Miranda Seymour
Stuck in the Mittel
Keeping Up with the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters
By Philip Oltermann
Faber & Faber 268pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
In a book that presents a range of improbable juxtapositions between two nations and two cultures, brightly narrated and pulled together by Philip Oltermann – a youngish German who can’t quite decide whether he’s an Anglophobe (the food) or an Anglophile (the jokes, the tolerance, and weirdly, the warm beer) – one item shines out. That particular treat is a gift to the reader, and one for which Oltermann deserves the gratitude of anyone who relishes end-of-the-pier-style comedy at its finest.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3