More from Books

Thursday

Juliet Nicolson

A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion

Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Thanks to a serendipitous sequence of connections, including a perspicacious dealer and a fast-moving literary agent, the wonderful (and super-latively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of Eileen Alexander and fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen has been saved from oblivion. Having survived a serious car accident on the eve of the second world war with her only-just-platonic friend Gershon at the wheel, Eileen begins writing him some of wartime’s funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters as she reports on her convalescence.

Adam Roberts

Victorian novels to enjoy in lockdown

It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I am here to offer some recommendations. But there’s an immediate problem. Do I gesture towards the blindingly obvious? Or do I recommend a variety of obscure and arcane titles? The former strategy is liable only to insult your intelligence — of course you already know Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are worth reading — whereas the latter runs the risk of merely putting you off and making me seem pretentious. There is, though, a third way. What did the Victorians themselves reckon were the great authors of their age? The answer, above all others, is Sir Walter Scott. I know nobody now reads him, but in the 19th century everybody did.

Laura Freeman

From blue to pink: Looking for Eliza, by Leaf Arbuthnot, reviewed

On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman in his late eighties, taking the air on his doorstep. I stand behind the area railings and shout: ‘How are you?’ And he shouts back: ‘Bored!’ At least not lonely. His sixtysomething son is with him. But how solitary these lockdown weeks have been for the widow and the widower, the singleton and the bachelor. Leaf Arbuthnot, a freelance journalist, could not have picked an apter time to publish her first novel Looking for Eliza, a redemptive story about grief, isolation and why everybody needs good neighbours. Its 75-year-old heroine Ada is a poet of the Wendy Cope school.

Max Décharné

Did George Formby and Gracie Fields really help Britain out of the Depression?

Cinema history is a strange thing. A couple of months ago the Guardian began a series in which film critics write about ‘the classic film I’ve never seen’, some admitting to have unaccountably avoided exposure to genuine masterpieces such as Metropolis (1927) or À Bout de Souffle (1960). Others have revealed they have yet to sample undemanding box-office hits such as Top Gun (1986) or Titanic (1997). If the latter are classics, then so is On the Buses, the biggest selling British film of 1971. The showing of motion pictures to paying customers began in the 1890s, and crowds flocked to see brief footage of someone treading on a hosepipe.

Christopher Bray

Houdini looks bound to captivate us forever

Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains is mostly what people got at a Houdini show. He’d come on stage, be locked up or sealed in or tied down, and then the curtains would descend. They could stay drawn for an hour or more. Ostensibly this was to ensure that nobody saw him effect his escape, but in reality it was to heighten the drama. Houdini was usually free within a couple of minutes, but he knew audiences didn’t want things to be too simple for him. As he put it: The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.

Nick Spencer

The delicate balance between God and Caesar in modern Britain

At a well-reported political meeting at London’s Queen’s Hall during the first world war the preacher and suffragette Maude Royden used a phrase that would pass into history. ‘The Church shall go forward along the path of progress,’ she argued hopefully, ‘and be no longer satisfied to represent the Conservative party at prayer.’ ‘Conservative’ would soon slip to ‘Tory’, and one of the most popular and potent political epithets of the 20th century was born. There was (and is) much evidence for Royden’s famous phrase. An Anglican-Conservative complex dominated much 19th-century politics when most English — indeed much British — politics could be effectively divided along the lines of church or chapel.

Thursday

Sue Prideaux

Roger Scruton’s swan song: salvation through Parsifal

This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last Words: testaments of belief at the end of a long spiritual journey. In the introduction, Scruton identifies the enduring problem in his life, and ours, as: ‘How to live in right relation with others, even if there is no God.’ He gives us his answer: Whether or not there is a God, there is this hallowed path towards a kind of salvation, the path that Wagner described as ‘godliness’, the path taken by Parsifal, and it is a path open to us all. Scruton sees Parsifal as a tale of redemption from the corrupting bondage of erotic love The path of our salvation, then, can be seen in the opera. Parsifal is a retelling of the Grail legend.

Fiona Sampson

Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life

To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is exactly that. It’s not just that Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page. Poetry has a tendency to come into its own at exceptional times such as our own. William Wordsworth’s 250th anniversary has provoked media reflections on his consolatory power; a recently established Poetry Pharmacy is receiving attention; and social media brims with poems and poets attempting to make sense of what’s happening to us. Arguably there couldn’t be a more apt context for Doty’s book about his lifelong exploration of — and through — the great American poet Walt Whitman.

Jay Elwes

Much-hyped technological innovation isn’t necessarily progress

Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like magic. It’s easy to get excited about it all — but what happens if we get too excited? What happens if we lean too heavily on technology, convinced that it can solve all our problems? What happens if we begin to see technology in an unrealistic, hyped-up way? These are the questions at the heart of Gemma Milne’s book. The answer — somewhat unsurprisingly — is that over-excitement is a bad thing. Hype can damage scientific progress and in some cases send it into reverse.

