More from Books

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Smelly hippies

The last time I saw a copy of the New Musical Express — the ferociously influential 1970s pop paper which plucked me from working-class provincial obscurity at the age of 17 and set me on the radiant way to fame, fortune and utter fabulousness — it was in a rain-lashed Shaftesbury Avenue, its humble bin pleading PLEASE TAKE ONE. As I stared at my tattered alma mater in appalled fascination, as one would a long-lost grand passion who had been vandalised by Old Father Time and then done over by Mother Nature for good measure, I reflected rather smugly that we had both come a long way, though thankfully in rather different directions. Though my story is unusual, it is not unique.

Michael Beloff

Law and disorder

Sir Stephen Sedley read English at Cambridge and Lord Dyson Classics at Oxford. Both switched to law and achieved high judicial office, the former a senior Lord Justice of Appeal, the latter as Master of the Rolls. Both were effective advocates as well as admired judges (not always the case). Both clearly enjoyed these two distinct stages in their legal careers (again not always the case). These volumes are not judicial memoirs (though each contain fragments of autobiography), but compendia of the author’s views on a variety of legal issues, notably the appropriate distribution of governmental power in British society.

Allan Mallinson

Their dark materials

Laws and sausages, we know, are better not seen in the making; and neither are ‘black ops’. Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, and Trafalgar on the dunes near Burnham Thorpe, but Britain’s secret war against Napoleon was won in less wholesome places. ‘This is a book about propaganda, spying and covert operations… a very modern story of secret committees, slush funds, assassination,’ writes Tim Clayton, whose Waterloo: Four Days that Changed Europe’s Destiny was by far the most scholarly of the many volumes produced for the bicentenary. And what an astonishing story it all is, alternately inspiring and disturbing, a challenging addition to the Napoleonic canon.

Thursday

Lara Feigel

Opposites attract

‘Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.’ This is the most frustrating part of being alienated and young. You hope that there’s a better life in store for you but you can’t yet bank on it. Sally Rooney appeared two years ago with Conversations with Friends and has rightly been fêted as one of the most important writers of her generation. The question of generation matters because she’s writing about young people. Both novels feature protagonists who are undergraduates in Rooney’s own Dublin.

Jonathan Meades

What you see is what you get

The Wellcome Trust puts on some of the most engaging exhibitions in London and holds in its permanent collection a number of fine works. Its roots are in biomedical research, but those roots have, with modification, sprouted so many disciplines and areas of tangential enquiry that it makes perfect sense to have commissioned Iain Sinclair to write about the physical and psychological effects of buildings and places on the health of the people who inhabit them, pass through them, long to get out of them, represent them, think about them. Sinclair’s approach is not that of a sociologist, an off-the-peg analyst of urbanism (density good, sprawl bad) or a travel writer on a journey to ‘find himself’ (in the way that they wearyingly will).

Kate Womersley

The burden of freedom

It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations and burnings are performed with languorous cruelty. Women give birth and are sent straight back to work after lying their ‘tender-skinned newborns down in the furrows to wail against the hot sun’. Esi Edugyan’s third novel does not retreat to softer ground after her last, Half-Blood Blues, dealt with Nazi ideology. Both Germany and Barbados have chapters in their histories when humans were treated like mere creatures. Hope arrives with the plantation master’s brother, Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde, a scientist, inventor and abolitionist. Titch chooses a slave boy, George Washington Black, to be his apprentice.

Chris Mullin

That’ll be the day

We’ve had Alan Johnson the lad from the slums of north Kensington, Alan Johnson the postman and Alan Johnson Member of Parliament and cabinet minister. Now comes the sequel: Alan Johnson the rock and roll years. Actually, it’s not quite a sequel since it covers much of the same territory as two of the previous volumes, albeit from a slightly different angle. Although Johnson went on to hold five cabinet posts, politics was never part of Johnson’s life plan. All he ever wanted to be was a rock star and, who knows, it was an ambition he might have realised but for the fact that his musical instruments kept being stolen. As recounted in This Boy, his wonderful and hugely successful first volume of memoirs, Johnson’s start in life was, to put it mildly, unpromising.

