The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue
The curse of the subtitle of Christopher de Bellaigue’s study of the most powerful of all Ottoman sultans, Suleyman the Magnificent (1494-1566), was that the sultanate had no history of primogeniture. The demise of a sultan meant more than one death as his assorted male offspring jostled bloodily for position – brothers and half-brothers suddenly became rivals to be disposed of. Suleyman may have been one of the most distinguished rulers of the 16th century, a man who wrought innumerable societal changes among his 25 million subjects – from education to law – but even he struggled with who would succeed him.
De Bellaigue’s account is told in the present tense, which takes some getting used to but gives his history a galloping, novelistic feel. His other main protagonists are Suleyman’s wife Hurrem (Roxelana) and his former consort Mahidevran and their son Mustafa. Both women wanted their sons to rule and a deadly rivalry developed. This is not, however, a book simply about dynastic succession, De Bellaigue takes in a broad sweep of Europe too. The Ottomans were the menacing other that occupied the thoughts of every monarch across the continent. The winner in this game of thrones mattered to them too.
By Michael Prodger
Bodley Head, 272pp, £22. Buy the book
Waste Wars by Alexander Clapp
Beginning in 2021, environmental activists took to inserting GPS chips into everyday items – laundry detergent and dishwasher soap, for instance – to see where they went when they were binned. On one occasion, a plastic bag left outside a Tesco in London was routed to Harwich, before being shipped to the Netherlands, trucked to Poland, and ending up in an industrial yard in southern Turkey. It’s an anecdote that Alexander Clapp neatly leverages in Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish to both exemplify the absurd machinations of the waste industry and reveal rubbish’s real destination.
Clapp ventures across five continents in his bid to expose dubious recycling procedures and the human cost of such abject failures. But whether it’s Guatemala or Ghana, the story largely goes unchanged: wealthier countries exploit poorer ones and dump a world’s worth of detritus on their doorstep. While Clapp argues convincingly about how the powerless often work in dangerous and unregulated conditions to bin the waste of the powerful, the industry’s frustrating obfuscation of reality helps maintain this exploitation and hampers his efforts to tell the filthy truth. Still, it doesn’t lessen the impact when the dustbin of humanity is laid bare.
By Zoë Huxford
John Murray, 400pp, £25. Buy the book
The Rebel Romanov: Julie of Saxe-Coburg, the Empress Russia Never Had by Helen Rappaport
In September 1795 the 14-year-old Princess Juliane Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld travelled by rocky carriage from an impecunious aristocratic family in the disparate Holy Roman Empire to the imperial court at Saint Petersburg. There, she was married to the grandson of Empress Catherine the Great, Grand Duke Konstantin. It was an unhappy union for “Julie”: her husband was violent and volatile and, so Julie’s biographer Helen Rappaport speculates, also infected her with a venereal disease.
The marriage did not last. After leaving imperial Russia in 1801, Julie spent the rest of her life luxuriously chasing her health around various central European spa towns, while keeping up with her family as it ingratiated its way into royalties across Europe (her niece was Queen Victoria) against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. The sobriquet adorning this book is never quite justified – it’s unclear how Julie could in any way be regarded as rebellious, and she was only a Romanov by marriage. Nonetheless, Rappaport is a nimble guide through the stately jumble of German dynasties.
By Barney Horner
Simon and Schuster, 315pp, £25. Buy the book
Spring Is the Only Season: How It Works, What It Does and Why It Matters by Simon Barnes
We have seasons, says the sports and nature writer Simon Barnes, because in deep time something hit the Earth and induced a wobble. It is that wobble, at 23.5 degrees, that is responsible for the cyclical nature of the year and, in spring, determines a range of miraculous occurrences such as “the growth pattern of trees, the lifecycle of butterflies, the song of birds, the sex life of mammals”.
In his paean to the season, Barnes looks at spring not just from the perspective of animals and insects but of religions, artists and sports too. He makes it personal: one chapter is entitled “Spring comes to Streatham”, he discusses celebrating Holi while covering a Test match series in India, while birds -– his great love -– flit in and out of the narrative with the likes of both Homer and Gilbert White brought in as witnesses to the phenomenon of migration. He is alive to the threat of climate change too. But even as he explains the science of spring, breezily and lucidly, Barnes can’t suppress the enthusiasm and wonder in his tone.
By Michael Prodger
Bloomsbury, 448pp, £18.99. Buy the book
[See also: Why Donald Trump embraced Andrew Tate]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out