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Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Lines of beauty | 24 September 2015

David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was an art of ‘gathering things in’ that engaged imaginatively with history and myth, with his Welsh heritage and the Christian religion. But art also comes out of conflict, and the tension between the two sides of Jones’s creative nature was the motive force that powered so much, both visual and written. Thus it can be misleading to separate his writing from his painting, for they form and express a single vision. However, Jones is presently most celebrated for his writing, particularly his first world war epic poem, In Parenthesis.

Anthony Cummins

Sibling rivalries

In The Past (set chiefly in the present) four middle-aged siblings spend an eventful summer holiday in the Devon country house vacated by their dead grandparents. When Alice, a failed actress, turns up with an unannounced male guest who’s still at university, her footloose ways vex the others — particularly the youngest, Fran, a harassed teacher with two small children, Ivy and Arthur. Then there’s demure Harriet, the eldest sibling, who needed to grow up fast when their mother Jill died young. Her secret diary shows how far her selflessness edges into repression, not least after she accidentally spies on her brother Roland in bed with his latest wife, a taut Argentinian named Pilar.

Simon Bradley

Pillar of the Victorian age

Briefing his illustrator for the jacket of A Handful of Dust (1934), Evelyn Waugh asked for a country house in ‘the worst possible 1860’. The result was a neoGothic extravaganza with a pinnacled entrance tower and spiky dormer windows — just the sort of thing that might have come from the drawing board of George Gilbert Scott, the most eminent architect of that time. Scott’s Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire, its bright red brick distantly visible from the western side of the carriage as the train heads north from Newark, gives the picture perfectly. And if you strain to spot Kelham amidst its trees, no one could miss Scott’s Midland Hotel at St Pancras —same style, but twice as big — or that staggering object, the Albert Memorial.

John R. MacArthur

Dick at his trickiest

In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying as by his actual crimes related to Watergate — history has been relatively kind to him. Compared with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Nixon in retrospect can seem statesmanlike, thoughtful and liberal-minded. He established diplomatic relations with communist China, took the US off the gold standard, negotiated the wind-down of the Vietnam war, and created the Environmental Protection Agency — accomplishments that generally prompt even Nixon-haters to pause before they condemn Tricky Dick to perdition. But now comes Joan Brady with a bracing reminder of what indeed was so hateful, so villainous about Nixon and his political ascent.

Thursday

Christian Wolmar

A new track record

Simon Bradley dates the demise of the on-board meal service to 1962, when Pullman services no longer offered croutons with the soup course. That may be a touch fanciful— there were other reasons for the decline, such as faster trains, cost cutting and the growth of fast food. Nevertheless, it is the type of anecdote that illustrates the thoroughness and depth of Bradley’s research. It is indisputable that the railways were the most important invention of the early 19th century. Before their creation, travel between towns and cities was a desperately slow and difficult enterprise and moving goods around was even harder, given the terrible state of the roads.

Connie Bensley

On the way to Plumpton

We pull up at Wivelsfield, under a blue sky, and glance out at the one figure on the platform: a mature, buxom woman in pink. Her arms are open wide, and a burly, moustachioed man climbs out of our carriage and gallops towards her embrace, burying his face in her yellow hair. When will they let go of each other? At last, she grasps his shabby bag, swings it over her shoulder, and off they march, trailing laughter; also disturbance — for some of us are looking a shade wistful as the train pulls out, soberly, to Plumpton.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Ticks and crosses

Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would that really happen on the night before a wedding in a swanky house in Connecticut, killing daughter, daughter’s fiancé and owner’s lover? It seems too good to be true —the perfect big bang to set a novel in motion — and it made me distrustful from the start. It’s bad enough for a fictional weirdo to engineer such a disaster, but it’s worse for a novelist to engineer one, just so he can crack open a cast of characters’ sorrowful interior monologues and keep them going for a novel’s length. Did You Ever Have a Family is a strange book: a psychological thriller that intrigues rather than thrills.

Naomi Alderman

A captivating prospect

What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off the beaten track and enter a magical place not quite of this world? They might end up, like Adam and Eve, in paradise. Or, like The Tempest’s Miranda and Ferdinand, under the control of powers greater than they can hope to understand. Or, like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they could find themselves unsure who they love, or whether they can ever trust what they see, or feel. Or, like Charmaine and Stan, the star-crossed heroes of Margaret Atwood’s dazzling and hilarious new novel The Heart Goes Last, which plays effortlessly with tropes from Shakespeare and Milton, they could take shelter from a world ravaged by economic crises in a prison.

Philip Marsden

Following the fickle fish

Fish stories come in two varieties: the micro-version of a hundred riverside bars, blokeish boastings of rod-and-line tussles with individual fish in which man and beast are fairly evenly matched. Then there is the macro-version, the one that tells of the fate of entire stocks — the cod of the Grand Banks, the European hake, the bluefin tuna of the Mediterranean, the haddock of the Atlantic, the whale everywhere. In this version, technology and greed have the upper hand and the narrative invariably moves from scenes of boundless plenty to ones of catastrophic scarcity. Donald S. Murray’s Herring Tales is one of these. As a native of Lewis, a Gaelic speaker, he recalls Stornaway crammed with herring boats; you could cross the harbour on their decks.

Nigel Jones

The continent in crisis

Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. He is now attempting to repeat the feat with a two-volume history of modern Europe, of which this is the opening shot.Inevitably, the figure of the Führer once again marches across Kershaw’s pages as they chronicle the years dominated by Germany’s malign master. First the Great War that gave Hitler his chance to escape obscurity, and then the greater one he launched himself. Opening with the continent’s catastrophic slide into generalised conflict in 1914, Kershaw apportions blame or the disaster more or less equally to all the combatant nations.