Michael Moorcock

In a forest dark and deep

Brian Catling’s great trilogy takes its title from The Vorrh, his first volume. This final book fulfills all the promises of the first two. It has a place beside such modern masters of the imagination as E.R. Eddison, Tolkien or Peake, and it is as completely unlike them as those three-deckers are of each other. Again we visit the Vorrh, the endless forest based on Raymond Roussel’s in Impressions of Africa. Built on its outskirts, Essenwald, a crumbling colonial city, exists because of the timber it cuts with the labour of ‘the Erstwhile’, the forest’s enslaved, semi-human inhabitants.

David Crane

An age of paradox

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ... in short,’ as Charles Dickens famously told the first readers of A Tale of Two Cities, it was a period very much like their own. Dickens was right. John Stuart Mill once claimed that the two great ‘seminal minds’ of the period were Coleridge and Bentham, and in that brilliant yoking of opposites — the warm, creative current of Coleridgean thought and the chillier stream of Benthamite utilitarianism — is summed up all the contradictions and paradoxes that the Victorian age was heir to. This is the fascination of the period.

Nicholas Lezard

We were all unwell then

On the one hand, I am supremely qualified to review this book. In 1984, bored beyond endurance after graduating with one of those degrees that leaves you both over- and under-qualified for employment, I decided to take my dole money down to the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, where this magazine’s Jeffrey Bernard held court, and pay my respects to him, for I liked his prose style and his stories. I stayed there for three years or more, a postgraduate course in itself, only packing my bags at the end of 1987 when I met the woman who was to become my wife.

Tom Williams

No longer the tough guy

Only to Sleep is the third Philip Marlowe novel written by someone other than Raymond Chandler and while the authors of Perchance to Dream and The Black-Eyed Blonde both found freedom to play with Marlowe and explore his potential, it is Lawrence Osborne who has run the furthest with the source material. The novel opens in 1988, with Marlowe living in retirement in Baja, Mexico. He is 72, and enjoying a leisurely life in the sun, when he is asked to take on one last investigation into insurance fraud. A Reagan-era Marlowe unlocks an aspect that Chandler never considered.

Wynn Wheldon

Curiosity – and cats

To Jan Morris, I am anathema. That goes, too, for David Attenborough. It is a word that this unarguably great writer likes: ‘It rolls well off the tongue.’ Why are your reviewer and the great broadcaster anathema, you ask. Well, we have been to the zoo. In this almost entirely enjoyable book no-one comes in for quite so much disapproval as those of us who have been to the zoo.I mention David because, when I was young, he took me to the zoo. However, despite this sinfulness, I would be surprised if Morris, who is a year older than Attenborough, does not recognise in David a confrère in the war for niceness against nastiness, kindness against cruelty. This book, apparently written because Morris has ‘nothing much else to write’, is more weighty than it seems.

Peter Tatchell

Ever the trail-blazer

This is the story of the ‘other’ Harvey Milk. We all know about Harvey the San Francisco politician who was tragically assassinated less than a year after he became one of the first openly gay candidates elected to public office in the US. But now, thanks to Lillian Faderman, we also know about Harvey the secular Jew, who renounced his faith but remained influenced and inspired by liberal Jewish values. The grandson of Lithuanian immigrants to the US, Harvey was, for many years, more out as a Jew than as a gay man. We also discover the restless, wandering Harvey, who moved from state to state, man to man and job to job.

