More from Books

Thursday

Mark Mason

When Geoff Boycott was a DJ in a Sydney nightclub

Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the people who are trying to do those things. Frank Keating, late of this and several other parishes and now just late, understood that truth, which is what made him such a great sports writer. Matthew Engel explains in the introduction to this anthology that his old colleague ‘liked sportsmen and made lasting friendships with them. This would be impossible nowadays.’ Most of the pieces report on those friendships rather than on matches: by portraying sportsmen as they were off the pitch Keating revealed what made them succeed on it.

James Walton

Those weren’t the days

If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined. Her previous novel, We Had It So Good, followed a group of students from the Oxford of the late 1960s to the present day, where they were bewildered to find themselves in the unthinkable position of being quite old. Now her new one does the same with a group of students from the York of the early 1970s. Inevitably, then, the two books do have similar themes, as youthful ideals come up against the annoyingly intractable world.

Thursday

Charlotte Mitchell

A pork-pie and Capri-Sun fuelled hike around England’s moors

‘No, no’ I said, when The Spectator’s literary editor rang up, ‘I’m sure you must be able to find someone who really wants to read another postcolonial analysis of the figure of the North African in English literature.’ But the book turned out to be about the other kind of moor, so I said yes, though not without some anxiety that it might be like Eeyore’s Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad. Luckily, William Atkins’s book, though it acknowledges that moors can be bleak, isolated and unforgiving, especially for permanent residents and those scraping a living off the land, is on the whole quite cheerful.

Fleur Adcock

Shorthand

Might you not have found him a little exhausting, though? If, for example, you were his mother, not given to innovative thinking yourself, and had this youth (in 1920 the word teenager was not current), forever coming up with a new interpretation of Genesis or sketching plans for a contraption that must be at least electrical, if not dangerous. And now this: a small ad in the Auckland Star – SHORTHAND in three hours. New system, easily learned. Send 5/- for course. C. Adcock, Te Rau-a-moa. That was in June; but on reflection three hours may have struck him as less than five shillings’ worth. So in December: SHORTHAND in three days. Write C. Adcock regarding the Veasy system… Oh, yes, ha ha – Veasy: v. easy. Did you make any money, Cyril?

Richard Davenporthines

The opéra bouffe that was the Bretton Woods conference

There ought to be a comic opera about the Bretton Woods conference — Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, with its mordant libretto by Philip Hensher, should be the model. Everything about the conference was overdone. It was held in 1944 in the gargantuan Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, which provided a preposterous background of gimcrack luxury. The arrangements were as farcically managed as the Atlanta Olympics. The boy scouts who were dragooned in to help run the conference would make a wonderfully playful chorus in the Adès-Hensher opéra bouffe. There were 400 delegates from 77 countries — to say nothing of hundreds of slavering newshounds.

James Mcconnachie

A Labour MP defends the Empire – and only quotes Lenin twice

In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is —  you might expect more hand-wringing from a historian and Labour MP who has previously written a life of Engels. But despite quoting Marx half a dozen times (and Lenin, twice!) there is something about the idea of empire that excites Tristram Hunt. And this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote. It describes how — and indeed when and where — the imperial ideology shaped and reshaped itself.

Matthew Dennison

Not quite romantic fiction, or literary fiction, or commercial fiction – but still quite good

Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath of the second world war and the present day, and two failsafe locations, Cornwall and the Norfolk coast. But From a Distance is not commercial fiction. Barker’s narrative is sparingly studded with quotations, but this is not literary fiction either. There is a strong love interest, which does not blossom into romantic fiction. Barker’s novel is a hybrid, enjoyable, ultimately heart-warming. It lacks the freshness and charm of the earlier Hens Dancing, but recalls some of its vividness and forensically detailed scrutiny of family life. In 1946, Michael, a demobilised soldier, avoids returning to his prewar life.

John Preston

The queen, the cardinal and the greatest con France ever saw

You usually know where you are with a book that promises the story ‘would violate the laws of plausibility’ if it appeared in a novel, and that’s in deep trouble. In the case of How to Ruin a Queen, however, this is a boast with a surprising amount of substance to it. You could make it up — just about — but you’d probably have a very sore head afterwards. In 1786 Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Grand Almoner of France and scion of one of the country’s leading families, went on trial accused of having stolen a 2,800-carat diamond necklace. This was serious enough, but what was far more serious was that he was accused of having appropriated the Queen’s name to do so.

Victor Sebestyen

A Pole’s view of the Czechs. Who cares? You will

When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his editor that it was likely to fail miserably. As Mariusz Szczgieł explains, the doubts were reasonable. No one was sure if anybody in the west would be interested in what a Pole had to say about the Czechs: ‘A representative of one marginal nation writing about another marginal nation is unlikely to be a success.’ But in 2009 Gottland won the European Book Prize (a serious award; the late Tony Judt’s Postwar won it the previous year) and it has been well received throughout the continent.

Thursday

Jonathan Keates

How to survive the rain-sodden Welsh Marches

The Welsh Marches, gloriously unvisited amid their wooded hills and swift-flowing streams, have remained mysteriously off-limits to the sort of novelist eager for territorial rights to a particular landscape or locality. Apart from Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill and Mary Webb’s torrid 1920s sagas of heartache and claustrophobia in field and farmhouse, fiction has mostly steered clear of Wye, Teme and Clun and their adjacent mountains. Along comes Laura Beatty, however, not to trouble this haunting remoteness but to use it, with subtle obliquity, as a grid for mapping the emotional lives of her twin heroines, women divided by nearly four centuries.