Candy Neubert

Review

(reading Daphne Rooke) Thank you for the book. It reminded me in the way she writes, dry as the Karoo, of the long hot drive from Matjiesfontein the day Paul stopped to give a girl a lift even though she wasn’t expecting one. She sat uneasily in the front seat beside him, saying thank you baas until he said don’t call me baas I’m not your baas and she said yes baas. That is how it was, grit spattering the windscreen, fynbos, rock, the shimmering air, the back of his neck, all stuck in things we couldn’t change like glue, flung towards our invisible futures which in my case would turn out to be you.

Nina Lyon

A myth is as good as a mile

We live in disenchanted times. We barely do God, most of us don’t do magic and frenzied consumerism occupies our minds more than any local spirit of place. At first glance it looks as though the supernatural folktales of old — those witches and giants who lend their names to pools or hilltop crags in Britain’s remoter spots — are all but lost. From this premise, the medievalist Carolyne Larrington examines the stories that characterise some of Britain’s place names, and considers how the mythological patterns of fairy brides and rampaging dragons might have shaped the way our ancestors saw both the places they inhabited and the world at large.

Andreas Campomar

Marvellous, murderous city

When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent landscape but also by its ordered architecture and city planning. This encounter he would later describe as being ‘one of the most powerful impressions of my whole life’. In his Brazil: Land of the Future, a book that was an exercise in wish-fulfilment masquerading as travelogue, Zweig believed the country to be the embodiment of ‘future civilisation and peace in our world’. Over 70 years later Brazil held the world’s worst record for homicidal violence: for every ten people killed, one was a Brazilian. Rio, the cidade maravilhosa (marvellous city), may have retained its beauty in spite of being hemmed in by favelas, but it was now damned.

Ted Hughes

Hoof-trimming

The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in the 1970s, but not included in the sequence as published. A few months after Ted purchased the bull, Sexton, he wrote to his brother Gerald: ‘I really love him. It isn’t just his incredible size and beauty — he has a strange, sweet nature, in every respect like an unusual person.’ Sexton remained at Moortown for many years after his working life, and was buried there in 1991. Some time later his remains were moved to Court Green.   The fee for this poem is donated to Farms for City Children   Sexton’s hooves are too big.

Allan Mallinson

When the boys come home

Matthew Green, former Financial Times and Reuters correspondent, remains unimpressed by officialdom’s response to casualties who aren’t actually bleeding: Ever since October 1914, when ‘Case One’ arrived in Myers’s care, the system for tending to the mental wellbeing of soldiers has grown up in a piecemeal and ad-hoc fashion, overshadowed by the Army’s stubborn ambivalence towards psychological injury (Dr Charles Myers was the Cambridge psychologist seconded to the Royal Army Medical Corps who first used the term ‘shell shock’.) Green acknowledges that ‘experience teaches that the psychological wounds of war have proved stubbornly difficult to treat’.

Sherard Cowpercoles

A hero of our time

I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting Edward Heath, I had to secure for an almost desperate former British prime minister a meeting with the former US secretary of state, also in town. Once with Kissinger, Heath promptly subsided into a deep slumber. I had the alarming experience of trying to keep the conversation going. The other occasions were more recent, but almost as scary. My hostess at the ‘secret’ (but much publicised) transatlantic talkfests which Kissinger (92 this year) still attends twice summoned me to sit beside the great man at dinner. On each occasion I felt like the luckless passenger in the Economist’s vintage television commercial.

Steven Poole

For better, for worse | 17 September 2015

Before I read this book, I wasn’t aware that I was a creationist. But Matt Ridley tells me I am, in his broad sense of someone who foolishly believes that any good can come of ‘human intentionality, design and planning’. With no little intellectual chutzpah, he offers to treat us to a ‘general theory of evolution’ of everything, surpassing Charles Darwin’s ‘special’ one that applied only to living organisms. According to the author, ‘top-down’ is always bad, ‘bottom-up’ is always good. By what evolutionary method he avoided consciously designing this book itself remains a mystery to the end. The book’s many short chapters are determined to find evolutionary virtues in different arenas.

Clare Mulley

The house that Alfred built

This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which in 1927 was the first of many small wooden summer houses to be built in the village of Gross Glienicke. Both its situation, just outside Berlin in the lakeside area that would later abut Gatow airport, and its many occupants, from well-established German Jews to partying neo-Nazis, would expose the property to the more tidal waters of modern German history. But the house has not just provided a stage for human drama; arguably it has been integral to the action itself, helping to shape lives, just as it was itself transformed by Germany’s changing politics.

Christopher Howse

Remembering P.J. Kavanagh

‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they make crisp scattered pinches of soot.’ P.J. Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, plucked out this observation for one of the columns that he wrote for The Spectator between 1983 and 1996. He was right to call a volume collecting these Life and Letters columns (with a later series from the TLS) by the name A Kind of Journal, for they possess the kind of narrative impetus that makes classic diaries such as Woodforde’s or Kilvert’s so compelling. But they were also a poet’s work-books, just as living in rural Gloucestershire, as he had since 1963, was to be in a poet’s workshop.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

Waiting for Utopia

The Soviet Union was a nation of bus stops. Cars were hard to come by, so a vast public transport network took up the slack. Buses not only bore workers to their labours, but also breathed life into the ‘union’ itself by taking travellers from town to taiga to desert to seaside. In remoter parts of the country, bus shelters mattered even more than buses, providing convenient places for people to gather, drink and socialise. They were caravanserai for the motor age, and while the empire they served no longer exists, most of them stand right where it left them. If they are in various stages of ruin now, they are all the more attractive for it.