More from Books

Thursday

Stella Rimington

Journalist, novelist, patriot, spy

When I was a new MI5 recruit, working in Leconfield House in 1970, there was a group of middle-aged men who came and went at unusual times of the day, often gathering in the late afternoons, talking loudly and cheerfully. They were the F4 agent runners and I envied them; they seemed to be having a lot more fun than I was. F Branch, the counter subversion branch, was responsible, amongst other things, for monitoring the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain and in particular for identifying its members, in support of Clement Attlee’s 1948 ‘Purge Procedure’, excluding communists and fascists from work vital to the security of the state. By 1970, the F4 agent runners, of whom John Bingham was one, had done a pretty thorough job.

Wynn Wheldon

What dogs know about us

In Aesop’s fable of the Dog and the Wolf, the latter declares that it is better to starve free than be a fat slave, but the fact is that, without man, there would be no dog at all. When people eventually began to form permanent settlements, a new food source appeared: waste. Wolf packs, less fearful of man than others, less aggressive too, took advantage, and turned themselves into dogs. Natural selection works in mysterious ways. Years ago, before the gender police were on the prowl, this book’s top title would have been Man’s Best Friend, for the ‘genius’ that it describes is the dog’s talent for inter- action with humans. Neither a teaching manual nor an anthology of heroic dog stories, this is a work of scholarship. It has 67 pages of notes.

Alan Judd

Hasty exit strategy

For years after the rug was pulled from under it, the British Empire — with a quarter of the globe, the largest the world has known — seemed an unfashionable subject for historians. Did they fear political incorrectness, or was it simply that they had to wait for sufficient archival material to emerge? Whichever, there is now some very welcome sprouting in this part of the historical garden, already well-watered by the Cambridge historian Ronald Hyam, and few shoots could be more welcome than Calder Walton’s important contribution. Walton draws on recently released MI5 files to reveal the role of intelligence in the transitions from colony to independent state.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Be careful what you wish for

Are things getting better? In some ways, undeniably. Progress is not altogether a fiction, or ‘modern myth’ in John Gray’s terminology, if we focus on such ultimately important ideas as medicine or science. Has life progressed since the discovery of antibiotics? Definitely. Would one seriously wish to have lived before the discovery of anaesthesia? Certainly not. In such areas, the existence of progress is, surely, undeniable. That isn’t John Gray’s focus, but the fact that progress certainly exists and is real in some areas of human endeavour makes one think that the evidence, in areas where he does address his attention in this interesting, original and memorable book, might be read in two ways.

John Martin-Robinson

An enduring romance

In the Pevsner volume on Sussex, the otherwise sane topographer Ian Nairn, harrumphed of Arundel ‘that anybody, duke or banker, could as late as 1890 have embarked on the pretty complete building of an imitation castle, remains a puzzle …’  In this amusing and richly illustrated book, Amicia de Moubray gives the answer, and demonstrates how castle-building continued as a serious architectural thread not just in the 19th but throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. The British love of castles is deeply rooted in their psyche as an island race. Children learn to love them from fairy stories and Harry Potter. Castles are an emblem of Britain itself, an island surrounded by a moat. A castle is a place of refuge and safety where we can do what we wish.

Marcus Berkmann

Wish you were here

It’s just a guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the 60p first-class stamp has finally done for the postcard as a useful or desirable means of communication. Receiving one postal delivery a day instead of two didn’t help, but then postal authorities across the world ceased to treat postcards with respect a long time ago. Sometimes you were off on your next holiday before postcards from your previous holiday had reached their destinations. And when was the last time you sent a postcard when you were on holiday? Were you spending francs or pesetas at the time, and cashing in travellers’ cheques? Postcards had their day, though. In 1903, more than a billion of them passed through the German postal system.

