More from Books

Thursday

Philip Hensher

‘Best of Young British Novelists 4’, by John Freeman (ed)

The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were some novelists there that anyone could have spotted at the time, such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, but the judges also impressively noticed Kazuo Ishiguro after a single book and Rose Tremain long before she substantially justified it. Ten years later, the exercise was repeated, with another brilliant group including A.L.Kennedy, Louis de Bernières and Alan Hollinghurst, and ten years after that too.

Juliet Townsend

‘The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling’, by Thomas Pinney (ed)

The last time I heard Kipling read aloud was last week at a Scout Gang Show. It was the grand finale. Centre stage on a dais stood a serving soldier and noble looking ancient veteran. On either side, a group of Scouts, an organisation dear to Kipling’s heart, stood with outflung arms indicating these heroes, while somebody read ‘If’. In the background one was vaguely aware of ‘Nimrod’ playing. All the clichés were there, yet it was strangely touching. One of Kipling’s gifts as a writer, both of prose and poetry, was his ability to connect with his audience, confirmed when, a few years ago, ‘If’ was voted the nation’s favourite poem. This connection was for good and ill.

Ian Thomson

‘The Making of a Minister’, by Roy Kerridge

Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general. The Making of a Minister, written (apparently) in the late 1960s, is a period piece, which alludes to ‘coloured men’ and unfolds round London’s Caribbean quarter — its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove.

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson reviews ‘C.S. Lewis: A Life’, by Alister McGrath

C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not make one warm to his subject. Lewis was an Ulsterman, and prone to the melancholy of his race, though without their bitter prejudices. The principal figures in his life were all unattractive. First was his father, whom Lewis disliked intensely and felt horrible guilt about his lack of love.

Sofka Zinovieff

‘Back to Delphi’, by Ioanna Karystiani

If you mixed Lionel Shriver’s chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin with a Joycean stream of consciousness from a female Ulysses in contemporary Athens, you’d be approaching the spirit of Ioanna Karystiani’s Back to Delphi. Viv is the mother of a notorious rapist and murderer, now locked up in Korydallos prison. Granted five days to take him on leave of absence, she decides that a trip to Delphi might provide salvation for her damaged son and for a relationship based on silence and betrayal. Strange, disturbing and funny, the book reveals the seedy neighbourhoods and bedsits of 21st-century Athens, its hot, dirty parks and ‘the drone of Balkan, Asian and African languages rising shrill above every badly designed square’.

Marcus Berkmann

‘Babble’, by Charles Saatchi

Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary success and achievement, Saatchi has kept his counsel on most subjects. He never gives interviews, he doesn’t like parties much (he doesn’t even go to his own) and I have yet to see him popping up on TV shows offering opinions about anything at all. This may be about control.

Alan Judd

‘The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake’, by Roger Hermiston

The spy George Blake, doyen of traitors, turned 90 last year. Almost blind, he lives with his Russian wife outside Moscow on an SVR (KGB in old money) reservation.  Much has changed since 1961 when he was sentenced to 42 years in British jails — the ideology he believed in discredited, the empire he spied for dismembered — but he remains convinced he was right to betray, as this thorough and thoughtful biography shows. Born in Holland to a Dutch mother and a father of Jewish-Egyptian heritage and British nationality, he was never quite sure where he belonged. He was sure, though, that belief mattered; although attracted by Marxism, he put religion first and nearly became a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Thursday

James P-Carley

The repentant book thief of Lambeth Palace

Most of us associate ecclesiastical libraries with dusty accumulations of sermons, providing nourishment for bookworms but of no other real use. But surprising treasures — some decidedly secular — can be found in our churches, cathedrals and episcopal residences. The library at Lambeth Palace, bequeathed in 1610 by Archbishop Richard Bancroft as a clerical equivalent to Thomas Bodley’s superb foundation at Oxford, is no exception. It is also one that has survived many vicissitudes, beginning in the 1640s with a 15-year exile to Cambridge University with the abolition of the Established Church under Oliver Cromwell. Some 400 years later, this early pattern of exile and return has repeated itself in an extraordinary, almost miraculous, way.

John Mole

Scan

I shall be radioactive For eight hours afterwards And must be careful To avoid intimate contact. The prospect of this Alarms me, but what now Suddenly comes to mind Is just how alone I felt Standing in Hereford Cathedral October 1962 Beside the Mappa Mundi With Krushchev banging on As nuclear war seemed Unavoidable, that the world Could soon be dust, this sacred Storehouse of humanity And faith be flattened In an instant. Eight hours Or not much more Was all I’d have to hurry home Before our precious intimacy Would vanish in the void And love, left echoing, Become an empty word.

Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon’s Swimming and flying: an extract

Some years back I volunteered to help with an experiment at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford which involved having my brain scanned while I watched a series of seemingly random images flashed up on a screen. Some were clearly meant to be neutral, others highly stimulating in one way or another. I remember a bath towel dropped on to a wooden floor, which was the most wonderful shade of turquoise. I remember pictures that were meant to be pornographic but which had clearly been taken from a copy of Mayfair c. 1972 and were therefore antique and oddly charming. Soft focus shots of the Tennis Girl soaping herself in the shower after a sweaty match.

Penelope Lively

‘The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory’, by Deborah Alun-Jones – review

The property pages of Country Life invariably feature an old rectory or two, probably graceful 18th-century, of honeyed Cotswold stone, and if you plan to move in you will need a deep pocket. This is Aga Saga country, Joanna Trollope territory. Old vicarages, old rectories, all the defrocked plant of the Church of England, are in hot demand: the estate agent’s dream. They are substantial, elegant, they propose permanence and stability and some sort of evocative past, and today they will be tricked out with central heating, en suite bathrooms and, of course, that Aga. It was not always thus.

