More from Books

Thursday

Susan Hill

Don’t let creative writing students read this book

One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way, not extracts. This morning I went into the park I often pass on my journeys to somewhere else. I can now say that I have been into this park and not always passed it by. Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before. One of these accounts of a dream is by Lydia Davis. One is not. I am a college girl. I tell a younger college girl, a dancer, that the sun is very low in the sky now. Its light must be filling the caves by the sea. I am watching a man lift up the sails of a windmill in his bare hands. The sails catch the light and appear to be spinning. One of these observations is by Lydia Davis. One is not.

John Sutherland

A Beckett fagend rescued from a bin

Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For me they happened around the same time, aged 18. The dramatic initiation was a Colchester rep performance of Waiting for Godot, in 1956. Twenty-five years after his first mature work was written Beckett had hit England with the burst of an unexploded wartime bomb. The general response at the time was one of fascinated bafflement. That has dispersed over the last half century but the fascination — as the headlines accompanying the publication of this Beckettian fragment witness — remains undiminished. The story, ‘Echo’s Bones’, is an early work but in no sense juvenile.

Josh Ekroy

In Winwick Churchyard

The gravestones are laughing. They tilt at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen blotching their honourable faces. Seated in uneven rows in their auditorium they note church-goers squinch the gravel path to the embossed door. Some lean backwards in mock amazement, others forward, study the half-mown grass or slap their thighs, whisper behind their hands — only one stares in vertical — at man that is born of woman, a joke they refuse to explain. But the upright rectangle between the medlar and the lych-gate, marbled in its twenty-first century is excluded from the pleasantries, is bullied after lights-out by the listing seniors, its jar of wilting pansies the butt of scorn. A much missed mum and nan? Don’t make them lurch. Get real: become obscure.

Anne Applebaum

An escape to the country that became a struggle for Poland’s soul

In 1993, John Borrell, a longtime foreign correspondent with no permanent home, decided to abandon journalism. Tired of writing about wars and violence — he had been in Beirut, Rwanda and Nicaragua — he determined to throw himself into European rural life. But instead of a year in Provence, he chose 20 years in Kaszubia, northeast Poland. Borrell, originally from New Zealand, had married a Pole. They bought an exquisite piece of land beside a pristine lake, and there they built a boutique hotel. I was a Warsaw correspondent at about the same time as Borrell, and remember a certain amount of head-shaking over this venture.

Julie Burchill

Arianna Huffington meets Madame de Menopause

A-Huff’s career has been remarkable for the contrast between hard-headed social advancement (‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’) and addle-pated spiritual questing. In this she resembles an older, colder Gwyneth Paltrow, who coincidentally came out with her ‘consciously uncoupling’ corker as I was ploughing my way through Thrive — such a G.P. cookbook title! Like Paltrow, who recently vowed that after years of lying she was ‘starting to get honest: the path to honesty has been one of the most beautiful, painful and interesting lessons of my life’, A-Huff attempts to portray trauma as a lifestyle accessory and growth enhancer.

Henrietta Garnett

If you think Virginia Woolf’s novels are good, you should try her bread

I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their cooking. During the course of her research for this book I met, got to know and became friends with Jan Ondaatje Rolls. She has certainly chosen a novel way to portray that well-known group of friends about whom so much has been written that it’s hard to imagine there could be anything more to unearth. Hers is a sprightly approach. By defining them through their dinners, she makes us see the Bloomsberries from another, more domestic, more gleeful point of view: the kaleidoscope is twisted again.

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson: ‘The first book that made me cry’

I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or adults. It was originally published on an adult list but I read it when I was about ten, Lovejoy’s age. She’s the heroine of this book, a small, strong-willed girl with the tenacity and determination of 20 adults. She’s got a feckless mother, no father at all, and scarcely any friends. It’s not perhaps surprising. Lovejoy is fierce and selfish because she had to learn to be tough to survive. She snatches, she steals, she’s witheringly scornful if she doesn’t like anyone. I knew as I read the book that I’d be very wary of Lovejoy in real life — but even so, I cared about her passionately.

Thursday

Kathryn Simmonds

April

Spring again   But from where no telling     Sweet as the spring       That went before         Same old story     But still compelling   Blossom reminding What blossom is for   Question the trees   But they’re not telling     How they obey       An impossible law         Question the mind     But it’s not telling   How it gives back What was gone for sure   Something stirs   In a blacked-out dwelling     Forces the lock       Of a double-locked door         That face again!

Nigel Jones

The one-man spy factory who changed history

With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent revelation that the aristocrat superspy John Bingham was the model for George Smiley, there is little doubt that Britain is currently going through one of its fitful bouts of spy fever, and this book can only add to the excitement. Philby has a walk-on role in Jason Webster’s gripping and stylish new account of the extraordinary career of Juan Pujol, aka Agent Garbo — and a multiplicity of other monikers — arguably the second world war’s most successful double agent apart from Philby himself.

A.N. Wilson

Oriel: the college that shaped the spiritual heart of 19th century Britain

Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of relative obscurity in the intervening seven centuries, it has also, at other times, been at the very centre of the intellectual life, not only of the university but of the nation. In the early 19th century, the Senior Common Room was dominated by the Noetics. These broad churchmen, who included Thomas Arnold, a fellow of the college before he became a famous head-master, believed in the acceptance of utilitarian economics, but also an application of Christian principles to society at large. Against them, and in the same common room, were the high churchmen or Tractarians, the most hypnotic of whom, John Henry Newman, was the closest Oxford ever got to possessing a guru.

