More from Books

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

More scenes from my life with Francis Bacon

The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and visited Bacon for a student magazine. Something clicked and Bacon became his sugar daddy, immediately and for ever, though Peppiatt has said that no sex was involved. One can see what Peppiatt got out of Bacon: not cash per se, but many opportunities for money, an entrée to the great art world, a raison d’être for his pen, as well as free entertainment on a lavish scale. This he acknowledges gratefully. But what Bacon got out of Peppiatt is never quite clear. It certainly helped that Peppiatt was young, bright, and could match Bacon’s drinking. He must also have been attractive in an obliging, even submissive way.

Boyd Tonkin

A tragic fall from grace

Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man who passes on a plausible lie ‘may be offering a rattlesnake in a calabash of food’. Someone who lugs grievances around carries ‘a full pitcher of resentment from which, every step or so on its rough journey through the worn path of life, a drop or two spilled’. This second book from the young Nigerian author whose debut, The Fishermen, reached the Man Booker shortlist does not quite escape that difficult second novel syndrome. It’s overlong, raggedly structured and freighted with rambling digressions.

Alex Burghart

The making of a monstrous metropolis

When Bishop Guy of Amiens looked across the Channel in the 11th century he saw ‘teeming London [which] shines bright. A most spacious city, full of evil inhabitants, and richer than anywhere else in the kingdom’. Well, plus c’est la même chose. Even then those Mammonic associations were already old. Over 300 years earlier the Venerable Bede had called London an ‘emporium of many nations who visit it by land and sea’ — a place of markets and mints, of North Sea slave-traders and missionaries seeking martyrdom east of the Rhine, of wine and wool merchants trying to make ends meet. The hubbub and hum of the city had begun. London of the early middle ages has — like much early medieval history — often been ignored.

Steven Poole

From Access to Youth

The mid-term elections in the US, when Democrats took over Congress, were hailed as a victory for ‘progressives’, while David Cameron once claimed to be a ‘progressive conservative’. Well, progress towards what exactly? ‘It is certainly significant that nearly all political tendencies now wish to be described as progressive,’ wrote the cultural critic Raymond Williams, ‘but it is more frequently now a persuasive than a descriptive term.’ Quite. That is taken from the seminal 1976 lexicon of political terms, Keywords:  A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, in which Williams traced the tangled history of words from ‘anarchism’ to ‘welfare’.

Charlotte Hobson

Little shots of sedition

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary Russia. Cheap to produce, easily transported and hidden, and conveying a simple graphic message, picture postcards were ideally suited to anti-government agitation. Too dangerous to post, these little shots of sedition were preserved and shared for years in the postcard albums that were a feature of any polite drawing-room and increasing numbers of peasant huts and workers’ barracks. Before 1905 revolutionary groups printed postcards abroad and smuggled them into the country, simultaneously spreading their message and raising funds.

Houman Barekat

Homage to catatonia

As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of literature with several books to his name, he retains ‘a long and deep intimacy with lassitude and aimlessness’. Cohen believes the special affection reserved for pop culture’s fictional slackers, slobs and reverists — think Jeff Lebowski, Homer Simpson, Snoopy — suggests that humans are fundamentally inclined towards idleness: people are ‘as much given to saying no as to saying yes, as much to rest as to motion, as much to being as to doing’. Not Working: Why We Have to Stop explores the relationship between inertia and the life of the mind by revisiting the lives and works of several giants from cultural history.

Daniel Hahn

Everyone’s a victim

From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors, their experiences and relationship driving the story’s developments, but these magnetic central characters are people-traffickers and kidnappers, capable of startling violence and dehumanising cruelty. And truly, they’re very much in love. For most of the novel, Estela and Epitafio are apart, having left the jungle clearing where the book opens to drive their respective consignments of human cargo to their destinations. Theirs is a single story — what happens to one has consequences for the other — told along parallel tracks.

Andrew Lambirth

Art’s hard graft

Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found himself enjoying a conversation with the Duke of Edinburgh about art. ‘The real problem with painting,’ said the Duke, in Hoyland’s delighted re-telling of this encounter, ‘is not so much the doing of it, as to know what to paint.’ Hoyland immediately concurred, adding that his friend Patrick Caulfield had been saying the same thing only the day before. This definition of painting’s central challenge appears again in Studio Voices, recollected by Tess Jaray as one of the first things her tutor at the Slade, Andrew Forge, told her.

Max Fletcher

Theatre of war

There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion. Post-modern writers like Robbe-Grillet, Ricardou and Perec were hyper-aware of the political and philosophical problems underlying traditional realist narratives. They produced novels that were as much critiques of novel writing as they were actual stories with actual characters. Nowadays, however, one might go to the French section of a bookshop looking for something more Balzacian. One might read Houellebecq for his excoriating critiques of our political culture, or Édouard Louis for an exposé of the prejudices fostered by French working-class life.

Sofka Zinovieff

The ballad of John and Anton

Tom Barbash’s dark and humorous second novel takes a risk by combining invented and real characters. I feared nagging doubts about what was ‘true’.  However, it absolutely succeeds. Set in 1979–80, the alluring (fictional) Winter family attend parties with neighbours like Betty Bacall or John and Yoko. They all live in the Dakota building — the Upper West Side landmark built to resemble ‘a Habsburg castle’ and populated by New York luminaries. ‘A malady shared by a lot of the building was that of being famous’ and Dakota etiquette demanded that even the legendary be treated as normal.

