More from Books

Thursday

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.

A.N. Wilson

Poet, novelist and arms-dealer

When H.H. Asquith, as prime minister, visited Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, during the first world war, he found a vast noisy factory churning out the most sophisticated means of destroying human life. The firm, Armstrong Whitworth, would, during that war, supply Britain with 12 armoured ships, 11 cruisers, 11 submarines, eight sloops, two floating power stations, 4,000 naval guns, 9,000 military guns, 14.5 million shells, 21 million shell cases, 100 tanks, three airships, over 1,000 aircraft, together with bombs, grenades and armour plate. Asquith was accompanied by his daughter Violet, who sat beside the chairman of the company at dinner, a gigantic figure who her father described as having a ‘rather melancholy face and voice and the general air of a transplanted hidalgo’.

Alexandra Coghlan

Divinely reticent

Earlier this year The Spectator published an article in celebration of Evensong — the nightly sung service of the Anglican Church. Attendance, it seems, is not just up but dramatically so. While church visitor figures across the UK have fallen steadily and substantially since the 1960s, congregations at sung services have swollen up to ten times over, often rising to three figures. Why? The answers come easily enough. In an increasingly volatile world, the certainty and beauty of Evensong offers a welcome still point — time and space to contemplate, meditate, an opportunity to listen to voices raised in a candlelit chapel and experience spirituality aesthetically rather than intellectually. The greatest appeal of all, however, seems to lie in the idea of continuity.

William Leith

The spirit of Christmas past

This book, an excellent history of Christmas, made me think of a Christmas cartoon strip I once saw in Viz magazine. There’s a couple. It’s Christmas Eve. The man goes out to buy the woman a present. On the way, he steps into a pub for a few drinks. Much later, drunk, having missed the shops, he tries his luck at a petrol station. But too many people have had the same idea; the only thing left to buy is engine oil. This, anyway, is how I remember it, ending deliciously with the man in a terrible dilemma. Why, you might ask, would this genteel book about the history of Christmas, with its sections on carols, and Christmas trees, and the choir of King’s College, Cambridge — why would all this remind me of a drunk in a petrol station?

Horatio Clare

The ice was all around

‘We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.’ Ernest Shackleton’s lines unscroll through both these complementary books. David Grann’s The White Darkness is all-man, the gripping story of mighty but quite straightforward struggles. The Library of Ice, brimming with men, women, ships, science, complexity, brevity and beauty, has a precision and quiet brilliance which suggest the feminine. In fact, these qualities belong simply to the author, Nancy Campbell. Readers will finish her quasi-travel book, a search for an ‘understanding’ of ice, wary of any idleness of expression, any generality in thought. Campbell seems incapable of either.

John Self

Black and white and read all over

In 1956, after Penguin Classics had published 60 titles, the editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, William Emrys Williams, wondered: ‘How many more titles in the classical literature of the world are there?’ As a case study in heroic shortsightedness, this measures up to Bobby Charlton’s question to his brother Jack after England’s World Cup victory in 1966: ‘What is there to win now?’ Williams needn’t have worried. Penguin has not run out of new classics, and there are currently around 1,200 in print. Like the NHS, Penguin Classics is an institution — a miracle of curation, covering 4,000 years of human thought, albeit with a largely Eurocentric vision — that didn’t exist 75 years ago. It began in 1946, with E.V.

Philip Ziegler

No Rose without a thorn

Kenneth Rose was gossip columnist by appointment to the aristocracy and gentry. He was, of course, a snob — nobody could write a social column in the Sunday Telegraph for more than 50 years without some snobbish instincts — but he was an intelligent one, singularly well-informed, and capable from time to time of administering a sharp bite to the noble hands that fed him his material. It might reasonably be said that his contribution to social history is limited in its parameters, but it is a real contribution for all that. It is also great fun to read. Certain themes recur constantly in the course of his narrative. One of these is Eton.

Honor Clerk

A short step from cradle to grave

Between 1300 and 1900 few things were more dangerous than giving birth. For poor and rich, the mortality rate was high. If the birth itself didn’t kill you, then puerperal fever very well might. Privacy was non-existent. If you were Marie de Medici, there was such a press of people in the lying-in chamber that you couldn’t get from the birthing chair to your bed — and that was not counting the 200 more in the ante-room.  Still worse, though, than giving birth was being born. In 16th- and 17th-century England, 20 per cent of children died before the age of five. If you managed to survive your arrival and four months of swaddled immobility, there was still every chance you might be burned, trodden on, eaten by animals in your home or squashed by your mother in bed.

Roger Lewis

Love your enmities

Grudges make the world go around, according to Sophie Hannah. They are ‘an important and fascinating part of human experience’, which ought to be ‘protective, life-enhancing and fun’. I think this overstates the case somewhat, as I can’t see any pleasurableness, though I am aware that my own ability to harbour resentments is possibly pathological and blood-soaked. The first thing I do each day is scan the obituary pages to see if any enemy has met with a fatal accident — and I fully understand Auden’s line about hearing with satisfaction, much later in life, of ‘the death by cancer of a once hated school master’. Not that being dead lets anyone off the hook.

Boyd Tonkin

Another tale of star-crossed lovers

It’s hard, in Britain, to imagine a popular museum devoted to a single poem. The Polish city of Wrocław hosts just such a shrine. It celebrates Pan Tadeusz, the verse novel written in his Parisian exile by the poet, dramatist and freedom fighter Adam Mickiewicz in the early 1830s, and now taught as a keystone of collective identity to every Polish schoolchild. Even the idea of a ‘national epic’ sounds like a great big bore, especially as the action of this one turns on a sideshow in the Lithuanian backwoods during the Napoleonic wars, while ‘the wide world ran riot/ In blood and tears’.

