More from Books

Thursday

Zenga Longmore

Imagine Eastenders directed by David Lynch

Ghostly doings are afoot in Edwardian London. Choking fog rolls over the treacle- black Thames. Braziers cast eerie shadows in grimy alleyways. Two sinister doctors hunch beside a dying fire in the appropriately-named Printer’s Devil Court, ‘a dark house, with steep, narrow stairs’. Having supped on a hearty repast of lamb stew and treacle pudding, the ‘shadowy’ Dr Walter reveals his dastardly scheme. ‘We are proposing... to bring the dead back to life.’ Our hero young Dr Meredith is appalled. This is diabolical! Derivative of Frankenstein! Not quite. The experiment results in a phantom rather than a monster. No gothic element is spared in this tale. The author has surpassed herself.

Anthony Cummins

A jaunty romp of rape and pillage through the 16th century

The Brethren, by Robert Merle, who died at the age of 95 ten years ago, was originally published in 1977, the first in a sequence of historical novels that sold millions in their native France but have gone untranslated until now. Set in a plague-ridden, conflict-ravaged 16th century, rife with beheadings, hangings, abductions and rape, it’s a visceral yet strangely jaunty chronicle of provincial life after the Reformation. The title refers to a partnership between war veterans Jean de Siorac and Jean de Sauveterre. One is a libidinous medical graduate, the other a more dour Protestant with a dim view of his pal’s bastard-fathering ways. Together they hang up their swords and use their accumulated plunder to hoover up land in southwest France and build a dynasty.

Joanna Kavenna

Flawed, unproductive and heroic: the real Ernest Shackleton

Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and, besides, the urge to dwell on a frozen ocean or forbidding glacier is maverick in itself. In the so-called Heroic Age (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) both Poles remained ‘unconquered’ and the margin between glory and opprobrium was slender. Frederick Cook and Robert Peary claimed that they reached the North Pole in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Their accounts were later discredited. When Roald Amundsen beat Captain Robert Scott to the South Pole in 1911, he was accused (unfairly) of concealing his plans and was summarily shunned by the British establishment. Scott meanwhile forced his expedition on, but in doing so condemned it to disaster.

Mark Mason

A compendium to match Radio 4: boring, but somehow gripping

When you think about it, Radio 4 is mostly a pile of old toss. Money Box qualifies as an anaesthetic, the dramas couldn’t act their way to the nearest street corner and Sheila Dillon from The Food Programme just needs a slap. That’s even before we reach the five most depressing words in the English language: ‘And now, You and Yours.’ Yet we love it. The bits of the station’s output we do like, we worship. Forget Magna Carta and the NHS, when the barricades go up then I, along with all the other Four Whores, will be fighting myself to a bloody stump in defence of Corrie Corfield and Today. This book, a lists-and-break-out-boxes tribute to the station, is very like Radio 4 itself: much of it I found boring, yet I couldn’t resist sticking with it.

John McEwen

To be astonished by nature, look no further than Claxton

Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People, was a tour de force, taking the birds of the entire world as its subject. Craig Brown described it as ‘the sort of masterpiece that comes along only once or twice a decade’. Expectations could not be higher. Claxton is a selection from his journalism for the Guardian and other publications, written since he moved to Claxton village, southeast of Norwich, 12 years ago. The 140 entries are arranged in 12 chronological chapters to form a naturalist’s journal of a Claxton year. Many have been radically revised so that of his eight books this ‘has taken the longest to write’.

Sydney Giffard

History Parade

We left the Scout hut shortly after dark, to ambush regulars acting as invaders. Later, there was to be a demonstration of the use of a primitive stun grenade, designed dramatically to improve morale in the under-gunned Home Guard. A Dunkirk veteran CSM from Caterham had been driven down in a staff car to show us the correct application of this novel weapon, bakelite casing, with one small metal pin. After patrolling in the silent dark, failing to intercept our good-humoured opponents, we assembled among the prostrate sarsen stones beyond the Lacket, for a quiet smoke. Then we fell in to watch the CSM, who threw the stun grenade, followed it in and, as it exploded, fell, killed by the pin. He lay there, still, between two sarsen stones. It was absolutely stunning. No one spoke.

