More from Books

Friday

John Preston

Torn between ideology and compassion

On 1 September 1978, the then prime minister Jim Callaghan invited six leading trade unionists to dinner at his Elizabethan farmhouse in Sussex. By all accounts it was a very jolly affair with Callaghan’s wife Audrey doing the cooking and their granddaughter Tamsin Jay handing round the dishes. The trade union grandees went away convinced that Callaghan was about to call a general election. Instead, he sat on his hands and waited. It proved to be a catastrophic misjudgment. Just four months later they all met up again — this time to discuss declaring a national emergency.

Daisy Dunn

Renaissance superwoman

In 1471 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, led a brash entourage of wine-swilling, jewel-bedecked courtiers into Florence. It was Lent. This was not the most auspicious way to begin a diplomatic mission to settle the dispute over Imola, the tiny Romagna fiefdom that Galeazzo had offered to sell to Lorenzo de’Medici. Even Lorenzo, epitome of the parvenu, was stunned by the fanfare. But for all the wrangling, within two years the territory would fall into Papal hands with the dowry of Caterina Sforza. The Deadly Sisterhood is a wide-ranging historical narrative about the women and power struggles that dominated Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

Paul Henry

A flock of bells…

A flock of bells takes the air and you come to me, out of nowehere and I smile, knowing you’ll visit me always, that this is how it will be till the last thread of an island slips through a bell-ringer’s hands and they put me in the listening earth.

Allan Mallinson

From the playing fields of Eton to El Alamein

The fascination with the last of the cavalry is enduring, perhaps partly because of the horseman’s apocalyptic links: one of the contenders for the last cavalry charge, about which there is still no consensus, is the battle of Megiddo in 1918, on the Plain of Armageddon. Now we have another question: who was the last great cavalryman? Not that it is actually posed in this engaging biography of the British contender to the title, the little-known Sir Richard McCreery, who fought in France in the Great War on horseback, and commanded Eighth Army in Italy during the second world war from a tank and occasionally an aircraft. But it is implicit in the author’s criteria: ‘the only member of the [non-mechanised] cavalry arm after 1918 to lead a British army in wartime’.

Peter Phillips

Musical rivalries

Donald Greig’s first novel is a fluent knitting together of three distinct worlds: American musical academia, London professional singing and the life of a 15th-century composer. It is also something of a whodunnit, involving secret codes in combustible medieval manuscripts alongside skullduggery between some very famous historical characters. If this sounds like a remake of The Name of the Rose, it is a lot funnier. Greig is at pains to say that all the musicologists he knows are genuinely effective people, but one would be forgiven for doubting it if his main character is anything to go by. Over-earnest academics are sitting targets, of course, but the fall and rise of this one is a delight to follow.

Wednesday

Mark Mason

Rock solid

Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy her a really big Christmas present. After much thought, she chose a new bread bin. Feet that stay on the ground are obviously a family trait. Rod: The Autobiography (Century, £20) is excellent, like listening to the guy in the pub who became a rock star but still drinks at the local. You don’t sell 200 million records without knowing how to connect with people, and Stewart does that just as well on the page as in his songs. The young singer sets his hair with sugar dissolved in water. He and Ronnie Wood hide behind a pot plant to escape the amorous intentions of Janis Joplin.

Anthony Seldon

Those who can, teach

This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 40-year-old, who has never written a book before, hardly sounds promising. The topic, education, moreover is death to good literature: barely has a book been written about the subject that is not dull beyond belief. Yet, against all the odds, this book turns out to be an enthralling read. Teach First is one of the most inspiring ideas around in 21st-century Britain. The book tells the story of its first decade, from 2002-12. Rising from nowhere, it has become one of the top graduate employers in Britain and is slowly achieving its mission of transforming opportunities for socially disadvantaged young people.

Michael Heath

The Making of Snow White

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (or ‘Seven Little Men’, as Walt Disney called them — he didn’t want to ‘disrespect’ dwarfs) first previewed in 1937 at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood. Stars of stage, screen and radio turned up, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Capra. Most were sceptical about an animated feature film lasting more than three minutes, and no one was more worried than Walt. If it failed he would be on skid row. Luckily, the audience went berserk, laughing and crying at the same time. The film was a hit; it even made Chaplin laugh. The animators who helped bring this fairytale to life had the oddest names: Ham Luske, Art Babbitt, Grim Natwick and U.B. Iwerks. Crazy names, crazy guys.

Anthony Daniels

Family commitments

Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be released. By now they were certainly mad, but whether they were mad because they had been tied up, or tied up because they had been mad, it was impossible to say. And in one of the institutions — a prison — I found prisoners who had been acquitted or whose release had been ordered by a judge ten years before, but who did not have enough money to pay their gaolers to release them.

Maurice Riordan

Turkeys

emerge from the orchard. There now Aunt Kit says, pouring us lemonade. It’ll be another scorcher. The bronze birds drop wing, shake caruncle and snood engorged with purple blood, and rattle in full barding. My prize cock’s gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly — to shoot the short film frame by frame. In rue Ortolan I hear the chorus of gobbles roll across the mossed cobbles from distant Ophir.

