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Thursday

David Wootton

The pursuit of happiness | 16 June 2016

There is a wonderful portrait of Kenelm Digby by Van Dyke. He is dressed in black. His hand is on his heart. Behind him is a vast, wilting sunflower. The sunflower is a symbol of constancy — it follows the sun. When his wife Venetia died in 1633, when Kenelm was 29, he went into a profound mourning that lasted for the rest of his life — another 30 years. The sun had gone out of his life. From the moment he discovered her dead body, seemingly asleep in her bed, his behaviour was, to say the least, a little odd. He took plaster casts of her hands, feet and face. He had Van Dyke paint a portrait of her in death. He commissioned a phalanx of poets, led by Ben Jonson (who was summoned to the deathbed so that he would be inspired by the sight), to write poems in her praise.

Eric Weinberger

Time trials | 16 June 2016

What are ‘lost time accidents’, apart from something on building-site signs announcing hours lost to worker injuries? In this novel by the Austrian-American John Wray, the accidents represent time travel, or one family’s century-long, multi-generation, trans-Atlantic obsession and dark joke. ‘Time is our shared disorder,’ says the narrator’s aunt. Waldy Tolliver is that narrator, anxious and infatuated and trapped in a time-pocket from which he lobs the family history in long passages to Mrs Haven, his recent lover. His father Orson is a science fiction writer whose own father, Kaspar, fled occupied Europe for Buffalo, New York.

Jonathan Mcaloon

Manhattan transfer

Good historical fiction takes more than research. Henry James once said that writers needed to shed everything that made them modern to feel their way into a completely alien world view — a near impossibility. But this ideal historical novel, bristling with ancient prejudice, would be rather heavy going for a general readership, and successful ones often come populated by dismaying modern stand-ins. Noted non-fiction writer Francis Spufford’s debut novel Golden Hill — an update of 18th-century adventure romps by the likes of Henry Fielding — is successful because it makes us feel entertained and uneasy with the past. In 1746, Englishman Richard Smith arrives at the office of a New York merchant with a bill for £1,000.

Claire Lowdon

The folly of youth

Let’s start with arithmetic. Edmund White’s 11th novel is a book about age and ageing. The young man of the title is a French model called Guy. Like Dorian Gray, Guy never seems to grow old. By the middle of the novel he is nearly 40, but he can still convince people — crucially, a desirable 19-year-old called Kevin — that he’s 25. The other characters constantly comment on Guy’s age. Guy himself obsesses over it and goes to great lengths to hide the truth, pretending not to recognise cultural references from earlier decades. Subterfuge so successful, apparently, that not even Edmund White knows how old his hero is.

Rose Prince

Woolton’s war

In wartime the housekeeping is a nightmare. While fighting Napoleon in Spain the Duke of Wellington sent an infuriated letter to the government in Whitehall. He complained that they had asked him to account for a petty cash deficit of one shilling and ninepence, and a ‘hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm…’. The Duke, more concerned with training soldiers to fight, would not have got on too well with Lord Woolton, the British government’s Minister of Food in the second world war, whose office had the most onerous catering job in history.

Anthony Cummins

Strange sightings in Essex

I suspect some readers might be too cool for this lovely book, partly because, despite its gothic horror set-up, it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits; and partly because historical novels are sometimes derided as escapist, as if they’re only a fallback for authors who can’t keep up with, say, immigration or the internet. It takes place over a single year in the 1890s, in an Essex village where — if the rumours are to be believed — a monstrous sea creature skulks in the estuary, blamed for horrors from disembowelled livestock to a man’s corpse washing up on the marsh, his neck snapped. Up from London amid this panic is Cora, a wealthy amateur naturalist, liberated by the death of her abusive husband.

