Lead book review

When The Waste Land first appeared, there were rumours that it was a hoax. It seemed so strange: 400 lines in many languages, and even the sections that were in English looked as if the author was only teasing. ‘Twit twit twit’ ran one line: ‘Jug jug jug jug jug jug.’ Eliot’s long poem was published first in Criterion in October 1922, and then in an American magazine the following month. Eliot had also sold the rights to publish it as a book, but his publishers feared that the poem alone was too short. To make it a little longer, Eliot added half a dozen pages of sporadic notes. The notes Eliot added are as odd as the rest of the poem. They give a handful of helpful references while denying others.

‘Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army, or President of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr Custis?’ asked John Adams. The answer, says Flora Fraser, is no. We like to see our ‘men of destiny’ as striding the world alone before stepping onto the customary plinth, so some might find it inconvenient to consider the role, in George Washington’s glorious career, of America’s first First Lady. But in her lifetime, no one put Martha in the corner. George and Martha Washington is a balanced and vivid account of a marriage which was both remarkable and strikingly down-to-earth.

In March 1987, as Professor Robert Service records in his new account of the end of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow. She had been reluctant to do so, largely out of fear that such a visit would only make it easier for a credulous Reagan — as she saw him — to offer Gorbachev even more concessions. She had also been worried that it would produce nothing for British interests. Her hesitation to travel to Russia, let alone, as her advisers had urged, solicit an invitation, was perhaps surprising. She and Gorbachev had got on famously — shoes off, in front of a blazing fire — when she had entertained him, then only the Politburo member responsible for agriculture, at Chequers just before Christmas 1984.

Daniel Hahn  I suspect many people won’t bother to read Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder (Bloomsbury, £12.99) because it’s a children’s book. Don’t be one of those people. You’d be depriving yourself of a ferociously paced, brilliantly imagined piece of gorgeous, immersive storytelling — and really, why would you want to do that? Set in Russia a century ago, it’s the story of a girl and her friends (some of whom are wolves) forced to be brave, and to right some great wrongs. We began 2015 with the introduction to another bright new talent, following the publication of The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello, £12.99), superbly translated by Deborah Smith.

I learned from this little lot that if one has read The Diary of a Nobody, then one can derive pleasure from even the most pedestrian life story, as there’s always an unintentional chuckle to be had. The former racing driver Nigel Mansell’s Staying on Track (Simon & Schuster, £20) delighted me with its Pooterish charms, from bullied boyhood : One time I was due to race for England abroad. The school announced the exciting news in assembly one morning... that afternoon I was attacked viciously with a cricket bat in the playground. I thought the other children would be proud of me. How wrong can you be? — to triumphant adulthood, bashing himself up for pleasure and profit: Let me tell you about the time I told a priest to get lost.

Philip Hensher, the thinking man’s Stephen Fry — novelist, critic, boisterously clever — begins his introduction to his two-volume anthology of the British short story with typical gusto. ‘The British short story is probably the richest, most varied and most historically extensive national tradition anywhere in the world.’ Take that, ye upstart Americans, with your dirty realism and your New Yorker swank! Read it and weep, ye Johnny-come-latelys! Look to your laurels, Chekhov and Carver. Jorge Luis Who? Maupassant? Bof! And there’s more — much much more.

‘Have you got over your father yet?’ the 26-year-old David Cornwell was asked by MI5’s head of personnel when he joined the agency in the spring of 1958. And the answer, more than half a century later, has to be ‘no’. We knew of his conman father Ronnie’s cartoonish presence in Cornwell’s life, but never the extent to which he has dominated his very being. After leaving Lincoln College, Oxford, Cornwell taught for a couple of years at Eton, where he disliked the ‘Herrenvolk doctrine’ expounded in what he called the ‘spiritual home of the English upper classes’. So he sought a return to the secret world that he had glimpsed as a gap-year student in Bern, after leaving Sherborne and before going up to Oxford.

In 1940, when Stephen Spender heard a German bomber diving down towards London, he calmed himself by imagining that there were no houses, and that the bomber was ‘gyring and diving over an empty plain covered in darkness’. The image consoled Spender with his ‘smallness as a target, compared with the immensity of London’. But it also exposed the ‘submission of human beings to the mechanical forces that they had called into being’. It seemed to Spender that entire nations were gripped by the ‘magnetic force of power’. People ‘no longer had wills of their own’. As Tolstoy complained in the second epilogue to War and Peace, this sort of thinking is tautological.