Rachel Redford

An epic performance that brings a lost novelist back to life

Hugh Walpole, now almost forgotten, was a literary giant. Descended from the younger brother of the 18th-century prime minister Robert Walpole, he was a prodigiously fast writer who seldom revised his work, producing at least a book a year between 1909 and his death in 1941. But who reads him these days? His books sold in vast numbers, including in America, where on his lecture tours in the 1920s he was more lionised than Dickens had been 80 years earlier. With his accumulated wealth he became a discerning art collector and left a fabulous legacy of paintings to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam.

Thursday

Rory Dunlop

David Nicholls’ Us: Alan Partridge’s Grand Tour

Us, David Nicholls’s first novel since the hugely successful One Day, is about a couple who have been married for 20 years. Douglas Petersen, the anally retentive middle-aged narrator, never feels like an equal to Connie, his attractive and witty wife. On the opening page, Connie tells him that she thinks she wants to leave him when their son Albie goes off to university. But first they are to take a long-planned family holiday — a Grand Tour of the great cities of Europe. Douglas sees this as his last chance to save his marriage, and also to rebuild his broken relationship with Albie. In an introduction, Nicholls explains that the inspiration for the book came when he was travelling round continental Europe publicising One Day.

Caroline Moorehead

Picasso’s dealer

When she was four, Anne Sinclair had her portrait painted by Marie Laurencin. It is a charming picture, a little dark-brown-haired girl with a white bow, very blue eyes and a white and pink striped blouse, and it was commissioned by Sinclair’s grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, one of the handful of most influential Parisian art dealers of the 1920s and 1930s. More interested in politics than family history, Sinclair — for 13 years the host of the prestigious French weekly television news show 7 sur 7 — waited until she turned 60 to explore the trunks of papers in her mother’s attic.

Mark McGinness

Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly – crusaders, chancers, spongers

Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests felled in the name of Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Freeman-Mitford than the Brontë sisters. Jessica alone produced two volumes of memoirs, Hons and Rebels (1960) and A Fine Old Conflict (1977); her collected letters (Decca, 2006) came in at a thumping 700 pages and in 2010, Irrepressible, Leslie Brody’s biography of Jessica’s years in the United States, appeared. ‘Enough already’, one can hear her American sisters cry. Yet with Churchill’s Rebels, Meredith Whitford, a South Australian author of historical novels, has brought a clear eye and a fresh pen to the early life of Jessica and her first husband, Esmond Romilly.

John Levett

The Afterlives of the Anarchists

Those staples in their foursquare silver strips  Stacked upwards like some brutalist   Manhattan office block  Were teased apart by fingertips And, jammed down in the stapler at half-cock,   Sent shockwaves up my wrist    Then pushed back in    They pierced the skin,   Refusing to align With folded A4’s creased and crooked spine. Another bead of blood. Another botch.  Another pamphlet not quite straight   To join the dodgy pile,  Another squat for Special Branch to watch.

Alan Judd

Why Jonathan Powell thinks we’ll have to negotiate with al-Qa’eda

Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about which he has written authoritatively, and since leaving office has set up his own NGO which advises on negotiations with terrorists worldwide. This book, subtitled ‘How to End Armed Conflicts’, is offered as a guide to negotiators. They should find it very useful, packed with quotes and anecdotes from negotiations with, amongst others, the Tamils, ETA, the IRA, the ANC, Columbia’s FARC and, of course, that hardiest of all perennials, Israel-Palestine.

Cressida Connolly

If you don’t think this novel is practically perfect, I’ll send you a replacement

If there were a harvest festival to honour the bounty of the autumnal book crop, the choir would be in especially good voice this year. There is much cause for rejoicing, with work from Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters. Oddly enough in these secular days, a bookish vicar could glean a sermon from any one of three new novels — by Ian McEwan, Michel Faber and Marilynne Robinson — in each of which the Bible is central. Faber’s book is said to be a science-fiction caper in which the holy book is exported to another planet, where alien inhabitants give it an enthusaistic reception. McEwan’s is a rationalist refutation of literalist Bible reading.