Lucy Jones

Guns and roses

During the civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Mr and Mrs Roami, a science professor and a nurse, sent their children away from Kabul to Europe for safety. Tragically, they lost the phone number of where the children had moved to and had no way of contacting them. The couple found solace in gardening. Despite the constant explosions of rockets and shells, they were unwilling to leave their home. They named flowers after their children, and tended and spoke to them. It gave them the hope that one day the family would be reunited. At one point, battle raged on all four sides and it was too dangerous to cross the road to fetch water from the stream. The garden was starting to die.

Robert Salisbury

A class act

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Peter, but you were a famously successful Leader of Their Lordships and I wondered whether you had any tips before I took it on.’ ‘All you’ve got to remember is that you are the headmaster of a second-rate public school.’ Lord Carrington’s answer to my enquiry was entirely characteristic: funny, and flattering, as though he knew you would instinctively understand the joke. You and he, he implied, belonged in the same place. It was a technique which he lavished with great success on those who worked for him. He was much loved in Their Lordships, at the Foreign Office and at the Ministry of Defence — and with reason. He was fun to work for and loyal to those who worked for him.

Craig Raine

A recitation of wrongs

In 1923, a Frenchman, Emile Coué, persuaded millions of Americans to finger a piece of string with exactly 20 knots. It was an exercise in auto-suggestion. At each knot of this secular rosary, the user intoned: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.’ Sylvia Plath’s letters — until they implode on p.790 when she discovers the affair between Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill — are a similar numbing iteration of optimism and self-improvement. Thereafter, the story changes, darkens. Up until then, her story is cropped for improvement: she takes her finals at Cambridge but the letters are silent on her degree result (II: i). She explains to her brother Warren that she doesn’t write when her moods are black.

Suzi Feay

Playing for time

In a pleasing nod to Marcel Proust, Eustace, the middle-aged protagonist of Patrick Gale’s new novel, is propelled into memories of his childhood by a piece of music. An online flirtation via Skype with a much younger serving soldier is beginning to consume his thoughts, at least until a health crisis looms. Telling Theo nothing about his cancer diagnosis, Eustace goes for radio-active iodine therapy, having been warned to bring nothing with him that he doesn’t mind throwing away after. Saint-Saens’s ‘The Swan’ drifting through on his MP3 player leads him to relive his boyhood as a devoted cellist, and to reflect which parts of his past can also now be discarded.

Francis Wheen

Please Mr President

President George Washington received about five letters a day and answered them all himself. By the end of the 19th century President William McKinley was so overwhelmed by the volume of mail — 100 letters a day — that he hired someone to manage the flow. Thus began what is now called the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). According to Jeanne Marie Laskas, however, it wasn’t until Barack Obama that a president committed himself to reading a set number of letters a day — the ten LADs, as they became known — from ordinary Americans. Before delving into Obama’s old mailbags Laskas talks to one of his senior advisers, Shailagh Murray.

Thursday

Jon Jolliffe

Man’s true best friend

This unusual book begins with an account of the author’s ten-year love affair with dairy farming and an attempt ‘to give a flavour of what our cattle do for us’. It then turns into a survey of the various British breeds of cattle. After poor A-levels, Philip Walling took odd jobs in his native Cumbria, such as building dry-stone walls, until he managed to acquire a small farm of his own. With great determination, he ran this single-handed, keeping both beef and dairy animals and raising poultry and a couple of pigs. They were, in retrospect at least, ‘ten years of almost undimmed joy’. But aged 30, discouraged by the daily grind, which included a milk round, and feeling he had missed out on a proper education, he gave it all up.

Jason Burke

Lines in the sand

One of the many pleasures offered by Lords of the Desert, which narrates the rivalry between Britain and the United States in the Middle East from the end of the second world war through to 1967, is the quotations that are liberally strewn across its pages. They have been culled from memoirs or official documents unearthed in British or US archives and testify to the research that has gone into this dense but consistently fascinating account. Some reveal the deep complacency of influential individuals. Ralph Brewster, an American senator who undertook a round- the-world tour in August 1943 to investigate the progress of the war and report to President Franklin D.