Micheal Mott

Missing | 21 February 2013

What are so noticeably lacking in Mathew Brady’s interviews with the dead are the smells; likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses their faces gnawed away by hogs near the Greenbrier, Cheat, Gauley; or the wounded roasted in gullies a foot deep in leaves at Shiloh, Spotsylvania; and you, reader, cannot supply what is left out.  So how much more eludes us? . . . the scent in the rain.

Lewis Jones

The boys’ brigade

British schoolboys doubtless have quite different fantasies nowadays, but for much of the last century most of them liked to imagine themselves leading their friends in guerrilla warfare against the German army. Stephen Grady is probably unique in having lived the fantasy, an experience he recalls in Gardens of Stone. Born in 1925, in the French village of Nieppe, just over the border with Belgium, he was the elder son of a Royal Artillery corporal who married a Frenchwoman and was a gardener for the Imperial War Graves Commission. In the first world war the district had been a battlefield, and the infant Stephen played marbles with shrapnel, in a house built from rubble and in gardens pegged out with bayonets.

Sarah Burton

Male-order bride

If you want to learn how to create the perfect wife, you should not read this book. You should make an emergency appointment with reality and remain under self-imposed house arrest until help arrives. If you are a man in search of a tolerably compatible partner, just keep looking. If you are a woman, read Caitlin Moran’s timely How to be a Woman (it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for anyone or not — just read it). In 1769 Thomas Day was a single man (aged 21), in possession of a good fortune who (therefore) must be in want of a wife. Though Day was charitable to the poor, opposed slavery and refused to kill a spider, these appear to have been his only merits.

William Leith

Destroying angel in the ether

A few years ago, James Lasdun wrote The Horned Man, a novel about Laurence Miller, an English lecturer in an American college who descends into paranoia. At first, he thinks someone is tampering with things in his office, and making calls from his phone. Then he thinks his colleagues are spying on him, and, perhaps worse, that they think he is spying on them. He worries that someone might think he is trying to plagiarise their work; that people can read his lascivious thoughts; that, whatever he says or does, he is leaving a damning trail of evidence against himself. Meanwhile, he is part of a sinister academic committee devoted to policing the behaviour of others.

Thursday

John Preston

Away with the fairies

There have been plenty of books in recent years in which apparently sane hacks go off in search of loonies to poke fun at. While The Heretics looks at first as if it fits neatly into the genre, there turns out to be rather more to it than that. Not that the book doesn’t come richly stocked with people who hold what my mother used to call very unreliable opinions. They include a regressive hypnotherapist called Vered who once treated someone who believed they’d been a twig in a previous life, and an NHS-funded expert on satanic rituals who insists that satanists regularly stitch babies inside the bellies of dying animals so that they can be ‘reborn’ to Satan. Apparently the satanists — when peckish — also snack on foetuses. ‘Raw or cooked?

Victor Sebestyen

What price freedom?

One of the best-known contacts for many Western reporters covering Poland and the Solidarity protests of the 1980s was Konstanty ‘Kostek’ Gebert. A fine journalist who usually wrote under the name Dawid Warszawski, he seemed to know everyone in Warsaw, liked to talk late into the night about ideas and gossip, wore his vast learning lightly and had an invaluable gift for putting complex issues into broad perspective. Gebert’s parents were Jewish migrants to the US in the 1920s. They were loyal members of the American Communist Party for years and returned to Poland in 1947 to build socialism from the ruins of the second world war. When Gebert, born in the Fifties, was old enough to think he knew he loathed communism.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Pyrrhic victories

In 193 BC, Scipio met Hannibal at Ephesus, and asked him who, in his opinion, were the greatest generals of all time. Since he’d personally defeated Rome’s most dangerous enemy a decade earlier, he rather expected to be on his list. But Hannibal first named Alexander the Great; then Pyrrhus (who like him had come within a whisker of sacking Rome); and for his third choice — one can’t help but feel he was taunting the self-important Roman — himself. And what, Scipio expostulated, if I hadn’t beaten you at Zama? In that case, the Carthaginian replied with a smile, I should have placed myself first. Of course, as Anthony Everitt observes in his excellent guide to Rome’s early history, this story is too good to be true. But who cares?