William Leith

The hell of being Michael Palin

In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. At the start of this period, he was about to become a hugely successful presenter of travel programmes. Ten years later, he was wondering if this was, in fact, what he wanted to be. ‘Should I accept that this is what I’m best suited for?’, he writes. Or should he try to do something else, like be an ‘arts presenter’ or a novelist? His own verdict: ‘I don’t know.’ Palin is obviously a man of great qualities. For instance, he’s almost always an optimist, but never a bore. He’s clever, he’s charming, he has good taste.

Philip Marsden

First ash dieback, then the world’s scariest beetle

The ash tree may lack the solidity of oak, the magnificence of beech or the ancient mystique of yew. In terms of habitat it may support fewer species of fauna, insect and fungus than other trees. It may, in this country at least, occupy a smaller cultural space than many of its woodland neighbours: according to Oliver Rackham, the combined works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Tennyson mention oak 134 times, pine 113 times and ash just 23. But with its delicate compound leaves, the pale bark and the swoop of its lower branches (likened by the writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin to the arc of a diver), ash is the prettiest of our common trees. Its timber has peculiar qualities. Both malleable and strong, it was favoured by spear-makers and wheelwrights.

Paul Routledge

Geoffrey Boycott’s new book would be of more use to English cricketers than a regiment of shrinks

After 13 barren years Yorkshire is back at the top of county cricket, where Geoffrey Boycott believes it has a place almost of right. We took the County Championship this year, beating Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge by an innings and 152 runs. Ryan Sidebottom finished off the home side to post a splendid match performance of 9-65. He doesn’t get a mention in this book, though his father Arnie does. In a part of the world where cricket is almost a religion, this is seen as a restoration of the natural order of things. It used to be said that when the county was low in the rankings, men read the Yorkshire Post upside down out of shame. Boycott played for Yorkshire for 24 years from 1962, and captained the side from 1971 to 1978.

James Walton

Colm Toibin’s restraint – like his characters’ – is quietly overwhelming

In Colm Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel Brooklyn, Eilis Lacy, somewhat to her own surprise, leaves 1950s Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s own home town in County Wexford where several of his books are set) for a new life in the United States. Before that, Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, having the same friends and neighbours… that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, in Nora Webster, we meet a woman who has done all of the above — a contrast made clear in the opening pages when Eilis’s mother makes a brief appearance to lament the fact that her daughter didn’t stay in Ireland.

Andrew Taylor

An unorthodox detective novel about Waitrose-country paedos

W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he claimed was similar to an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. He suggested among other things that the genre allows the addict to indulge in a fantasy in which our guilt is purged, and we are restored to a state of innocence, to the Garden of Eden. When literary novelists turn to crime fiction (as they so often do these days), the results are not always happy. Susan Hill is a welcome exception. Her Simon Serrailler novels have developed into a series whose appeal stretches beyond its genre. Why? Perhaps Auden gives us a clue.

Alan Strachan

From Trot to Thatcher: the life of Kika Markham

In a varied career, the actress Kika Markham has regularly played real-life charcters, including, on television, Mrs Thatcher — piquant casting for a lifelong anti-capitalist — and memorably on the stage, in David Hare’s The Permanent Way. the novelist Nina Bawden, survivor of the Potters Bar rail crash in which her husband, Austen Kark died. Markham’s memoir of her life over 30 years with her actor husband Corin Redgrave focuses on the traumatic period, following his recovery from prostate cancer, when in 2005 he suffered a heart attack, causing significant memory loss until his death five years later from an aneurysm on the brain.

Justin Marozzi

More derring dos and don’ts from Paddy Leigh Fermor

Recent years have seen the slim but splendid Patrick Leigh Fermor oeuvre swell considerably. In 2008 came In Tearing Haste, an entertaining collection of letters to and from Deborah Devonshire, followed last year by The Broken Road, the posthumously sparkling and long-awaited completion of the ‘Great Trudge’ trilogy, which finally delivered the 18-year-old Paddy from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Now comes another volume, setting out in full for the first time one of the great moments in a life heavily laced with glamour and incident. It takes some chutzpah to kidnap a German general — and serious presence of mind to get away with it.