a Mafia assassin with a pragmatic attitude to murder — even when that involved killing a man in front of his wife and small daughter.

IT GETS WORSE

by Nicholas Lezard (Salt £9.99, 320 pp)

It is, as P.G. Wodehouse almost put it, never difficult to distinguish between Nicholas Lezard and a ray of sunshine.

Lezard’s chronicle of his life in a weekly magazine column is a dire account of a misspent middle age. His first volume of autobiographical essays found him divorced and gloom-stricken in a squalid central London flat, known as The Hovel. This sequel finds him, five years after ‘my ejection from the family home, quietly proud that I have not actually got much worse, in terms of orderliness and hygiene.’

Lezard is a magnet for misfortune — his finances, love life and domestic skills are equally disaster-prone, and he shares his book-infested lodgings with a variety of uninvited wildlife. Rueful and funny, this is a book to relish in the comfort of a tidy living room.

I SAW ETERNITY THE OTHER NIGHT

by Timothy Day (Penguin £12.99, 416 pp)

For many, the Festival Of Nine Lessons And Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, marks the beginning of Christmas.

First broadcast by the BBC in 1928, the crystalline timbre of the King’s choristers became famous as the quintessential sound of the English cathedral choral tradition. After hearing the Advent carol service in November 1955, the poet Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother ‘I have never been so moved in my life’.

Timothy Day’s account reveals the tradition’s origins are surprisingly recent. In the mid-19th century, boy choristers of Magdalen College, Oxford, smoked, drank and filled a pudding destined for High Table with nails. But by the end of the century, the Victorian idealisation of childhood had made the treble voice synonymous with angelic innocence.