Richard Francis

With Friends like these…

The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a young man administering the family estates in Ireland, Penn experienced ‘convincement’, another Quaker term for what other Dissenters called conversion. But while these experiences were inward and personal, they had public consequences. Since they were potentially available to anyone, they brought in their wake a tendency towards egalitarianism, manifested in plain speaking, pacifism, and a refusal to swear oaths or doff one’s hat. These outward manifestations of private experience inevitably caused ructions in the hierarchical social structure of 17th-century England.

Thursday

James Hawes

Squabbling over Kafka

Benjamin Balint’s Kafka’s Last Trial is a legal and philosophical black comedy of the first water, complete, like all the best adventure stories, with a physical treasure to be won or lost. Balint lays out with cool, collected passion the full absurdity of the 2011 court struggle which climaxed when a couple of boxes of aged, yellowing jottings, upon which an elderly Tel Aviv lady had allegedly allowed her cats to sit for many years, were taken under armed guard, besieged by writs and counter-writs, to the highest court in Israel. Until 1973, you see, these boxes had belonged to Max Brod, best friend of Franz Kafka, the legendary Nostradamus of Prague who (as any fool knows) somehow predicted the Holocaust.

Alexandra Masters

The night has a thousand eyes

Edward S. Curtis’s 1914 photograph, ‘Dancing to Restore an Eclipsed Moon’, shows the Kwakiutl tribe of North American Indians circling a fire ‘to make a sky creature sneeze and disgorge the moon’. Raised arms are silhouetted against the sky, faces remain imperceptible, and bodies are shrouded in smoke. It is apt that such a mesmerising image should accompany the opening chapter of Nina Edwards’s beguiling book, which gallantly aims to subvert common views of darkness, both physical and metaphorical.

Rachel Redford

A rake’s progress

This monumental unabridged audio production of Casanova’s memoir The Story of My Life in three volumes covers his first 49 years. He was born in 1725 into a struggling theatre family in Venice, the carnival centre of Europe, and masks, masquerades and music were so much in Casanova’s blood that a glorious, effervescent theatricality lights up these 125 hours. The narrator, Peter Wickham, is so convincing that he must surely have had difficulty re-assuming his own identity after the final recording session. Constantly seeking pastures new, Casanova travelled through France, Russia, Spain, Constantinople, Poland and England, transported by sedan chair, sleigh and felucca, but mainly by hideously uncomfortable carriage (74 changes of horses between Moscow and St Petersburg).

Patrick Skene-Catling

Death at the top

Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this poisonous new historical entertainment. Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the success of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, thoroughly researched, gossipy revelations of promiscuity among monarchs and their noble retainers during the Renaissance. She is an American author and broadcaster, born in Baltimore, now living in Virginia, but, at 58, she still concentrates her professional attention on the historic immorality and disastrous vulnerability of western European royalty. In the Middle Ages, when monarchs commanded virtually absolute power, rivalry for every top job was sufficiently intense to motivate assassination, and the least difficult way to commit it was with poison.

Cressida Connolly

Outpourings of love and loss

The deserved success of Shaun Usher’s marvellous anthology Letters of Note has inspired several imitators, and Caroline Atkins’s sparkling collection makes an ideal companion volume. Here are missives both literary and otherwise, all of them destined never to be read by their intended recipients. Some are grave, some are tender; some are funny, several are vengeful or self-justifying. It’s a great idea for a book. A letter which goes missing is of course a standard tragedy-inducing device in fiction.  Romeo could have lived had he received Juliet’s letter; but perhaps the most heartbreaking of all is poor Tess Durbeyfield’s to Angel Clare. Never was a flap of carpet responsible for so much misery.

Ian Thomson

A tainted paradise

Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘This, one of the great travel books, is published by John Murray at 25s’, proclaims a footnote in the first edition. Fleming was a friend of Leigh Fermor, so this is to be expected. Published in 1950, The Traveller’s Tree may still be the best non-fiction account of the West Indies. ‘It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about’, M tells 007, knowingly. But Paul Morand’s 1929 Hiver caraïbe comes a close second. The question is: why has it taken 90 years for this masterwork to appear in English?

Thursday

Peter Hain

Duplicity of the first order

Around 1970 I was labelled ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ by white South Africa’s newspapers for leading militant anti-apartheid protests which stopped all-white sports tours to Britain. And a year ago when, under parliamentary privilege in the House of Lords, I exposed looting, corruption and money-laundering by former President Zuma and his cronies the Gupta brothers, some jaundiced white South Africans again attacked me — this time for having helped deliver ‘corrupt black majority rule’.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

A sleep and a forgetting

Ma Jian’s novels have been banned in his native China for 30 years and he has been hailed as ‘China’s Solzhenitsyn’. His latest book, China Dream, also contains some of the zip and vigour found in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian visions. This must be one of the liveliest novels about brainwashing ever written. Ma Daode, the protagonist, is the director of the China Dream Bureau. Chillingly, such a body exists and was tasked with promoting Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream of National Rejuvenation’ shortly after he came to power in 2012. Ma Jian takes this concept one stage further and has Ma Daode work on ‘developing a neural implant, a tiny microchip which we would call the China Dream Device’.

David Crystal

Beyond words | 13 December 2018

You may have read about this during the Iraq war. A group of local people approach an American position. A US soldier holds out his hand at arm’s length, palm outwards, in the traditional gesture of ‘halt’. The locals keep on coming. He repeats the gesture. They keep advancing. So he opens fire. The locals turn out to be civilians, not fighters. The Americans evidently didn’t know that this gesture, throughout the Middle East, is a friendly greeting. It means ‘hi’ rather than ‘halt’. Very few gestures are universal, and François Caradec’s fascinating collection shows the way they vary around the world.