John Akeroyd

Read this book and you’ll see why our meadows are so precious

This book is a portrait of one man’s meadow. Our now almost vanished meadowland, with its tapestry of wildflowers, abundant wildlife and rich human history, has long attracted English writers. Modern meadow books are usually copiously illustrated in colour to reach the coffee-table market, but John Lewis-Stempel bravely relies on lively elegant prose. His thoughtful, discursive, often humorous and always enjoyable narrative conveys a vital message, for one cannot overemphasise how important are these last ancient meadows. They are a cultural heritage and vital store of biodiversity, not least the genetic variation of grasses, clovers and other forage plants.

David Grubb

When the Rains Came

When the rains continued the rivers rebelled, the swans moved inland and even the bank was sandbagged and we saw images of villages cut off and deserted schools and people being carried out of old folks homes and the cathedrals that somehow began to look like galleons; and as each day drenched we began to wonder how trees remained tethered by root systems and there were stories of people who refused to leave their cottages and a man and his dog got stuck in a chimney and from a distance the Malvern Hills began to look like an island.

Mark Mason

When the English cricket team toured Nazi Germany – and got smashed

Why have the Germans never been any good at cricket? This entertaining account of the MCC’s 1937 tour to the Fatherland gives some clues. Any country po-faced enough to have a ‘Society for the Encouragement of Playing Ball’ will struggle from the start. Certainly the Germans back then seemed to understand neither cricket’s equipment (‘why so much luggage?’ asked one reporter of the tourists) nor its terminology — later, during the war, letters home from British PoWs about games at their camp were censored because ‘OMWR&A’ was thought to be code. It actually stood for ‘overs, maidens, wickets, runs and average’.

Nigel Prentice

Research Centre

Beyond the measured stretch of lawns and hedges are cultivated rows where snug plastic tunnels creep. Indoors, the fantastic spores fluff up on jelly: fungus rages under glass and germination bristles. In a sealed hot-room, in tanks lined with foil predators quietly chew and scrat; aphids suck their fill of sap. A forest of corn in pots jostles in the breathless light of the glasshouse, each plant drip-fed, wired to dream on growth. This is calm towering work, where light is monastic, clean or flares briefly on a clear pane, a white coat. All builds, for the one to burst into the room with a bouquet, steal the studied scene.

Ben Hamilton

If you prefer banal symbols freighted with meaning to plot, Nicola Barker is your woman

Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest novel. It’s 1984 and we are in Pett Level, Hastings, a marginal location even by Barker’s standards (previous novels have been set in Luton, Ashford, and the Isle of Sheppey), and a well-travelled man named Franklin D. Huff is investigating a series of events that took place there many years earlier. The events themselves are nebulous. Something about miracles, romantic affairs, and a saintly child deformed by thalidomide. Before Huff can find any answers, though, countryside serenity is replaced by the quirks of Barker’s reckless imagination. As is usual with Barker’s fiction, the story is a blurb-writer’s nightmare.

John Preston

There’s so much mystery around Charles Portis that we’re not even clear whether he’s alive

The American writer, Charles Portis, has had what some novelists — the more purist ones — might regard as an ideal life. While his books have seldom been big-sellers, his fans sink to their knees at the mention of his name. In the mid 1980s, two bookshop employees in New York were so smitten with Portis’s then out-of-print novel, The Dog of the South, that they bought up all 183 hardback copies on the market and put them in their bookshop window. The books sold out in days. Contacted in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he writes in an office behind a bar called Cash McCool’s, Portis said that he was ‘surprised and pleased by the attention’.

Jane Ridley

The Paris of Napoleon III was one big brothel – which is why the future Edward VII loved it

Stephen Clarke lives in Paris and writes book with titles such as 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. Dirty Bertie is a book in the same line — a comic history which manages to combine his brand of jaunty, bawdy humour (not mine, I confess) with being genuinely informative about French history. Clarke claims that there is a gap in the biography of King Edward VII. Biographers have not said nearly enough about Bertie’s jaunts to Paris. He is absolutely right about this. To Bertie’s British biographers Paris is a collection of clichés about grandes horizontales and a few well-worn anecdotes.

Clare Mulley

Reliving the most famous last stand of the French Resistance

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance in the second world war, there is an awful inevitability to this book. Tragedy looms like the great plateau itself, overshadowing the individual stories of the people who lived, fought and died in these mountains. The strategic and tactical failings that led to their defeat run like strata through the history: a lack of clarity in Allied communications; failure to deliver sufficient heavy weapons or reinforcements; the mistaken use of a guerrilla army as a fixed, defensive force and, above all, the tendency to let diplomacy and politics trump military common sense.

Melanie McDonagh

The best new children’s books

A children’s author and illustrator, Jonathan Emmet, created a stir recently by saying that women are effectively gatekeepers of children’s books — chiefly picture books. They constitute the majority of the buyers, reviewers and prizegivers – and the result is that boys are shortchanged. Too few pirates and dragons — or the wrong sort — and too little peril, too little technology, too little non-fiction. Naturally, he’s had to spend a good deal of energy since explaining no offence was intended. Actually, I think he’s right, and not just about picture books.

Harry Mount

What made Romans LOL?

At the beginning of The Art of Poetry, Horace tells a story that, he promises, will make anyone laugh: ‘If a painter wanted to put a horse’s head on a human neck, would you be able to keep your laughter in?’ Would you? I certainly would. That’s the thing about Roman jokes: they’re not really very funny now. In 2008, when the comic Jim Bowen did an act based on the fourth-century AD Roman joke book, Philogelos (or The Laughter Lover), the jokes hadn’t improved with age: ‘A man complains that a slave he was sold had died. “When he was with me, he never did any such thing!” replies the seller.’ Did that really have them rolling in the aisles in the Colosseum?