In almost every one of the many biographies of Margaret Thatcher that now exist, the story is told of her being congratulated for her good luck in winning a prize when she was nine — either for reciting poetry or for playing the piano. She indignantly replied, ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’ Now, in Charles Moore’s biography, we reach the splendid zenith of Mrs Thatcher’s career in the form of her second administration of 1983–7. We have to ask the question again: was she lucky, or did she deserve it? Clearly, one of the chief reasons that she was re-elected in 1983 after a period of staggering unpopularity was the Falklands triumph of 1982, with which Moore concluded his first volume.

Like Richard Hannay, I had to run to catch the early morning train from London to Edinburgh. Thankfully, unlike Hannay, I wasn’t wanted for murder — I’d merely overslept again. As the train pulled out of King’s Cross, I fished out my old Penguin edition of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay’s first — and most famous —adventure. Each time I reread it, I marvel at what a brilliant book it is — how modern it still seems, how easily it draws you in. As we raced through England towards Buchan’s beloved Borders, I rejoined Hannay on his mad dash across the country, urging him on in his heroic quest to save Britain from the beastly Hun. By the time I’d turned the final page, we’d already reached Berwick.

In Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera says: ‘Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.’ In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm says: ‘The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.’ She also shrewdly remarks on the ‘mantle of judiciousness’ that biographers are forced to deploy. Jonathan Bate informs us that over a period of five years he has read and taken notes on nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts.

We don’t usually pay all that much attention, as James Shapiro points out, to the Jacobean Shakespeare. We’re in the habit of thinking of him as an Elizabethan playwright: look in most cradle-to-grave biographies for ‘what Shakespeare was doing after James came to the throne in 1603 and there usually aren’t many pages left to read’. That’s to scant his decade-long engagement with the dawning of the Stuart era. Also to ignore that, as Shapiro argues, only three cultural artefacts created during the first decade of King James’s reign still matter 400 years later: the King James Bible, the mythology of the Gunpowder Plot, and Shakespeare’s late plays. Shakespeare, as 1606 began, was 41.

Good pottery appears to be cool and silent — something vulnerable that, with luck, can outlast many human generations. A white porcelain dish seems calm and decorous; one knows that skill went into its evenness, into the exact whiteness, into its lightness. But when I began to think about pots I had no idea of the extreme violence, happenstance and risk that are an intrinsic part of the maker’s art. The chemistry is complex; the potter needs to study it intimately — the composition of different clays, of glazes, of rare and valuable pigments (cobalt for instance), and of the firewood that makes the fire. Pottery-making can be poisonous from fumes, and tasting deadly dyes. The history of the art is littered with terrible disasters.

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments.

‘July 1st 1916 was the most interesting day of my life,’ Philip Howe recalled, with characteristic English dryness, half a century after taking part in the most catastrophic 24 hours in the history of the British army. Howe had been a lieutenant in the 10th West Yorkshires, which had the grim distinction of losing more men during the first day on the Somme than any other battalion: of the 1,050 that went into battle, 710 became casualties, 60 per cent of whom were killed. At the end of the day Howe was the only officer left standing, and many other battalions had suffered almost as badly.

In Marianne in Chains, his last book on Occupied France, Robert Gildea offered an original view of life in that country between 1940 and 1944, arguing that outside the cities it had not always been as bad, nor had the Vichy regime always been as reactionary, as was subsequently claimed. Confining his research to three departments in the Loire valley, Gildea also suggested that for most people most of the time the Resistance was a dangerous irrelevance, to be avoided wherever possible. These conclusions were presented at a conference in Tours where they caused a minor uproar among French specialists. Gildea, professor of modern history at Oxford University, now turns to a much bigger subject.

Physicists have a nerve. I know one (I’ll call him Mark) who berates every religious person he meets, yet honestly thinks there exist parallel universes, exactly like our own, in which we all have two noses. He refuses to give any credit to Old Testament creation myths and of course sneers at the idea of transubstantiation. But, without any sense of shame, he insists in the same breath that humans are made from the fallout of exploded stars; that it is theoretically possible for a person to decompose on one side of a black hole and recompose on the other, and that there are diamonds in the sky the size of the moon.

Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As a conductor, he stands out in a profession increasingly given to the eclectic, and to performances of music outside the western canon. The practitioners of art music have almost all surrendered to the requirement to reach out, to experiment with the new and the non-European, and to mesh their endeavours with conscious gestures of social improvement. Thielemann could hardly be more out of sympathy with the prevailing mood. He is noisily devoted to musical excellence at all costs, and to long apprenticeships rather than flashes of stardom.