Christopher Meyer

Double speak

Tom Fletcher, a young star of the Foreign Office, made his reputation last year when he blogged his ‘valedictory despatch’ from Beirut, where he had served as ambassador for several years. From time immemorial ambassadors had written these despatches on quitting their posts. It was the occasion to spread your diplomatic wings with candid observations on the country or career you were leaving. A few have been small literary gems and have been republished in book form. Some were laced with indiscretion. In his farewell despatch, Sir Ivor Roberts, our man in Rome earlier this century, was extremely rude (rightly so) about the way the Foreign Office was run.

Sue Prideaux

The Redeemer

The political trigger for the Ring was the 1849 Dresden uprising, when the young freedom fighter Richard Wagner financed the hand grenades and debated ethics with his co-revolutionary Bakunin. According to Bernard Shaw, the Russian stood model for Siegfried, the Ring’s hero who would overthrow the old order and install a new realm of personal and political freedom. God was dying; nationalism killing Goethe’s enlightened neo-Hellenism. For Wagner, loss of faith in the divine and the divinely remote ancient Greeks demanded another route to meaning. He found it in pre-Christian Germanic texts, using them to shape the new cosmology of the post-Christian world.

Richard Ingrams

Hacks and robbers

Readers of advanced years like me will almost certainly remember the bow-tied figure of Edgar Lustgarten, star of any number of ‘True Crime’ B movies which were an integral part of a visit to the cinema, or ‘flicks’, when we were young. Some of us also remember his catchphrase when describing the downfall of a murderer, if only because it was a favourite of The Spectator’s one-time political columnist Alan Watkins: ‘It was then that he made his first big mistake.’ As it happens The Spectator features in Lustgarten’s own story, one of many to be told in Duncan Campbell’s very entertaining new book about crime reporting past and present.

Christopher Hawtree

Park life

Petrichor. Coined as recently as 1964 but redolent of Eden onwards, the word appears in neither of these volumes but they are suffused with it. In denoting that tang which arises after rain has fallen upon dry ground, petrichor can make a stroll through park or hillside headier than any parfumier’s establishment. Down the centuries, as people moved into populous cities, such relish of open, green space has become all the more acute, with one man’s wild meadow another’s ‘development opportunity’. With a steadily lengthening shelf of books that are threnodies for seaside holidays, the Routemaster bus, vinyl records, the transplanted London Bridge and now public parks, Travis Elborough is becoming a latter-day Alan Bennett.

Dorian Lynskey

The clean and the unclean

In 1991, Moby folded the theme from Twin Peaks into a remix of his dance track ‘Go’ and a diminutive, teetotal, vegan Christian abruptly became the American rave scene’s first pop star. He was not the obvious candidate: one critic dubbed him ‘techno’s crazed youth minister’. As a showboating entertainer in a culture sceptical of stardom, and a somewhat sanctimonious puritan surrounded by hedonists, he put a lot of noses out of joint. On one early online rave forum the phrase ‘Go away Moby’ became a mantra. In his first memoir, Richard Melville Hall (nicknamed Moby due to his famous ancestor Herman) unpicks this paradox with an unusual degree of self-awareness and deadpan humour.

Stuart Kelly

Into a cloud-scratched sky

There have been a number of attempts to graft the style of the so-called new nature writing onto the novel: works such as Melissa Harrison’s Clay, for instance, or Amy Sackville’s Orkney. Tom Bullough’s Addlands is a very creditable contribution to this genre. The form does have an intrinsic problem: how does one dramatise seeing? The solution here is that the characters — the reserved Idris Hamer, his stoical wife, Etty, and their son Oliver, a principled bruiser — are farmers in the Welsh borders. Their livelihood depends on being attuned to changes in the environment. The novel has an elegant structural conceit.

A.S.H. Smyth

Missing in action

‘Missing in action is the worst state to which we can lose a human being,’ avers Commodore (Ret.) Ajith Boyagoda — and he should know. A not especially academic young chap from the hill country, Boyagoda joined the then Ceylonese navy for the glamour of it; progressed fair-to-middlingly; saw Southampton, Suez and South India; and, in September 1994, on his final voyage, found himself in command of the Sagarawardene, Sri Lanka’s biggest warship, on the night that it was sunk by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Julie Burchill

Get over it!

