More from Books

Thursday

John Preston

Beautiful and damned

According to his mother, Neville Heath was ‘prone to be excitable’. He was that all right — and then some. In the space of two weeks in the summer of 1946, Heath murdered two women with such brutality that, as Sean O’Connor puts it with shuddering relish, ‘war-hardened police officers vomited on seeing them’. The public were fascinated by him. Elizabeth Taylor reworked Heath’s story into a novel, Patrick Hamilton drew on it heavily for his Gorse trilogy and Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a film about the case, but had to ditch the idea when the studio decided it would be too revolting. Heath was fascinating mainly due to his ambivalence. Clearly capable of appalling brutality, he could also be tender and considerate.

Cressida Connolly

Love stories

Unfortunately for the reading public, most of Bernadine Bishop’s working life has been spent as a psychotherapist. Having published a couple of early novels, she put aside her pen, first to become a teacher, and then a shrink: it was only after cancer forced her retirement in 2010 that she turned again to writing. I sincerely hope she is in remission now, not only for the sake of her own health and happiness, but so that she can write as many more books as possible. Unexpected Lessons in Love is a wonderful novel, one of those rare books which leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of the human heart. It actually offers what its title proposes.

Catherine Ormell

Small Chat

I have no experience of small boys, I tell my son, driving him home. Well only you. He sits there pertly. They lose things, he chirrups. You must know that. Encouraged by this opening, I warm-up a mother’s inside info. So why did Jago kick Beastly? I quiz and, why did Ant fix his key-fob to his fly? His silence counts each snowflake; he is as secret as Switzerland. His strength gathers itself, cracks open his shoes, skitters through his jacket’s seams. Only his hands furl, last token of infancy, these he bunkers in his pockets.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Indian giver

A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new, 16 old) are moving and hilarious, and they amount to an education. Take the term Native American, for example. Isn’t this the accepted way to refer to the author’s ethnicity? You’d have thought. Yet Sherman Alexie avoids it, referring to himself and his characters as ‘Indian’. Everything he writes is imbued with a consciousness of the irreversible wrong visited on his ancestors, but this is as often wry as plaintive.

Michela Wrong

Change of heart | 7 February 2013

A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return eight years later, bored and homesick.

Andro Linklater

Winning the war with wheezers

The Anfa Hotel in Casablanca has seen better days. Seventy years ago it was the grandest hotel in Morocco, good enough to house Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they met in January 1943 to devise a strategy that would win the second world war. The views remain as fine and the bedrooms as expansive, but today the carpets are unmistakably worn and the bathrooms are beginning to peel. In its own small way, the hotel illustrates the central theme of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Professor Paul Kennedy’s epochal history now more than 20 years old, that a dearth of economic resources progressively enfeebles the mightiest of institutions.

Thursday

Kerry-Lee Powell

Ship’s Biscuit

After Mother scarpered It was ship’s biscuit With shrapnel sparkles. It was hot spurts and gristle And cold snaps with a wet towel For stealing a puff from Dad’s fag Or sneaking a peek at his titty mags. But we buggers deserved no better. It was us that made her run off, With our bickers and our bungles. It was our bloody cheek. It was his bleeding knuckles.

Mark Mason

Down to a T

There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate, £14.99), concern the Traveller community. The first is that while most people have only just got used to the fact that Traveller now has a capital ‘T’, the reviews must avoid those other words you’re not supposed to have in your head any more, though everyone does. Yes, even Guardian journalists and BBC editors; I once heard one of the latter breed say, after everyone had discussed a radio drama about Travellers using the ‘correct’ terminology: ‘Oh, you mean the pikey play?

John Sutherland

Up

One of the reprinted reviews which make up the bulk of this book opens: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Eton.’ How would it sound, I mused, if I began a review: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Colchester Grammar School.’ It would lack, I feel, that enviable tone of Etonian ‘assurance’. True, a less self-assured person than James Wood might have slipped his educational credentials in parenthetically — in the style of David Cameron’s casual remark that he is ‘reasonably well off’. And Eton, one notes in passing, has produced many more prime ministers than great literary critics. Connolly, Orwell (at a stretch), and who else? Well, of course, James Wood.

John Gimlette

Gaza stripped bare

Imagine a piece of land: sandy, roughly rectangular, and about the size of the Isle of Wight. It is surrounded on three sides by desert and hostile neighbours, and on the fourth by the sea. Although almost 1.7 million live in this space, nothing except essentials is allowed in or out. It’s under blockade. By sea, even its fishing boats are sprayed with sewage or gunfire and, around its land border, there’s a ‘free-fire zone’ a kilometre wide. Meanwhile, its buildings have been so enthusiastically shelled that, sometimes, whole ceilings just suddenly give way. Although this dystopia isn’t part of anywhere else, it’s not — officially — a country either. Even its name sounds utterly ravaged. This is the Gaza Strip.

D.J. Taylor

Playing Possum

The contending versions of T.S. Eliot on display in the latest bumper instalment of his collected letters are practically legion. To begin with there is the hieratic, if not downright priestly, Eliot, soberly petitioning  Father D’Arcy, the correspondence columns  of the Church Times, or studious clergymen who may be flattered into taking charge of his pet project for a library of 17th-century theological classics. Next there is the sedulous Elizabethan scholar gravely conferring with Professor Grierson over textual complications in Marlowe, and circulating the results around the Cambridge combination rooms. Then comes a third Eliot, the deferential protégé of elderly men-of-letters such as Charles Whibley or J.M.

