More from Books

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

Red Nile, by Robert Twigger – review

When Bernini designed his fountain of the four rivers for the Piazza Navona in Rome in 1651 he draped the head of the god of the Nile with a loose piece of cloth, to denote the fact that its source remained unknown. Tracing the sources of both the Blue and the White Nile would become one of the most heated and consuming of all Victorian quests and the adventures and tribulations of the men — Petherick, Stanley, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Speke — and one woman, Baker’s Hungarian slave wife, Florenz, have provided rich material for many generations of writers.

Eric Weinberger

All That Is, by James Salter- review

Some authors’ lives are a great deal more interesting than others — James Salter’s, for one. Born in 1925 and educated at West Point, a fighter pilot in Korea and afterwards in Cold War Europe, the chiselled flyboy soon jettisoned this for writing and became a cosmopolitan and a worldly adventurer. He made a film in the Alps with Robert Redford, and climbed at Chamonix to produce what was meant to be another film but became the novel Solo Faces. He had homes in Aspen and the Hamptons, frequented the parlours of Paris and Rome but was always, always, too reticent, and, by his code, too honour-bound to divulge all he had seen. Privacy — his own and others’ — was all.

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver – review

‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the big brother of the title, the handsome, free-wheeling, jive-talking Edison, a jazz pianist. The siblings grew up in LA, their dysfunctional family life paralleled, almost parodied, in Joint Custody, a prime-time television drama scripted by Travis Appaloosa, their smarmy, self-aggrandising father. This prolonged and subtle betrayal drives Pandora to seek anonymity in quiet Iowa, while Edison, in bohemian New York, craves public attention, and trades on his father’s fame to attain it.

David Sexton

Here and Now, by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee – review

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. So too in the luckless genre of letters artificially exchanged for the purposes of publication. There’s been a little spate of these lately, the most interesting and unbalanced having been Public Enemies, in which Michel Houellebecq brilliantly began the exchange by telling Bernard Henri-Levy that what they had in common was that they were both a bit contemptible, a bond from which BHL tried unsuccessfully to extract himself for the rest of their collaboration. Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had read each other’s work for years but only met for the first time in February 2008, when they were both in their sixties.

Stephen Bayley

Folly de Grandeur, by Nicky Haslam- review

Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the sometimes directionless rich, a brighter star than most of his astronomically stellar client list. Considering a joint project, I asked him over lunch to tell me all the amazing people he had met. He demurred, but later that afternoon I got a 20-page handwritten document and on page one the names included John Kennedy, Svetlana Stalin, Picasso and Elvis. But Nicky is perhaps better known to Spectator readers as a contributor of meticulous, gossipy, beautifully crafted, super-well-informed and often rather saucy accounts of what used to be called high society. But how to describe the man to a reader who has not met him?

William Leith

The Society of Timid Souls, by Polly Morland – review

In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She interviews a man who fixes the upper sections of skyscrapers, and is afraid of heights. She meets people who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases. She quizzes a former armed robber. It’s well worth reading. Morland is slightly more humanistic than scientific; she wonders what courage is, without being absolutely determined to come up with a definition. I started the book thinking that courage is the ability to do something you think is right, even when you’re scared. It means not wavering from your core beliefs, or feelings, when things get difficult or dangerous. Think of the word core.

Andrew Taylor

Crime fiction reviewed by Andrew Taylor

An epigraph taken from Goebbels’s only published novel certainly makes a book stand out from the crowd. A Man Without Breath (Quercus, £18.99) is the ninth instalment in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, which examines the rise, fall and aftermath of Nazi Germany through the eyes of a disillusioned Berlin detective. By 1943, the tide of war is turning. Bernie, now working from the German War Crimes Bureau, is despatched to the neighbourhood of Smolensk, where a wolf has dug up human remains in the Katyn forest. Is this a mass grave of Polish officers murdered by the Russians? If so, the Wehrmacht is more than happy to conduct a scrupulously fair war crimes investigation before the eyes of the world. But what if the killers were German? It’s an intriguing set-up.

Lloyd Evans

5 Days in May, by Andrew Adonis – review

Andrew Adonis enjoyed a week of glory in 2010. The former Lib Dem activist was asked to join Labour’s negotiating team as they tried to forge a coalition with Nick Clegg in the aftermath of 6 May general election. Adonis admits that his account of those five days is ‘vivid, partisan and angry’. And it seems strange that, as a Lib Dem defector himself, he should accuse the Lib Dems of ‘perfidy’ in their dealings with Labour. The politician in him can’t resist the opportunity to attack his former colleagues. He shoves the knife into David Laws for admiring George Osborne and for advocating ‘faster and deeper’ cuts to the deficit.

Philip Hensher

Complete Poems, by C.P. Cavafy – review

Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which shares with the poet an aesthetic of the transfixed gaze, of remote history running under everything. Robert Liddell wrote a restrained, elegant life of the poet — oddly dismissed by this translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, as ‘workmanlike.

Thursday

Christopher Howse

The Serpent’s Promise, by Steve Jones – review

The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in the gut alone as the number of human cells in the body. There may be 10,000 distinct kinds, with a different community on the forehead from that on the sole. There are fewer kinds in the mouth or stomach than at the back of the knee, which has a more diverse population than any other part. This is surprising and interesting, and we would like to know more about this teeming personal nature reserve.

