Money and Tough Love: Inside the IMF by Ahamed Liaquat
This offering from the “Writer in Residence” series commissioned by Alain de Botton’s School of Life sees Liaquat Ahamed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Lords of Finance, relaying the results of several months spent with his former organisation, the International Monetary Fund. Ahamed describes the everyday business of meetings and work abroad for employees of the Fund, presented alongside photography by Eli Reed.
Phillip Aldrick of The Times is impressed by how Ahamed manages to “humanise a faceless institution … and teach a little economic history along the way.” The book, according to Aldrick, describes well the “prosaic truth” of why the IMF shrank from prominence on the world stage. Aldrick notes the “sense of fading glory” as one of the book’s main themes. While he worries that “it’s hard to imagine many people outside the IMF being particularly interested,” he nevertheless claims that Ahamed’s “gentle prose” serves as a “good introduction to the IMF”.
The Financial Times’ Edward Luce calls the book an “enjoyable portrait.” Luce knows Liaquat personally, at his own admission, but claims that the author “removes his rose-coloured spectacles” in order to write the book. Assuming Luce manages the same in his review, the book is credited with “bringing life to an institution that is too often deadened with jargon.” SinceMoney and Tough Love is “about the troops not the generals,” Luce also mentions Ahamed’s daily-reportage style, adding that this helps “avoid the leaden prose of an in-house biographer.” The Fund is a complex machine and its “finances are usually arcane,” writes Ahamed. Luce is taken with this apparently clear and entertaining look at such an organisation.
The book endures a much more tepid reception from Alex Preston writing in The Telegraph, who claims that the ‘anonymous and dull’ nature of the organisation applies equally well to Money and Tough Love. Writing that the book lacks “drama and stylish prose,” Preston questions why Ahamed’s project seems so drab despite the “extraordinary access” he was granted, and compares the attempted look at the human side of the organisation unfavourably to a fictional counterpart – namely, David Foster Wallace’sThe Pale King and its “greater scope to show us the unique complexity of every human life.”
Thirst by Kerry Hudson
Thirst is Kerry Hudson’s second novel, following her well-received debut,Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma. The story follows Alena, a young Russian, who is the victim of a sex trafficking gang in East London. Beginning with an encounter with Dave, a security guard who catches Alena shoplifting, the novel explores a conventional romance among a backdrop of “unrelenting horror”. Yet the characters’ back stories are more complex than they first appear, allowing for the plot to unfold with “horrible inevitability”.
Louise Welsh of The Guardian applauds the novel’s “wit and shrewdness”, confronting “hard-hitting” topics, while being “never miserable”. She praises Hudson’s decision, as in her debut, to explore the lives of communities who are “not generally considered fit for literature”, while emphasising her ability to create “complex working-class characters faced with moral dilemmas”. In fact, Welsh suggests that recent critics who have drawn attention to “literature’s failure to portray working-class characters with intelligence, education or culture” are likely to be impressed by Thirst.
The Independent’s Katie Welsh similarly admires Thirst, describing the novel as “heartbreaking”, “beautiful” and “touching”. Welsh praises Hudson’s maturity in dealing with depictions of a “brutal series of sexual assaults” without descending into “sensationalism”. As with the Guardian’sreview, special praise is reserved for Hudson’s ability to write “from the perspective of people whose voices are rarely heard”, largely a result of her “meticulous research”.
Writing for The Scotsman, Lesley McDowell suggests that Kerry Hudson has “consolidated her position” as a writer “prepared to face the injustices and the grimness of life”. The review congratulates the novel’s authenticity, praising Hudson’s ability “to get to the heart of her characters”. DescribingThirst as a “tale of female powerlessness”, comparison is made with events of “brutal male domination” that have cropped up in the media in recent weeks. Given this, McDowell asserts that although Thirst is “hardly a summer read”, it is “probably an essential one”.
Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-1916: The View from Downing Street, Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock
Margot Asquith’s diaries fill 22 volumes in total, and this single volume, edited by the Brocks (Michael and Eleanor), tells a part of the story only two years long. Those two years are the wartime years of Herbert Asquith’s premiership. Replete with vociferous opinions and depictions of the most notable political characters of the time, these diaries provide a long-awaited, very personal insight into the upper heights of the UK government during the onset of the First World War.
Writing in the Telegraph, an impressed Miranda Seymour calls the collection a “beautiful work of conjugal editorship by Eleanor Brock and her late husband.” “The sensation of intimacy is remarkable,” writes Seymour, who is particularly taken by Margot’s defence of Richard Haldane from charges of treachery. She adds that “Margot may have been rude and overbearing, but she was also observant, bright and thoughtful,” and concludes that these “private records are all the better for being unspeakably, delectably, impenitently frank.”
Jane Ridley writes in the Literary Review that “Michael and Eleanor Brock have edited Margot’s writing with meticulous academic precision.” However, she characterises the diaries themselves with a mixed tone, saying that Margot’s “party tricks” of writing “characters” of people and coming off best in every argument can be “tedious.” She adds that Margot was “slapdash and egotistical… emotional and histrionic.” But ultimately she calls the wartime picture that is painted “really striking,” and adds that the diary is “invaluable and fascinating.”
Writing for the Times, Lawrence James is impressed by the book, describing it as a “vivid, fascinating and disconcerting record of war as seen from the top”. He describes Margot Asquith’s bold, swashbuckling spirit” and “caustic wit”, while praising the “lucidity and scholarship” of the editors who compiled the volume. James highlights how the “partisan record” is predictably supportive of Margot’s husband Herbert, whose virtues of “humanity, compassion and warmth are praised throughout”. Nonetheless, James emphasised the “pleasure” he took in reading the book.
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