Jonathan Mirsky

Going under

As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is old. Alvarez’s outer and inner selves, in the first five or six years of this ten-year journal, rejoice with the ecstasy of swimming almost daily in water preferably just a few degrees above freezing, feeling the zing when he climbs out pink as a lobster and banters with the lifeguards. But then, slowly and horrifyingly, he charts the not-so-gradual collapse of his once super-fit body.

Jasper Becker

China’s second coming

It’s a new version of the Yellow Peril. The Chinese are taking over the world, starting with the nasty bits, like Burma, Sudan and Iran, which we are boycotting for all kinds of high-minded reasons. Two Spanish journalists, Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo, have returned from an exhausting trip round the globe to tell us how it’s being done. After carrying out 500 interviews, the authors seem outraged by the corruption and environmental devastation they witness, but also awed by the sheer guts and industry that individual Chinese show in doing business where so many others fail. The authors believe that something is going on in the global economy that is altogether different, bigger and possibly uglier than anything seen before.

Connie Bensley

Electricity

It was a bolt from the blue, she said. You mean it was love at first sight? I asked. But no, she meant that they ran past the same tree in a storm and were flung to the ground side by side — an introduction of almost Biblical significance. Of course he helped her up and took her to the clubhouse and that was how it started, But now, she complained, the electricity’s off and we’re left lying down in the dark.

Robert Salisbury

A woman of substance | 31 January 2013

Hermione Ranfurly wrote two books. One was called The Ugly One. The other, the first, was called To War with Whitaker. Its success came as a surprise to her, but to none of her legion of friends. It chronicled her war. Recently married to Dan, a Northern Irish peer whose father had lost almost everything, mostly on the green baize, she determined to pursue him, his horses and his yeomanry regiment to the Middle East, no matter that the army, the War Office and official Whitehall expressly forbade such camp following. She eventually reached Cairo and secured a job in SOE. She had already demonstrated her determination by getting there. Once in Egypt, she used her genius for diagnosing character and her infectious enthusiasm to get to know anyone who was anyone.

Thursday

Jonathan Bate

The twin certainties of baptism and burial

Can there possibly be anything new to say about the old subject of Shakespeare’s sources? As early as the 18th century, scholars realised that he made up very few of his own plots. Whether he was bringing to life Plutarch’s biographies of the noble Romans or rescripting a hoary old drama from the existing repertoire or turning a saucy Elizabethan novel into a stage comedy, Shakespeare was always a literary magpie or, as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale describes himself, ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. The shelves of the Shakespearean library groan with volumes on his uses of classical poets such as Ovid, of the Bible, of Montaigne’s essays.

Richard Davenporthines

The wilder shores of Wilde

In 1946, as a Princeton graduate, J. Robert Maguire was attached to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. He befriended an elderly survivor of the Dreyfus Affair, from whom he acquired important unpublished documents, and ever since has been a quiet, discriminating buyer of archival material relating to sensational trials and miscarriages of justice — particularly the Wilde and Dreyfus cases. After nearly 70 years he has published the sum of his researches into Carlos Blacker, Wilde’s friend and Dreyfus’s champion, and the ways in which those sensational cases interlocked and rebounded on Blacker. Ceremonies of Bravery is a recondite book, written with lawyerly precision and patrician understatement, but it also has rare charm.

Michael Heath

Lost Soho afternoons

‘And what do you do?’ asked Francis Bacon. ‘Er, I’m a cartoonist.’ ‘You are a chronicler of our age, yours is the art that counts, yours is art made history, I salute you!’ Bacon then stumbled off, shouting, ‘Who was that cunt?’ That was the Colony Room. Dangerous! Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night, reading Sophie Parkin’s history. I’d been taken to the club in the late 1950s by Jeffrey Bernard. I’d teamed up with him, eager to join his long downhill struggle, and he liked having around him people who were happy to self-destruct. I’d introduced him to Richard Ingrams, who had nervously taken him on as racing correspondent of Private Eye, dubbing him ‘Colonel Mad’.

Eric Weinberger

The waiting-room of life

The decadence of at least two societies or cultures can be seen in Dave Eggers’ new novel, where some bored Americans wait for weeks in a giant cooled tent in Saudia Arabia for the chance to display the latest innovation in conference IT to King Abdullah at the unbuilt ‘economic city’ that bears his name. Considering current sophisticated video-conferencing and other technology, how vital is it that King Abdullah Economic City (or KAEC, pronounced ‘cake’) be equipped with a hologram device that enables colleagues walking and talking in London to appear to be striding the stage near Jeddah?  But perhaps something similar was said about mobile phones 20 years ago.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Telling tales out of school

The difficult thing about writing a memoir is this: how do you avoid numbing the reader with endless thumbnail sketches of the hundreds of characters who have crossed your path? It’s easier in a novel, where you might have seven to ten main characters and can take time to delve deeply into each one.  In a memoir which spans a long life from pre-war Eton to modern-day Yorkshire, you need to be a very good writer indeed to bring alive, for instance, Mrs Tedder, who did the washing-up at Sunningdale School in 1953. Are you interested? Well, I’m happy to tell you that you are. Wild Writing Granny is a book full of delight. It is shot through with love, anguish, light, darkness and fun.