Jonathan Rugman

Peter Oborne is almost right about Iran’s non-existent nukes

Whether the United States is a force for global peace is not really up for debate in the self-described ‘indispensable nation’, though the question sharply divides opinion almost everywhere else. By focusing on America’s fixation with Iran, this short and angry book argues against. The book’s polemic is built on good foundations: we are often told that Iran is a rogue nuclear state, yet it does not possess nuclear weapons. As a signatory to the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear energy programme as long as it is monitored by UN inspectors. However, ten years of negotiations aimed at persuading Iran to stop have led nowhere.

Wynn Wheldon

Holloway, by Robert Macfarlane – review

This is a very short book recording two visits to the hills around Chideock in Dorset.In the first Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go searching for the ‘holloway’ in which Geoffrey Household’s hero holes up in Rogue Male. A holloway (not to be found in the OED) is, in Macfarlane’s words, ‘a sunken path, a deep & shady lane’ and, according to Household, ‘a lane not marked on the map’. The second trip, made with Macfarlane’s co-authors after Deakin’s death, revisits the holloway, and the hill-fort at the top of Pilsdon Pen.

David Crane

The Young Titan, by Michael Shelden; Churchill’s First War, by Con Coughlin – review

One evening in 1906, shortly after the election that brought Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals into power, an understandably nervous Eddie Marsh, a middle-ranking civil servant in the Colonial Office, paid a social call on the Dowager Countess of Lytton.  The previous day Marsh had gone through a tricky first meeting with the new number two in the department, and it had been a surprise to him on going into the office that morning to hear that he was wanted as his private secretary.  ‘Desperate, Marsh begged the dowager countess for guidance,’ writes Michael Shelden in his Young Titan: She had known Winston and Jennie for many years... She had also been acquainted with Lord Randolph.

Oliver Rackham

The Tradescants’ Orchard, by Barry Juniper – review

Elias Ashmole, fortune-hunter, scholar and collector, bequeathed his coins, curiosities and books in 1692 to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The books were later taken over by the Bodleian Library. One of them is called The Tradescants’ Orchard, from a tenuous association with John Tradescant I, Keeper of Gardens, Vines and Silkworms to King Charles I, and his nurseryman son John II. It is edited by the historian of the world’s apples and his Oxford colleague in art history.

Matthew Parris

Beyond the Malachite Hills, by Jonathan Lawley; Last Man In, by John Hare – review

In post when the curtain came down on Britain’s African empire, there survives today a generation of colonial officers whose numbers are dwindling fast. Many were fired by an idealism already out of fashion when they chose their career. Most came to love their adopted continent. Some can write. Two of these are Jonathan Lawley and John Hare. Each has an incredible tale to tell. Here is a pair of books that, placed with a decanter of whisky on the bedside table of any Spectator reader’s guest bedroom, will have the reading-light burning late into the night. Yet they are very different stories, quite differently written.

James Walton

And the Mountain Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini – review

The American comedian Stephen Colbert once joked that when he publicly criticised the novels of Khaled Hosseini, his front garden was invaded by angry members of women’s books groups. They were carrying flaming torches in one hand and bottles of white wine in the other. It’s a joke that neatly sums up two significant facts about Hosseini’s status as a writer. First — and not to be underestimated, of course — it proves that he’s famous enough to make jokes about. But it also reminds us that his fame has been driven by ordinary book-lovers rather than literary professionals. His two previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, have sold around 38 million copies.

Peter Parker

The Hermit in the Garden, by Gordon Campbell – review

In his 1780 essay On Modern Gardening Horace Walpole declared that of the many ornamental features then fashionable, the one ‘whose merit soonest fades’ was the hermitage. Inspired by the ancient cells of genuine religious anchorites, but largely decorative, garden hermitages had flourished in Britain during the 18th century. While some were appropriately primitive in design, others had Gothick doorways and windows filled with stained glass, floors made of pebbles or sheep’s knucklebones arranged in elaborate patterns, ceilings ornamented with pine cones, rustic furniture made from elm boles ‘distorted by fungal disease’, and inscriptions carved in stone to aid philosophical reflection.

Thursday

Oliver Comins

Herring Way (15th Hole, 321 yards)

Where the golf course curls along the sea’s granite edge and wholesome turf seeps around outcrops of dark rock, a modest drive is required to carry beyond a deep gully reaching into the heart of a succinct and slender fairway.  A poorly struck ball can leap between knobs of stone before, occasionally, being tossed just a short chip or long putt away from the wavering flag.  More normally, you will see its final despairing hop into the ravine, sacrificed to the tide or disappearing into camouflage among like-sized pebbles on the beach below. At one time or another, in a kind of ritual, most golfers reaching this high place will also pull out an older ball and tee up the wrong way, facing the lumbering swell.

Alan Judd

A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré – review

John Le Carré is one of a select group of novelists whose vivid and internally coherent imaginative worlds are so recognisable that their names have become adjectives — Dickensian, Wodehousian,  Kafka-esqe. Thus, we all know what we mean by Le Carré-esque — the shifting sands of the Cold War, its depths and shallows reflected in the moral composition of those who fought it, sinister and impersonal state interests pitted against the individual, the inevitability of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, London grey in fog and rain, the outward manifestation of the inner landscape.

Robert Chandler

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, by Nikolai Leskov – review

Though underestimated in the English-speaking world, Nikolai Leskov is one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian writers. Donald Rayfield has described him as ‘Russia’s best-kept secret’. Richard Pevear’s excellent introduction to this selection includes Anton Chekhov’s account of how Leskov — ‘his favourite writer’ — said to him at the beginning of his career, after a night of carousing, ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David.  Write.’ This little scene, which could be from one of Leskov’s own stories, perhaps offers a clue as to why he is not more widely recognised.