Russell Kane

‘Evelyn Waugh: A Biography’, by Selina Hastings – review

When it comes to literature, there are two types of Prius-driving, hummus-eating, Green-party voting, lefty reactionary readers. Those who loathe Evelyn Waugh and find him to represent elitism, condescension and selfishness; and those who love him for those very reasons — who find him a bite of literary chili in their lentils, a fascinating voice of the Other, a canopy of language and class, to be lain under and lost within. Russell Kane? That spikey-haired comedian irritant writing about Evelyn Waugh? Do not panic: I’m supposed to be here. This middlebrow, eye-linered, greasy oik has a literary fetish so removed from his demographic DNA that it is precisely the reason it’s such a fetish. The Other. The Them. And guess what?

Christopher Booker

‘The Age of Global Warming’, by Rupert Darwall – review

We scarcely need our fifth freezing winter in a row to remind us of the probability that future generations may look back on the panic over global warming which suddenly gripped the world in the late 1980s as one of the oddest scientific and political aberrations in history. Why did such an unprecedented scare blow up when it did, thanks to a moderate rise of just 0.5 degrees C in global temperatures, when earlier in the 20th century a similar temperature rise between 1910 and 1940 had been accepted as perfectly natural: as simply another phase in the general warming trend which had begun 200 years earlier, after four centuries of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when the world had cooled?

Cecilia Grayson

‘Life after Life’, by Kate Atkinson – review

Das also war des Pudels Kern! Everybody thought, ‘Oh, Groundhog Day,’ but they were wrong. Not that the pest-control man couldn’t have coped with a few marmots — he’d seen worse in his time. He’d been summoned because of an infestation of black bats. * Meriel’s confusion lay in the fact that she knew she had known a lot, yet suspected she also knew nothing. Her family couldn’t help with the contradictions surrounding her birth, nor with her multiple deaths. ‘It’s just déjà vu,’ her mother Emily said, or was it déjà lu? She hopped about from year to year, forwards and backwards (if only she’d keep still, the reader thought), gathering redundant adjectives.

Michael Howard

‘The British Dream’, by David Goodhart – review

David Goodhart’s new book, The British Dream, is an important study of postwar immigration into the UK, its successes and failures. He explores the tension between growing diversity and national solidarity and examines the meaning and significance of national identity. In his introduction he quotes a conversation he had over dinner at an Oxford college in the spring of 2011. He told his neighbour that he intended to write a book arguing that liberals should be less sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale immigration. His neighbour, described as one of the country’s most senior civil servants, said: ‘I disagree. When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration.

Selina Hastings

‘The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder’, by Andrew Rose – review

In April 1917 Edward, Prince of Wales, at a luncheon at the Crillon Hotel in Paris, had the misfortune to meet the very sexy and utterly loathsome Marguerite Alibert. A successful demimondaine, Marguerite could be amusing company, sophisticated in manner and extremely chic. Expert in bed, she was also expert at manipulating men and parting them from very large sums of money; and as all her lovers soon discovered, when crossed she proved spoilt, vindictive and possessed of a terrifying temper. The Prince fell for her at once and began an affair which lasted just over a year.

Sara Maitland

‘Silence: A Christian History’, by Diarmaid MacCulloch – review

This is a specialist book for non-specialist readers — by which I mean in part that it is made highly accessible to anyone seriously interested by excellent and lively writing rather than by any dumbing down. It may be an odd thing to say about a history of the intersection of platonic philosophy and Christian and Judaic spiritual theologies, but actually it is great fun. A good read. Nonetheless it is also odd and unexpected. One of the oddities is the curious balance of silence and confessional in the authorial voice. It is a sign of the times, I think, when a book of this substance tells the reader more about the author’s sexuality than about his relationship to the faith he is discussing.

Sam Leith

‘Levels of Life’, by Julian Barnes – review

‘You put together two things that have not been put together before and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.’ In this slim book Julian Barnes puts not two but three things together: nonfiction, fiction and memoir. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The first section is an elegant and breezy account of the early days of ballooning and the development of aerial photography. Here are the adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the photographer Félix Tournachon (otherwise known as Nadar): ‘The enthusiastic English amateur, the most famous actress of her era, making a celebrity flight, and the professional balloonist’.

Nicky Haslam

‘Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty’, by Michèle Fitoussi – review

In New York, in the 1960s, in a sleek, silvery elevator, I rose from the marble halls of Helena Rubinstein’s gleaming emporium up towards the top floor office of a new friend who worked for that legendary beautician. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the lift stopped, the doors slid open and a tiny, squat figure with oily, inky hair scraped back and livid carmine cheeks above violently purple tweed capes stabbed with a jagged, surreal brooch, stood peering up at what I hoped was my youthful, English-rose complexion. A short, intense scrutiny. Then, imperiously: ‘Oy vey! But I sink ve can help. Tell Patrick he needs gif you our XXX recipe.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005-2008’, by Lawrence Goldman – review

Where else would you possibly find George Painter, Jackie Pallo and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in immediate successive proximity? The incunabulist of the British Museum who emerged from scholarly obscurity with his biography of Proust, the curly-blond wrestler in kinky trunks, and the son of an Edinburgh-Italian confectioner who became an avant-garde sculptor, have nothing whatever in common except that they died within the same four-year period, and they have all been accounted British worthies, deserving places in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In September 2004, I wrote here about the astonishing new Oxford DNB, edited by H. C. G.