Dominic Green

The symbolism of Orion, the hunter of the heavens

What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our pre-literate past is a history without a clear story: excavated stones and waste pits, fragments of myth and philological association. The early literate past is little clearer. The later Bronze Age of the Myceneans, the Minoans and Moses is a speculative assembly. Later, the surfaces of the Athens of Plato and Pericles are solid in marble and rational in thought, but the myths remain strange and violent memories, subject to an alien, evasive logic we cannot quite follow. ‘These Greeks,’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal mused as he climbed up to the Acropolis in 1908, ‘where are they?

Simon Heffer

Political biographies to enjoy in lockdown

Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present house arrest. The danger with such lists is that what has recently entered the memory becomes most prominent; so this one consists entirely of works published in the 20th century. Charles Moore’sThatcher, Leo McKinstry’s Rosebery and Andrew Roberts’s Churchill, all superb works, therefore do not figure; and I have arranged those that do in chronological order of their subjects. John Ehrman started his magnificent three-volume life of William Pitt the Younger in the late 1950s and published the final part in 1996. He was a gentleman-scholar of the old school who undertook pains-taking research but sought to produce a literary work as well as one of history.

John Self

Another alien in our midst: Pew, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed

It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain. Step up Catherine Lacey, and welcome. Her previous novels specialised in confounding the reader, taking the frames of road trip and science fiction and giving them a good yank. Now she’s gone full religious allegory on us: or has she? ‘Pew’ is the name the villagers in her novel give to a stranger they find sleeping on a pew in the local church. Lacey’s character offers no name, no story, no age or gender (so let’s use the pronoun they; though I admit I kept thinking of Pew as male, but that may just reflect my preconceptions about taciturn weirdos).

Annie Gray

William Sitwell’s history of eating out reminds us painfully of what we’re missing

In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the collapse of Jamie Oliver’s empire last year: ‘His endeavour, passion and hard work wasn’t enough... it was part of a bursting bubble.’ Since then more mid-range chains have announced their imminent demise. Teetering before lockdown, it’s not just the prospect of months of closure and general uncertainty that’s pushing them over the brink but decades of oversupply and a reliance on a cynical model of successful restaurants selling on and out. This book feels timely: a reminder of what we currently can’t have, and how the sector came to be. Sitwell is upfront about his book.

Sarah Ditum

We don’t talk of a ‘working father’ — so why do we still refer to a ‘working mother’?

The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that: in the UK three-quarters of women with dependent children work. Yet the working mother still feels provisional, something that lockdown has made sharply apparent to many women. Will it be Mum or Dad who claims the spare room, while the loser retreats to the kitchen table? Mum or Dad who does the home-schooling? Who will preserve their professional status, and who will slide into the domestic? The answer is that, in most cases, the woman loses, and her male partner quietly gathers the spoils.

Emily Rhodes

The art of negotiation: Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, reviewed

Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace negotiations — reflects: ‘Peace talks settle into this repeating pattern after a while, a pattern like that of the floor carpets in places like this conference centre, in which a polygonal weave mesmerises the eye almost to a vanishing point.’ He is commenting on the lonely, relentless routine of the talks, walks, meals and drinks, as official negotiations inch forward, stall, reverse and proceed again over the course of months.Alongside the diplomatic conference, another type of peace talk is underway: the meandering, intimate prose of the novel’s first-person narrative from Edvard to his wife Anna.

Peter Parker

Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure

When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. ‘Every blockhead does that,’ Banks replied. ‘My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.’ It was a wise decision, and his voyage on HMS Endeavour would be the making of him.

Daniel Rey

The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?

Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to developers, the countryside is ingrained in our collective consciousness as our unspoiled national haven. It is Albion’s Garden of Eden, with its Holy Trinity of village church, local pub and cricket ground.Englishness itself, as much as cricket, is the main theme of Michael Henderson’s genre-melding And That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket. The title alludes to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Going, Going’, and the last summer was 2019, when Henderson, sportswriter and cultural critic, took a journey around the cricket grounds of his past.

Thursday

Peter Parker

Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’. In the Victorian language of flowers the plant denoted pride or haughtiness, but its tendency to turn its head to the sun led Byron’s abject Julia to use its image on a seal for her final letter to Don Juan with the accompanying motto Elle vous suit partout.

Duncan Fallowell

Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?

People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that may be true. But the drag of the past is still great, and I can think of only two major works between classical and recent times that celebrate same-sex love openly: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Light began to break through after the Great War, but largely for fellow insiders. Auden and Isherwood were timid in what they published in their prime. Proust did gay, but stuck to sordid. Only Gide spoke out positively in Corydon, but the journals are almost mute on his sex life. It took Genet, Burroughs and Warhol to place a bomb under the whole culture-wide taboo and proclaim the news: that males could be magically sexy to other males.

Stephen Bayley

René Dreyfus: the racing driver detested by the Nazis

I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A racing car is a fearsome environment of engulfing pyroclastic heat, metaphor-testing noise, vision-blurring vibration and nauseating centrifugal forces. Ninety years ago it was even worse. The cars had tyres with little grip, feeble brakes and no crash protection whatever. Hot oil would continuously spray over drivers, who raced in linen caps; and an off, as they call excursions, would often result in mutilation or immolation. Faster is the story of René Dreyfus, who flourished in this atrocious atmosphere, in a culture where the public found the achievement of speed a transfixing spectacle.