Vernon Bogdanor

White, blue-collar, grey-haired rebels

In the 2010 general election, Ukip gained nearly a million votes — over 3 per cent — three times as many as the Greens, and nearly twice as many as the SNP. Unlike those parties, it won no seats, but its intervention almost certainly cost the Conservatives an overall majority at Westminster. The paradoxical consequence was to hand the balance of power at Westminster to the most pro-European party in British politics, the Liberal Democrats. In the local elections last year, Ukip won 24 per cent of the vote, and is well placed to win the European parliament elections in May. Its impact in next year’s general election is likely to be even greater than in 2010. So far, explanations of the Ukip phenomenon have been long on assertion but short on evidence.

Peter Parker

Brains with green fingers

‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’ This is the remedy espoused by Candide at the end of Voltaire’s satirical novel, published ten years earlier, and the literal and metaphorical cultivating of gardens is the subject of Damon Young’s sprightly and stimulating little book. Young examines the relationship between gardening and philosophy in the life and work of 11 writers, from the 18th to the 20th century, topping and tailing these individual essays with a consideration of the Ancient Greeks.

Michael Paraskos

Philip Marlowe returns with bark but no bite

With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private dick, Philip Marlowe. Perhaps it’s inevitable that Benjamin Black’s reboot of Raymond Chandler’s great creation does not have the bite of Chandler in an age when the casual racism, sexism and downright class snobbery of mid-century America is not easy to articulate if you want to keep an audience sympathetic. But still, Black’s love of Chandler’s harebrained plots, stock characters and corny one-liners produces a tale that is hugely entertaining. Inevitably this centres on a stunning blonde, Clare Cavendish, who walks into Marlowe’s sleazy downtown office with a missing-person case.

Philip Ziegler

The Thucydides of court gossip? Steady on…

Sir Brian Unwin leads off with some decidedly questionable assertions. He wonders why the first of his two subjects, the Comtesse de Boigne, should have been ‘ignored or un-noticed by most historians’ — curious words to apply to a woman whose words are quoted in virtually every biography or history of her period. As to his second subject, Fanny Burney, he describes her as a ‘great novelist’. Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla make pleasant reading and were vastly successful in their time, but ‘great’ is surely pushing it a bit? In the vast gulf that separates Barbara Cartland from Virginia Woolf, Burney is nearer the latter than the former but a considerable way from both.

Mark Mason

Mortar fire, weddings, camels, the French revolution: all kind of things get in the way of cricket

It isn’t just the elk, either. Also bringing proceedings to a halt in this wonderful anthology are camels (Bahrain), cows and donkeys (Botswana), unexploded landmines (Rwanda, silly mid-on), people learning to drive (East Timor), punch-ups (Bermuda), low cloud (Christmas Island, 300 metres above sea-level), mortars (Iraq, though not during the game held by coalition forces in the ballroom-sized anteroom of Saddam’s abandoned North Palace) and weddings (the ground on Ascension Island has a church inside its boundary). For the record, the elk (Finland) was twice the size of a horse. Even when play is possible, life can still be tricky.

Owen Matthews

How did revolution become Istanbul’s new normal?

On a recent weekend I was thinking of taking my sons to downtown Istanbul to do some bazaar browsing. ‘Bad idea’,  a fellow expatriate warned me, ‘revolution on Taxim Square. Again.’ Revolt has become the new normal in Istanbul, a constant of urban life to be followed like the weather. Every few months the ritual dance erupts, chanting crowds on one side and sinister and well-drilled riot police on the other, followed by water cannon and the artillery-like noise of tear-gas canisters being fired into the crowd. How has Turkey come to this? Twelve years ago, Turkey’s then-new prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to be an ‘Islamic Democrat’ in the sense that Germany’s Christian Democrats were Christians.

Amanda Craig

Sex and squalor in San Francisco

Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room, however, the setting is not present-day America but that of 1876. Blanche is travelling on a train with her new friend Jenny. She hears several loud cracks and feels something hot and wet fall on her face. When she collects her senses, Jenny lies dead. Like Kate Atkinson, Donoghue straddles the literary and the crime genre. Room, inspired by the discovery of a number of women abducted and impregnated by their captors, should have won the 2010 Orange Prize and didn’t — perhaps because its subject matter was simply too controversial. Frog Music, like Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter, is a return to a historical setting.

Thursday

Byron Rogers

When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door

John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to get given a sword, which he could then brandish. After all, he knew about swords; they were things that came out of props baskets in his cavalry epics, but that was in films. Unfortunately in real life he found he had an arthritic thumb, which meant that having once drawn one he needed help to put the sword back in its scabbard. It had not been like that in his films, where he had only to say the word for anything to happen. There he could put a coal mine on top of a mountain in How Green Was My Valley, and farm the desert in his Westerns. But the first film he made in the navy was real life with a vengeance.

Tobias Grey

‘A dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’

Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary William Ormsby-Gore presented a far grislier picture of Palestine on the eve of the second world war when he described it as ‘full of arms and bitterness, and there are few who do good and many that do evil’. That précis is proved sadly accurate many times over in Patrick Bishop’s gripping The Reckoning, about the fatal shooting and subsequent martyrdom of the Zionist freedom fighter (or terrorist — take your pick), Avraham Stern. As characters go Stern is compelling in a car-crash kind of way.

Marcus Berkmann

When posters told us our place

As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing co-ordinator’ at the National Archives, has collated this splendid collection of posters issued by various government agencies in the 30 years or so after the second world war. This was, of course, the heyday and highwater mark of what furious red-faced men of my acquaintance now call ‘the nanny state’ — a phrase, incidentally, first used by an editor of The Spectator (Iain Macleod) in the pages of this magazine back in 1965. Although I never had a nanny myself, I know from repeated childhood viewings of Mary Poppins that Nanny Knows Best, and so these posters confirm.