Mark Amory

A definition of glamour

‘Dark Star’ is a suitable enough title in itself, but the definition makes it a brilliant one: ‘A Dark Star’, we are told in this book, ‘is shadowed, often detectable by its gravitational effect on other bodies. It is often a component of a binary star and can cause the brightness of its visible partner to vary periodically.’ That is to say, Vivien Leigh was bipolar and married Laurence Olivier, and these things dominated her life. She was born in Darjeeling in 1913, her father, Ernest Hartley, a stockbroker. When she was six, she was sent to school in England. This was not unusual, but that does not mean that she did not feel abandoned. She was educated by Roman Catholic nuns and read a lot, including Rudyard Kipling. Vivien had a gift for prophecy.

Alan Judd

Could they have tried harder?

Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched man on 20 July 1944. Hitler was at a briefing in his Wolf’s Lair, a secret forested redoubt, when Stauffenberg entered the room with his briefcase bomb (containing British plastic explosive), placing it beneath the table where Hitler was due to sit. Stauffenberg withdrew, pleading an urgent call, but the unsuspecting subordinate who took his place moved the briefcase further under the table and away from Hitler. Standing and smoking by his car, Stauffenberg — a one-armed, eye-patched veteran of the North African and Russian campaigns — watched as the wooden briefing hut erupted with a flash and roar.

John McEwen

Invasion of the bread-snatchers

Little Toller Books, in Dorset, aims to publish old and new writing on nature by the very best writers and artists, in books of the highest quality at affordable prices. This offering, neat enough to fit an overcoat pocket, ticks every box. Its author, Tim Dee, co-editor of The Poetry of Birds, has been a BBC natural history radio producer, whose first job was in bird conservation. Born and bred in Bristol, notable for its gull population, he has been a dedicated birdwatcher from boyhood. He thus brings expertise as well as broad engagement to his subject. Accordingly, Landfill, like its principal subject, the gulls we see in Britain, ranges far and wide.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

I like a book where you don’t think you’re going to be interested in the subject, but then find it’s so vigorously and engagingly written that you’re enchanted. This is one of those. I’m not a skier —I’m quickly bored when coffee-drinking mothers start recounting their children’s latest achievements on the piste — so I expected to have had enough by page five, as I set off across the blinding whiteness of this ‘biography’ of snow, written by a man who’s wearing ski-goggles in the jacket photo. But in Giles Whittell’s genial company, reading it was a great pleasure.

Roy Foster

Sins of the fathers | 13 December 2018

‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of Owl-Light. Stephen Dedalus puts it differently in Ulysses: ‘A father is a necessary evil.’ But later, he qualifies this: ‘Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ Colm Tóibín has repeatedly squared up to fathers as well as mothers in his own work (a dead father haunts the family in Nora Webster, and fatherhood is a central theme in The Heather Blazing). His new book takes on the theme of fatherhood in relation to three great Irish writers, supplying a scintillating new perspective on each.

Thursday

Zoë Apostolides

Vanished without trace Zoë Apostolides

From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely hearts’ killer. By the time he was apprehended, France’s answer to Jack the Ripper had swindled his way to contact with almost 300 women, using a variety of aliases, and murdered ten of them at his country pied-à-terre outside Paris. A century later, the suicide of Rey Rivera at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore created no such sensation except in the minds of conspiracy theorists and those who missed him, but the two stories reveal more similarities than might be expected. Trawling through 7,000 pages of archive material, Richard Tomlinson’s account spans many years, witness statements, forensic records and court documents.

Kapil Komireddi

A nation of beggars and plutocrats

Picture India in 1991. You need to make several trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer. Coca-Cola is contraband; there is a 22-month waiting list for a car, and an interminable queue for admission to the exclusive club of telephone owners: there are only five million active connections in a country of 900 million people. Post-colonial India elevated suspicion of private business into a public virtue. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which maintained a vital $6 billion trade relationship with India, the rhetoric of economic self-reliance and political non-alignment became insupportable. All that stood between India and bankruptcy when the government was compelled to throw open the economy in the summer of 1991 was $2 billion.

Brian Martin

Flights of fancy | 6 December 2018

In the opening pages of Turbulence, a woman in her seventies, who is visiting her sick son in Notting Hill, thinks how easy ‘it was, these days, to acquire a plane ticket’. Instead of a ticket to take us around the world, we have David Szalay’s novel, which takes us across continents in a series of 12 connected stories. The chapter headings are the acronyms of international airports; thus the first chapter is LGW-MAD and the last BUD-LGW. Each episode arises from a personal connection to a character in the previous one. Szalay might have been conscious of Forster’s dictum: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion.’ He is a clever craftsman.

Ian Sansom

A hero to worship

If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will. But if you know who Messi is and you’ve got at least a 2:1 in English, comp. lit. or similar, you are going to absolutely love it. This is definitely one for the football aficionado as well as for fans of fine writing. Messi is an Argentinian footballer who’s played for Barcelona for his entire professional career. He’s short. He’s modest. And he never takes a dive. Apart from his appalling tattoos, he’s the very opposite of what you might expect of the modern footballer — an Argentinian Roy of the Rovers.

Tim Martin

Commies and comics

Its Booker-longlist nomination meant that Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) was the comic that everyone has heard of this year, even if it’s also the one most likely to give them post-traumatic stress. Drawn in deliberately bland colours and small, often wordless panels, this story about the human aftermath of a grisly American killing takes in internet paranoia, conspiracy theorists and the internet’s hyperspeed appetite for atrocity. But it’s also an intensely withdrawn book, full of desperate characters whose emotions vibrate at near-subperceptible frequencies. I admired it deeply, and I’d be happy never to think about it again.