Connie Bensley

Painting the Fence

For the first coat she started at the house end, he at the garden gate. They worked towards each other meeting fondly in the middle. For the second coat they began in the middle and worked outwards;  he abstracted, murmuring,  tweaking his phone with a painty forefinger. By the shrubbery he put down his brush and the garden gate groaned, clicked shut. Now the tin offers her its tedious advice For a perfect finish, apply a third coat. The days pass.  The paint hardens.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Leaving Sussex

I read William Nicholson’s new novel in proof before Christmas. ‘The must-read book for 2013 for lovers of William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks,’ it said on the back. Well, I like Boyd and Faulks, but I positively love William Nicholson, so I found that come-on slightly grating. Then I saw what the publicity people meant. Nicholson has broken out of his small, square two inches of ivory. His previous three novels were set over the course of a few days in the southeast of England. A typical chapter was called ‘Saturday’. Motherland spans 11 years, set in Sussex, France, India, Jamaica and New Orleans. Part One is called ‘War: 1942-45’. The pivotal scene of the book is a seaborne raid on the beaches of Dieppe.

Cressida Connolly

Growing up the hard way | 14 February 2013

Like the gingerbread house, these three novels seem at first to be a delightful and innocent place, entirely suitable for the three not-quite orphaned young girls who are Holden’s heroines. But, just as in a fairytale, safety is never assured. The very grown-ups who should be offering protection — a governess, a head teacher, even their own mother — may become suddenly unstable and capricious. What looks bright and cheery and full of hope may turn out to be perilous, even sinister. Home is not a constant. Written with an engaging immediacy, these are stories about children but, with their dark secrets, their frightening reversals, their alarming glimpses of sex and death, they are certainly not for children.

Justin Cartwright

The tragedy of a hamlet

Jim Crace’s novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. The subjects Crace tackles are varied, from a microscopic study of death (Being Dead) to an eremitic retreat in the Judaean desert (Quarantine). They all deploy a terrible, lyrical, beauty that is nothing like any other novel I have ever read. Some of them are dystopian (The Pesthouse), some are set in very faintly demarcated places, or places that we recognise because we have dreamed of them. Yet this is not science fiction. It is rather a re-imagining of the world, using the available tools.

Thursday

Erica Mcalpine

Peonies

On an impulse, you could eat these flowers up the way they’re floating, stemlessly, side by side like scoops of ice cream in a crystal cup. White and softly drizzled with syrup (almost creeping down from the top) and shyly turning inward still, each closed bud leaks red along the seams and gleams like a hot sundae. What puzzles is how quickly these petals fan out, brown, flip, and fray along the edges. If only they’d stay put — if you could just keep peonies shut. Open, they frazzle.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A hero of folk

‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant the entire American capitalist establishment during the Great Depression and after. A self-taught socialist, Woody wrote more than 3,000 songs, mostly in angry protest on behalf of millions of underdogs. As the ‘Dust Bowl Balladeer’, he became the legendary folk hero who inspired Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and many others. Woody was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. When he was 15, his mother was institutionalised with Huntington’s disease, a hereditary cause of early dementia and other mental disabilities, which he eventually inherited. At 17, he moved to Pampa, a small town on the Texas Panhandle.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of recent crime novels

Many novels deal with unhappy families. But happy families are relatively rare, especially in crime fiction, which is one of the many interesting features of Erin Kelly’s third book, The Burning Air (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The MacBrides have always been close. Rowan has recently retired from the headmastership of a major public school. He is devastated by the death from cancer of his wife, Lydia, the much-loved matriarch; but his children and grandchildren console him. The clan gathers for the annual bonfire weekend at their Devon holiday home. It all goes horribly wrong when baby Edie, the youngest grandchild and apple of everyone’s eye, vanishes one evening, along with the newly acquired girlfriend of Rowan’s only son.