As someone who managed to move from enfant terrible to grande dame without ever being a proper grown-up, I must say the menopause passed me by. I make a practise of having mostly much younger or male mates so I don’t have to hear old birds banging on about it, but occasionally my bezzie (who seems to have been undergoing the unfortunate process since the EU was the EC) will start feeling hot — then the next minute, she’s moaning about the British weather and pining to go somewhere warm. Women! My main thought as I pushed, tank-like, through mine was that as a broad who has lived her life in a bid to show that arch-bitch Mother Nature who’s the Daddy, defying her at every turn, I was damned if I was going to cry ‘Uncle!’ at the eleventh hour.

Thursday

Nigel Jones

Win some — lose too many

In this centenary year of the Somme, it is refreshing to read a book about the Great War that is not yet another dreary recital of the tragic and over-familiar facts, but successfully gets to grips with the dilemmas facing the commanders and politicians mediating the gargantuan conflict. Historical debate about the war now boils down to two views. Either the conflict was conducted by bone-headed generals guzzling champagne in their chateaux while sending a generation to certain death against chattering machine guns and impenetrable barbed wire. Or the said generals have been much maligned, and eventually achieved a stunning victory after intelligently using tactics learned in a very hard but sadly necessary school of battles.

Andrew Lycett

Lives of gay abandon

Somewhere I have a couple of neat letters from the artist Richard Chopping, politely declining my requests to interview him about Ian Fleming. ‘Dicky’ is best known for the trompe l’oeil dust jackets he painted for nine of Fleming’s James Bond novels. Because of this patronage, an accomplished second-division artist gained wider prominence, becoming at one stage, according to the New Yorker, the world’s highest paid book designer. It didn’t make him happy. He was involved in a long, bickering relationship with his fellow artist Denis Wirth-Miller, who was wilder and more experimental, but whose reputation, despite a close working association with Francis Bacon, has not endured so well.

Christopher Bray

She’s the top

This book is the latest in Yale’s series of Jewish Lives — though in this case Jewish Loves might be nearer the mark. Neal Gabler adores Barbra Streisand. He purports to have written a critical biography, but pretty much the only bad thing he has to say about Streisand’s 50-odd-year career (and counting — who would bet against her returning to the White House to carol the Clintons come next January?) is that Peter Bogdanovich’s picture What’s Up, Doc? is ‘junk’. Actually it’s a work of genius, with Streisand at the top of her considerable comic game – though that’s a judgment you mightn’t want to trust any more than Gabler’s. Because when it comes to movies and records I love Barbra too.

Camilla Swift

Tales of Mr Tod

Have you ever considered tying a fox’s penis to your head? Well no, nor have I, but if you suffer from migraines, perhaps you might give it a shot. The fox, in fact, was thought to be a cure for any number of maladies in the 1600s. Fox ashes dunked in wine were recommended as a cure for asthma, their brains were thought to be useful in treating epilepsy, and making a necklace of fox testicles for a child was billed as a surefire cure for toothache. It sounds like quite the fashion statement. This book — Lucy Jones’s first — is a fascinating discussion of the history of our attitude to the fox, and if you want to know more about the red creature that wakes you at 3 a.m. with its baby-like screaming, then this volume is sure to keep you occupied for a while at least.

Maggie Fergusson

That glowing feeling

On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia — ‘Mollie’ — Maggia. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. Everyone present knew what that meant. ‘My beautiful radium’, Marie Curie called the element she discovered in 1898.

Charlotte Shane

Love for sale

The premise of Kat Banyard’s Pimp State is a familiar one: sex work — a phrase the author rejects as pure euphemism — is formalised sexual exploitation, synonymous with sexual abuse and therefore both ‘a cause and a consequence of inequality between men and women’. It follows, then, that if you’re in favour of gender equality, or simply a decent human being who disapproves of sexual violence, you must oppose the sale of any and all variations of sex. If you’re not part of the solution — well, you know the rest. You don’t have to be especially interested in feminism to have heard this before.