More from Books

Thursday

Boyd Tonkin

Sunlit days and starry nights

In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in London. At the same time, his debut stage play The Writing Game opened at the Birmingham Rep. Malcolm Bradbury, his old friend and partner on the twin tracks of literary academia and serio-comic fiction, had come to Birmingham to stay and see the show. After a starry night in the West End, and ‘a brief whirl around the dance floor’, Lodge sped back home. He arrived at 3.30 a.m., but found that his wife Mary ‘had accidentally locked me out, and I had to throw gravel up at our bedroom window from the back garden to wake her without disturbing the Bradburys’.

A.S.H. Smyth

Cannon law

Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull discovered at The Lord Clyde, Walmer, complete with brief biography: Skull of havildar ‘Alum Bheg’, 46th Regt. Bengal N. Infantry... blown away from a gun. From this grisly starting point, Kim Wagner, lecturer in British imperial history at Queen Mary University of London, narrates how, in the swelter of mid-1857, following outbreaks throughout British India, native Bengal Army units at Sialkot mutinied, killing officers and civilians and looting the cantonment, and then set out for Delhi to join Bahadur Shah, the briefly-minted ‘Emperor of India’. They didn’t make it.

Jonathan Coe

Short and sharp

Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where I described Johnson as ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s’. It was a silly thing to write, partly because it wasn’t true, but also because it was easily the most quotable line in the book and so every journalist and reviewer was bound to pick it up and repeat it. And so it proved. But Johnson was not Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde. The 1960s saw a significant flowering of what we might (for shorthand) call experimental writing in this country.

Thursday

Max Décharné

War of words

At the close of the 1970s, I found a selection of postcards in an antique shop which had been sent from the Western Front in 1917 by a soldier named Private Howe to his young daughter Ena. I was struck by the immediacy of the language, and the careful avoidance of anything hinting at danger, combined with the tastefully chosen French photomontages of flowers and romanticised battlefields. In Words and the First World War, Julian Walker has examined many such postcards, alongside letters sent to and from the Fro nt, private diaries, trench publications such as the Wipers Times, national and regional newspapers and other sources.

Kate Flint

Shooting from the hip

The career of the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank stands in direct antithesis to the characteristics of his native Switzerland. Switzerland sucked the air out of him, he claimed, through its orderliness, decorum, neatness and predictability. As R. J. Smith’s vivid biography explains, Frank displays none of these traits. Just as coming to America was a form of escape, so he has never remained content with one genre or style of work — despite, or perhaps because of, the huge, influential success of The Americans, his photographic portrayal of a divided nation full of contradictions.

Desmond Seward

Answerable only to God

The late Michael Foot used to say that the first thing he needed to know about a new acquaintance was, on which side he or she would like their forebears to have fought in the English Civil War. He himself, of course, was firmly for Parliament. But having read Leanda de Lisle’s book, it is hard to imagine how anyone could possibly want to have Roundhead ancestors. King Charles I is among the most baffling figures in English history, as the subtitle makes clear. Failing to avoid the the Civil War and letting Lord Strafford, his loyal chief minister, go to the block, are scarcely peccadilloes. ‘The man of blood, with his long, essenced hair’ aroused real hatred among enemies who eventually killed him.

Fiona Sampson

An uphill struggle

‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live’, perhaps the most famous line Nan Shepherd wrote, is carved in the slate paving of the Writers’ Museum’s Close in Edinburgh. But many who read it, either there or on the new Scottish £5 note, will be surprised to learn that it is not actually taken from The Living Mountain, the work that brought Shepherd posthumous fame beyond her native Scotland. Published in 1977, just four years before its author’s death, this book about the Cairngorms — part spiritual memoir, part nature writing — was written decades earlier, in the 1940s, but failed to find a publisher.

Jude Cook

A banquet of delights

While the short story is currently under-going one of its periods of robust, if not rude, health, its two dominant modes — the classical or Chekhovian, and the postmodern or experimental — have become harder to define, with authors happily borrowing tricks from both approaches. None of the collections here can definitively be confined to either camp, and this should be celebrated. William Boyd’s decision in The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (Viking, £14.99) to jettison conventional character names is gently experimental, if not always successful. From the start we encounter exotics such as Ludo Abernathy and Arkady Lemko. Later, there’s a Zack, a Moxy and a Sholto. Later still, a Max Bassman, a Jurgen Kiel and (boldly) a Raleigh Maltravers.

Wednesday

Peter Carty

Puffing through the Punjab

‘I went to a restaurant the other day called Taste of the Raj. The waiter hit me with a stick and got me to build a complicated railway system.’ The comedian Harry Hill’s gag is an acerbic commentary on the British empire, but there can be no doubt that India’s modern history is intimately intertwined with its railways. They grew into a vast realm of their own within the sub-continent and embodied all the vagaries of imperial rule. Who better to chronicle them than Christian Wolmar? He is a railway obsessive who has now produced his 11th book on rail and its history. This time round he has given himself one of the greatest train sets any boy ever had to play with. The story he tells begins in the mid-19th century with a series of formidable engineering challenges.

Sinclair McKay

The best television ever made

Now, if someone were to spray stun gas through the keyhole of my front door, and I were to collapse on my sofa only to regain consciousness in a slightly kitsch 1960s serviced apartment, outside which lay an exquisite Italianate village, a stretch of sparkling coast, a startlingly cheery populace all speaking in RP accents and social order maintained by means of a gigantic white plastic ball bubbling out of the sea… well, to be frank, I’d be thrilled. Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six, on the other hand, is seething about it from the start; and the film director Alex Cox, who sat watching The Prisoner as a 13-year-old in 1967, does a terrific job of giving a fresh interpretation to what must be the world’s most analysed television series.

