More from Books

Thursday

Peter Parker

David Hockney, our most popular and hardworking living artist, returns to the easel

The first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography of David Hockney ended in the summer of 1975. The 38-year-old painter had just returned to Paris, where he was then living, ‘energised’ by the widespread acclaim that greeted his designs for the Glyndebourne production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Energy was something Hockney would need in the years ahead when the time he always wanted to devote to painting was frequently interrupted by side-projects such as stage design or an investigation into earlier painters’ use of the camera lucida, sudden passions for new technology, and the increasing demands of celebrity.

Charlotte Moore

Andrew Marr thinks he’s a novelist. I don’t

It’s September 2017, and our still apparently United Kingdom is in the throes of a referendum campaign. The wise, charming, beloved Prime Minister, successor to ‘the shortlived Johnson administration’, wants to keep us in the EU. Olivia Kite, a spike-heeled mixture of Elizabeth I (Horrible Histories version) and Rebekah Brooks, heads the ‘No to Europe’ brigade. The country, showing rather more passion on the issue than is quite credible, is divided down the middle. At the crucial moment the PM drops dead at his desk. Without him, the ‘Yes’ vote will be lost. Only his inner circle know he’s died. What to do?

Nicky Haslam

Cecil Beaton, the bitch

Beaton was the great inventor. Apart from inventing not only himself but his look, his voice, his persona and a glamorous family, he invented the a in photography, the Edwardian period for the stage and films, the most outré of costumes, the elaborate for his rooms, a cartoon-like simplicity for his drawings, and the dream of being a playwright and painter. What he didn’t need to invent was being a writer, at which, as his many books, and particularly this one prove, he was a natural. His lifelong observance of the world around him gave him the power to describe on paper, always acutely and often superbly, landscapes, cities, colours, nature. And of course people. He was a snob but not snobbish. Alice B.

Roddy Doyle

And one more for the road – excerpts from Roddy Doyle’s latest

9-12-12 — See the spacer died. —Wha’ spacer? —The Sky at Night fella. —Bobby Moore. —Patrick Moore. —That’s him, yeah. Did he die? —Yeah. —That’s a bit sad. He was good, wasn’t he? —Brilliant. Very English as well. —How d’yeh mean? —Well, like — he’d look into his telescope an’ his eyebrows would go mad cos he was so excited abou’ all the fuckin’ stars an’ the planets an’ tha’. An’ the words — —They fuckin’ poured out of him. —Exactly. It was brilliant. But if he’d been Irish, he’d just’ve said, So wha’? They’re only fuckin’ stars.

Judith Flanders

Beer and skittles and Lucian Freud and Quentin Crisp – a Hampstead misery memoir

The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older tradition, the memoir of childhood pleasure, of charm and humour. Some of the greats — Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece, Diana Holman-Hunt’s My Grandmothers and I — continue to be enjoyed; others every bit as good — Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons trilogy — must be snapped up secondhand. Marjorie Ann Watt’s Slideshow never quite reaches these heights, but is nevertheless a welcome addition to this genre. Watts herself is a painter and illustrator, and here she uses words to depict the lost world of the prewar bohemian Hampstead upper-middle-classes.

Alastair Smart

If you hate art-world show-offs, Grayson Perry, what’s with the frocks?

At the time it was all too easy to get sucked in by the hype. In 2013, Grayson Perry was the first visual artist ever to give the Reith Lectures and — unlike so many of his dry, earnest predecessors — here was a speaker ready to fulfil all three Reithian aims: to inform, educate and entertain. (‘I still find commercial art galleries intimidating,’ he observed in the first lecture. ‘From the frighteningly chic gallery girls on the front desk to the reverential hush around arcane lumps of stuff inside.’) Here also was a transvestite potter from Essex being welcomed to the heart of the British cultural establishment, a one-time outsider who’d made his name with pots depicting fetishism and bondage.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton. His academic career was now interrupted for six years: nominally commissioned in the Life Guards, he plunged deep into the murky world of secret intelligence. Before that, and before he turned to Modern History, Trevor-Roper had been a brilliant classicist, winning a string of university prizes.

Hilary Spurling

Literature’s least attractive power couple

This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner was initially Pam Johnson, a rising literary star, 28 years old and happily married with five novels under her belt and a fiction column on the Liverpool Post, when she singled out a novel by an obscure Civil Service scientist called C.P. Snow. He responded with a fan letter assuring her she could if she wanted ‘become quite easily the best woman writer in the world’. Snow at 35 was tubby, pop-eyed and lumbering but his effect on her was electric, ‘like a current of magic energy’.

Alan Johnson

‘Like Superman stopping a runaway train’: when Bobby Moore tackled Jairzinho

Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than the story of how Bobby Moore only just made it to the West Ham ground for his first team debut against Manchester United. Today the players arrive from their luxury mansions insulated from the world in a Lamborghini or Maserati a few hours before kick-off to be pampered by an army of physios, clinicians, sports scientists and dieticians. Young Bobby had to catch a bus from his parents’ home in Barking to travel the three miles to Upton Park along with thousands of fans going to watch him play. Indeed there were so many that the Hammers left-half found himself at the back of a long queue at the bus stop.

Karl Miller

Hugo Williams’s new poems confirm his national-treasure status

Around 1960, I went to work with the literary staff of The Spectator, where I was followed, in a later world, by the poet and diarist Hugo Williams. At this early stage it was possible to feel close to the family that could be inferred from his poems: a mother and a film-star father injured in the war, two brothers, a sister. He was thought, from school onward, to be a member of the jeunesse dorée. His satires could look as if they had issued from the Albany, or other Regency revival buildings. His poems were recognised from the first as elegant and intelligent. Many of them were poems that good manners might write.