Eric Christiansen

First pluck your crow

As fewer people write by hand, some of us who do venture to squeak a thin call of alarm, like mice behind the frescoes during the last days of Pompeii. Philip Hensher (novelist and university teacher) voices dismay more manfully in this eloquent account of what has been and will be lost by the ending of this ancient habit, now that thoughts are transferred on to screens by squirming thumbs on dwarf keyboards. He has a ten-point plan for restoring pen and ink to daily life, and urges us all, literate or semi-literate, to try it out.

Henrietta Leyser

In the cold light of dawn

In The English Cathedral Peter Marlow of Royal Mail fame (his photographs of eight world heritage sites were used on stamps in 2005 and in 2008 of six British cathedrals) has given us a complete set of photographs of England’s 42 Anglican cathedrals. Anyone who can name all 42 surely deserves an extra Christmas present, but those looking for a luscious coffee-table book to give away should be warned that this volume, despite appearances — it is very large and all text appears discreetly at the back — is not it. The English Cathedral is a remarkably austere book. The photographs are nearly all taken from west to east, just after sunrise and in natural light.

Edmund De Waal

Not just for Christmas

New York is a strange place for dogs. As I walked back from an early morning art-world breakfast — black coffee and untouched fruit, untouched granola — the apartment buildings of the Upper East Side were disgorging perfectly groomed hounds and their staff for their walks in Central Park. I’m used to south London dog-walking, the shuffling between apology for our puppy, the avoidance of Staffies and the odd five-minute conversations with other park-goers. It is shambolic. I think of the Pont cartoon of ‘the British love for dogs’ — the total displacement of human life by a motley, shaggy array of dogs — and see a great cultural difference. This anthology confirms the difference.

Nicholas Gormanston

The most decorative honey pot in Ireland

Luggala Lodge was built in Ireland’s Wicklow mountains near the end of the 18th century by Peter La Touche, the son of a French Huguenot banking family. It was only ten miles from his house, Bellevue, and abundant game made it an ideal place to indulge a love of field sports. The late Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, who for years was head of the Irish Georgian Society, wrote of it: ‘Somehow, this whitewashed toy pavilion fits into its green-grey setting of old twisted oak trees, beeches, mossy rocks and mountains in the most unnaturally natural way. It carries off its very unlikelihood with a vivid panache.’ Robert O’Byrne is an architectural historian whose narrative provides insight into the building itself, as well as the early history of the valley.

John Hartley Williams

Men’s Wear

From the Woolrich Elite Concealed Carry line Shawn Thompson bought two shirts. He wrote on his blog: ‘The clothes I used in the past to hide my sidearm looked pretty sloppy and had my girlfriend complaining.’ The line includes the sort of vest that includes a stealth compartment. The wearer can appear to be warming his hands while gripping a pistol in a holster. Says a spokesman for Woolrich: ‘The bad guy gets a glimmer of fear wondering “Are they packing, or not?” ’ Not everyone is a fan. Howard Walter, 61, a salesman, said he preferred to carry his colt and a couple of knives and two extra magazines in a durable pair of work pants. Said Mr Walter: ‘They don’t shout “gun”, they shout average guy in the street. Dress for the gun.

Richard Shone

Into the limelight

The online accessibility of British population censuses has resulted in an outpouring  of ‘who and how we were’, keeping amateur genealogists, local historians and social commentators extremely busy. Barry Anthony’s book relies heavily on the censuses of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, combined with a close reading of the astonishingly detailed stage magazines and papers such as the Era and the Entr’acte, to flesh out what we know of the early life of England’s most famous comic actor. Charlie Chaplin’s stage career was not long; he seems to have seen, in some flash of foresight, that film was the coming medium and by 1914 he had transferred his gifts from theatre to screen.

Adam Nicolson

Bleak beauty

Adam Gopnik’s dazzlingly knowledgeable and beautifully told essays on winter began life as the Massey Lecture Series on Canadian National Radio, the Canadian Reith lectures. But dismiss from your mind any of the rather stodged up seriousness that always seems to hang around Important Radio Talks on the BBC. Gopnik is serious, and believes and cares passionately about things, but he understands exactly what an essay is, or should be: an attempt to get at something, a stroll into the not-yet-known or only-just-thought-about. He says in a foreword that his chapters are in fact edited transcripts of trial runs for those talks, given to a few friends, at home, in front of the fire, with the winter outside.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

As dark and heavy as plum pudding

Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd Brunner, who has also written monographs on bears, the moon and snowmen. As it’s translated into American, we have gray, color, luster, skeptics and travelers. But rather than reading it in an American accent, I read it in a German one.

Charles Cumming

Return of the living dead

What is it with dead American writers? Years after they’ve popped their clogs, some of the biggest names in crime fiction continue to produce novels from beyond the grave. Mario Puzo has been sleeping with the fishes since 1999, but that hasn’t stopped him clanking out Omertà (2000) and The Family (2001), the latter of which was based on an unfinished manuscript posthumously completed by his longterm girlfriend. Michael Crichton died in 2008. A year later, his fans were able to enjoy Pirate Latitudes, a novel based — once again — on an incomplete manuscript found among Crichton’s papers. Yet both men have been slouches in comparison to Robert Ludlum. The creator of Jason Bourne didn’t live to see Matt Damon’s incarnation of the character.