More from Books

Thursday

Benjamin Yardebuller

‘Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov’, edited by Robert Chandler – review

For the English-speaking world, the book that more than any other defines the magic — or fairy — tale is Children’s and Household Tales by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in Germany in 1812, and translated (or adapted: it was seriously toned down) into English by Edgar Taylor in 1823. For the Grimms, as for other Romantic writers, these traditional tales were the repository of an authentic, national culture, under dual threat from industrialisation and invasion by Napoleon’s France. Educated Russian interest in folk traditions followed a similar trajectory: the first great Russian folklorist, Aleksandr Afanasyev, assembled his vast collection in the middle years of the 19th century.

Wynn Wheldon

‘Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls’, by David Sedaris – review

David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker. Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he’s not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He’s no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh. Which is not to say that there isn’t at least a chuckle or two and usually a guffaw in each of the 26 pieces that comprise this book. While studying Life in the UK in order to apply for Indefinite Leave to stay here, Sedaris learns much that the rest of us do not know: ‘I learned that people below the age of 16 cannot deliver milk in the UK, but I don’t think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices.

Peter J. Conradi

‘Imagined Greetings: Poetic Engagements with R.S. Thomas’, by David Lloyd – review

There is a much reproduced image of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas towards the end of his life. A gaunt and angular figure leans defiantly out over the half-gate of his cottage on the Llyn peninsula, wild of hair, curmudgeonly and altogether unwelcoming. The photograph, taken after Thomas’s retirement as vicar of the fishing village of Aberdaron and relocation to nearby Rhiw, reveals a man at war with the world — and with himself too. Tourists passing through the Welsh-speaking region who asked him for directions encountered the baffling response: ‘No English’. He would return indoors to relish the joke with his monoglot English wife Elsi. She shared his hatred of the machine age.

John Greening

Provincials

for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison. There she goes. But you and I have learned by now to steer a steady course up Petrarch’s mountain track or — better metaphor — across the Rhône beside that Pont that keeps on reaching for a rhyme on its far bank. We know the knack of picking a wind, too: not one that’s blown infernos; one that gently tries the door.

Owen Bennett-Jones

‘Ask Forgiveness Not Permission’, by Howard Leedham – review

At the start of 2004 Howard Leedham, a former British special forces officer who had taken up US citizenship, addressed the raw Pashtun recruits he had made into a US-backed militia capable of operating on the Pakistan-Afghan border, surely one of the world’s most hostile environments. He told them about Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cross-desert assault on the port of Aqabar: ‘We are like Lawrence of Arabia,’ he said.‘Now let’s find our Aqabar.’ You might think that the US military high command would have identified a target before deploying a military force to attack it. But in the aftermath of 9/11 the normal rules did not apply.

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

Bookends: Byronic intensity

A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy —  ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it  — is as vividly evident as his relentless egocentricity and unctuous if irresistible charm.

Victoria Glendinning

‘Trespassers: A Memoir’, by Julia O¹Faolain

In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’ Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter when they leave home. Julia O’Faolain certainly left home geographically. Over a long life she has lived in London, Dublin, Rome, Florence, Paris, Los Angeles, Portland, New York and Venice. Yet on the evidence of this succinct memoir, she remains the daughter.

Geoffrey Owen

‘The Branded Gentry’, by Charles Vallance and David Hopper

We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries. Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has the same name as the person who owns and runs it? The answer is not obvious. Entrepreneurs often choose to use an invented brand name rather than their own. Branson Atlantic sounds less inviting than Virgin Atlantic, and Apple might not be the company that it is today if it had followed the example of its Silicon Valley predecessor, Hewlett Packard, and called itself Jobs Wozniak, after the two founders.

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?