Hermione Eyre

Golden lads galore

Stephen Fry has had a go at the Greek myths, in a competitively priced hardback, just in time for Christmas. And he has done it jolly well, actually, so lower that collective eyebrow, please, all of you purists who think entertainers ought to stay away from the classics, and remember that as one of our top TV deities, Fry can do what he likes. Born wearing tweed, he was dipped by the heel in the River of Wisdom (though some say it was only the Trickle of Cleverness) and ascended via the Cambridge Footlights into the Equity-approved pantheon. He is loved, as the Greek gods were loved, not only for his talents, but for his failings and vulnerabilities too. He could get away with anything, except perhaps denim. In Mythos, he is clearly enjoying himself.

Christopher Meyer

Rats in the ballroom

At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market — expensively produced, replete with beautiful photographs, a text as undemanding as the tinkling notes of a cocktail-bar pianist, and the whole thing massively heavy. It is a beautiful — and heavy — book, with fine photographs by Luke White. But what distinguishes it is the skill and acuity with which James Stourton has written the commentary, making it a serious and engrossing work of history. His text takes the form of an introductory essay on the changing nature of diplomacy over the centuries, a model of elegant concision, followed by the histories of 26 embassies and ambassadorial residences scattered around the globe.

A.S.H. Smyth

Fair tradesman

Ole Thorstensen has been a carpenter for 25 years. A master craftsman, in fact. He is busy working on a minor job — ‘replacing a few windows, putting down decking and doing a number of other odds and ends’ — when he gets invited to bid for a loft conversion in a 19th-century apartment block in Oslo. ‘The Petersens have mentioned their desire for quality while avoiding unforeseen expense.’ No shit. The conversion will include a bedroom, bathroom and an office mezzanine and has all to be insulated, plumbed, wired, plastered, painted, floored and fitted out with furniture before a staircase can connect it to the floor below.

Clinton Heylin

Hey nonny nonny

After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s passion — I am none the wiser as to why folk song collectors assumed that a man singing in a pub for free drinks in, say, 1890 or 1920 was de facto a folk singer? A singer of folk songs, yes. A folk singer, maybe not. Such men were ‘professional’ singers of popular songs. They sung what people wished to hear, for recompense: a pint.

Nicky Haslam

Littering castles all over the land

I rashly discarded this book’s dustjacket when I received it, and thus saw only the unlettered cover, a faded photograph of three generations of an aristocratic family, somewhat camera-shy in their silken breeches. Oh I see, I thought, this is one of those books on the foibles of the aristocracy, always an entertaining subject. How wrong can one be? Instead, it’s a polemic against crats aristo, auto, mono or pluto; and the author apparently yearns for any crat of a different stripe — not just demo and bureau, but mobo, neo and probably ochlo to boot. Naturally I went immediately to the index, to look up my family.

Rowan Pelling

Toys for us

It’s hard not to love a book that starts with its author fearing a police sting while flogging sex toys at a hen party in Texas. The year is 2004 and Hallie Lieberman is attending grad school in Austin and supporting her studies by working as a home party organiser for Forbidden Fruit, local purveyor of marital aids: ‘Christy is rattling off her order: a jelly vibrator, a cock ring, a bottle of Eros lubricant.’ Just one snag; devices that are intended ‘primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs’ are deemed illegal in the state of Texas. They’re illegal to this day in Louisiana.

Josh Ireland

Recipes for disaster

Halfway through Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book Lucy Moore takes a moment to regret the vast tracts of the past that are lost to us. How lucky we would be if more examples of our ancestors’ daily interactions with others, what she calls ‘the scraps of daily life we take for granted’, had been preserved. Instead, of course, we must make do with the flotsam that has survived, and to try to coax quotidian objects into offering up glimpses into lives that might otherwise have remained obscure. Court records, depositions and wills have all been interrogated by historians, as have more unlikely items, such as the collections of culinary and medical preparations compiled by women from ‘receipts’ given to them by their friends and relations.

Claudia Massie

Hot dogs

There are currently 151,000,000 photos on Instagram tagged #Dog which is 14,000,000 more than those tagged #Cat. The enormous number shouldn’t surprise us. We’ve been obsessively depicting our dogs since prehistoric times, when we painted them on walls, carved them in ivory and buried them with bones and blankets for the afterlife. A Dog a Day is one of two marvellous new books that feed this atavistic devotion. A handsome collection of Sally Muir’s dog portraiture, it demonstrates the artist’s technical range and her keen understanding of essential doggishness. The images are deft sketches that capture the particular hang of a hound’s head, the Mikado-sticks jumble of lurcher legs or the crazy glint in a spaniel’s eye.

James Walton

Easy on the hard stuff

It’s one of the more mysterious features of human history that people of every era and in almost every place have regularly striven to reduce their intelligence, impair their reflexes and generally ensure that everything about them functions far less well. So what is about getting drunk that we love so much? According to Mark Forsyth’s breezy new book, the best answer comes from somebody not often thought of as a classic roisterer: William James, the American philosopher and brother of Henry. ‘Sobriety,’ James wrote, ‘diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.’ And the way Forsyth tells it, drink has caused us to say yes to an awful lot.

William Cook

Comfort and joy

John Julius Norwich loves Christmas dearly. ‘I just wish it didn’t come round about every three months,’ he says. I know how he feels. Christmas does seem to arrive sooner every year — not just because time seems to speed up as you get older, but because our avaricious shopkeepers can’t wait to start cashing in earlier each autumn. We all harbour fond memories of childhood Christmases, and do our best to recreate them for our children. We just wish the whole thing were confined to a few weeks rather than dragging on for half the year. It’s hard to feel full of Yuletide cheer when shopping centres put up their Christmas decorations before Bonfire Night.