Ferdinand Mount

Religion does not poison everything – everything poisons religion

It slips so easily off the tongue. In fact, it’s a modern mantra. ‘Religion causes all the wars.’ Karen Armstrong claims to have heard it tossed off by American psychiatrists, London taxi-drivers and pretty much everyone else. Yet it’s an odd thing to say. For a start, which wars are we talking about? Among the many causes advanced for the Great War, ranging from the train timetables on the continent to the Kaiser’s withered left arm, I have never heard religion mentioned. Same with the second world war.

Patrick Marnham

A salute to Georges Simenon

One hundred years ago an 11-year-old boy called Georges Simenon was getting accustomed to the presence of the German army in Liège. Together with his mother and his younger brother he had been forced to hide in the cellar of their terraced house on the island of Outremeuse to avoid the firing squads. The Belgian fortress outside the city had resisted for longer than expected and had inflicted casualties on the invading army. The Uhlan lancers were so angry that 200 of the Simenons’ neighbours were lined up and shot. Once Belgian resistance had ended, the occupation of Liège became a quieter affair. For a while Madame Simenon even took in German soldiers as lodgers. Years later Georges recalled his youthful surprise at the number of German officers who wore corsets.

Blair Worden

Rebellion without a cause: Peter Ackroyd’s curious Civil War

How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s book, the third of what have been announced as six volumes of his History of England, covers the period from the accession of James I in 1603 to the overthrow of his grandson James II in 1688. His priority is established by his title and by the facing portraits of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell on the front cover. He gives proportionately much more space to the conflicts of 1640–60 than to events on either side of them.

A.N. Wilson

This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece

Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable feast. Even The Spectator at its best, however, could not quite rival the periodical the Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik) under the editorship of M.N. Katkov. This phenomenal editor, in the year 1866, secured serial publication of the two giants of Russian fiction. Tolstoy had been slow in giving Katkov enough material for continuous serial publication of War and Peace. To fill the gap, Katkov enlisted Dostoevsky. Readers could enjoy episodes from War and Peace in the spring numbers of the magazine. Then in May, they could start Crime and Punishment.

Thursday

Colin Falck

Left

Who is there left that you can talk to? Days go by. ‘Friendless, deserted’ (The Beggar’s Opera?) — left in the lurch (what lurch?) — you languish. Time to make plans to die? You box up some age-stained letters, set aside more stuff, but your heart’s not in it. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Another of your thoughtless friends falls off the perch. Those language-teachers, those sergeant-majors, those not-quite-wives — how old they must all be now! And those types at school: grumbling, frowning, living their boxed-up lives — Mr Cartwright-Brown would be a hundred and thirty-nine. All gone... Time to wait out our world’s decline? (Wait even longer and watch the planet cool...?) Be serious. It’s not a dress rehearsal, OK...

Sofka Zinovieff

When Rachel Cusk went to Greece: would she be nice or nasty?

Last year in Athens, rumours raced about Rachel Cusk’s creative writing classes at the British Council. Some of the (mostly Athenian) pupils revered her for her intelligence and pitiless honesty, while others reviled her for her ‘colonial attitude’ and an apparent antipathy towards Greeks. One might suspect Greeks of tending towards intense emotional reactions, but the phlegmatic British have had no less divided opinions about Cusk’s books. The author of seven novels, she was amongst Granta’s best young writers in 2003, yet her memoirs about the horrors of having babies (A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother) and about the break-up of her ten-year marriage (Aftermath) provoked outrage as well as adulation.

Christopher Howse

Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking photographs’. One of the most successful of these is a black and white image of male and female figures: ‘Gruesome and gaunt, they look like extras from an early piece of zombie cinema.’ They are, it soon becomes clear, oddments saved by firemen from a blaze at Madame Tussauds in 1925. Madame Tussaud, the author reminds us, ‘would ‘tiptoe through the piles of corpses behind the guillotine to discover the most illustrious of the heads, and would promptly make casts of them, her hands bathed in their blood’.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How dare this author trash one of the great screenwriters of the 20th century?

Should one say ‘vicious circle’ or ‘vicious cycle’? That’s a question that just goes round and round inside my head. In the case of the American novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, he has always abhorred reviewers (‘whores and failures’, in his eyes), and the reviewers have returned the compliment. When he was paid $400,000 for the script of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, it was the highest price ever for a screenplay, and the pundits were quick to pan it. The public differed, and the film was a smash hit (the script, of course, is a masterpiece). But it’s interesting to consider why Goldman has always been quite so critical of the critics.

Alexander Starritt

Margaret Atwood settles her accounts with this new short story collection

Margaret Atwood is in the first rank of literary fame and her trophy cabinet is handsomely stocked; yet she has never fully shaken off the suspicion that her politics have spoiled her writing. Despite the practised prose, delicate observation and steady-handed drip-feed of plot, there sometimes rises off the page a teacherly spirit that grabs you by the lapels and says, ‘Now listen here’. Gender relations, climate change; Atwood would probably say these subjects are more important than whether the direction of a book isn’t just a bit too obvious. And maybe she’s right. But it bodes well for the reader that in Stone Mattress, her new collection of ‘tales’, she gravitates towards a more personal subject.

James Walton

Howard Jacobson’s J convinced me that I’d just read a masterpiece

At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard Jacobson. It’s set in a future Britain where some sort of apocalypse — known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’ — has taken place several decades ago. It also contains virtually no jokes. Yet, from within this unfamiliar framework, some familiar concerns soon emerge. In 2010, The Finkler Question was hailed as the first comic novel to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. But the book darkened considerably towards the end, with Jacobson unsmilingly warning his readers — and especially any fellow Jews who regard such warnings as ‘hysterical’ — about the continuing, potentially lethal dangers of anti-Semitism.