More from Books

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian – review

‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country. British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense.

Marcus Berkmann

Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey – review

We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you’re going to be under three feet of snow every December.’ Perhaps appropriately, then, he has written quite a whimsical little book, scarcely longer than a pamphlet, exploring the glorious oddness of British weather with characteristic elegance and perspicacity. East Anglian gales, ‘ranting uninterrupted from the Urals’, are ‘a sight more brazen than the tree-top gossip of the Chilterns’.

Lloyd Evans

Mr Speaker: The Office and the Individuals since 1945, by Matthew Laban – review

The sheer workload. That’s the first big surprise in Matthew Laban’s absorbing history of the Speakership since 1945. Typically, the Speaker rises at dawn and holds several hours of preparatory meetings before parliamentary business starts after lunch. Though helped by two deputies, the Speaker must remain on duty into the small hours. Loneliness and overwork have created casualties. Horace King (1965-1971) liked an early-evening stiffener consisting of half a pint of sherry enlivened with four fingers of Armagnac. As he staggered towards his ceremonial perch one night, he was heckled by Labour’s chief whip, Bob Mellish. ‘Horace, I’ll have you out of that chair within three months.

Andrew Taylor

The Dance of the Seagull, by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli – review

In the first six pages of Andrea Camilleri’s new novel, Inspector Montalbano drinks at least four cups of coffee and watches a seagull dance to its death in front of his verandah. Its beak pointing at the sky, the bird spins in its last agony. Afterwards, the inspector places its corpse in a plastic bag, swims into the sea and commits it to the deep. It’s an arresting, eccentric episode which, together with the coffee, gives a glimpse of what lies in store. Montalbano is never far removed from his next cup of coffee. He’s also strangely sensitive, alert to the nuances of life and death; his imagination often tips him into nightmare, which is not always convenient, particularly at the scene of a crime.

Jonathan Mirsky

Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig – review

Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to acquire these qualities; they attend concerts, look at paintings, travel and meet men and woman of distinction. They could, for example, while still young, watch Rodin perfecting his sculpture, write operas with Richard Strauss or help James Joyce find the perfect words for turning something he had written into other languages. Stefan Zweig was just such a man. He was born in 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, during the last Golden Age as he put it. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 in despair at Hitler’s destruction of their civilisation.

Daniel Swift

Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare, by David Schalkwyk – review

The so-called ‘Robben Island Bible’ is one of the holy relics of Shakespeare criticism. It is a copy of a 1970 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, kept by a political prisoner on Robben Island, the notorious island jail off Cape Town, during the 1970s and 1980s. The possession of such a book was against the rules, but its owner, Sonny Venkatrathnam, convinced the guards that this was a Bible, and inside the prison it functioned as something like a holy text. The inmates passed around the collection of plays and poems, and 34 signed their names next to a favourite passage. Apartheid was founded upon division. In sharing the Robben Island Bible among themselves, these prisoners used Shakespeare to found their own community.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Confronting the Classics, by Mary Beard – review

The Emperor Augustus, ruler of the known world, once spotted a man in the street who looked a bit like himself. ‘Did your mother ever work at the palace?’ he asked him roguishly. ‘No,’ the man replied, ‘but my father did.’ Augustus could have had the man killed for this scurrilous (and slightly surreal) insinuation, but fortunately he had a sense of humour. As too, Mary Beard tells us, did the Emperor Elagabalus, who used to seat his dinner guests on cushions that, unbeknownst to them, were full of air. As the meal progressed, a slave secretly let the air out, so Elagabalus could enjoy the sight of his companions subsiding, until they slid beneath the table.

Thursday

Cressida Connolly

How Many Camels are there in Holland? by Phyillida Law – review

Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of pretty much everything.  She’s a good actor: she’s obviously a fine cook, too, if the recipes in How Many Camels Are There in Holland? Dementia, Ma and Me (Fourth Estate, £12.99) are anything to go by. Also included are a series of her lovely watercolour sketches, of Tuscan villas, Christmas stockings, her mother asleep. Is there nothing the woman can’t do? Someone so accomplished could write a book about their weekly trip to the supermarket and make it highly amusing. A volume about her mother’s decline into dementia is hardly a more promising proposition, yet this is a funny, brave and heartening volume.

Stig Abell

The Scent of Death, by Andrew Taylor – review

Raymond Chandler once said that ‘the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels.’ This holds true for genre writing generally. Historical fictions, like murder mysteries, can often be dismissed as the thoughtless product of the hack, not the artist. For every ‘good specimen’ (and one might nominate Gore Vidal and Hilary Mantel as practitioners of this art), there are shelves groaning with the mediocre, the outright bad, and even the so-bad-it-is-good (Dennis Wheatley). Andrew Taylor, an expert in the realm of murder and mystery fiction (he reviews crime novels for this magazine), must know the potential pitfalls.

Wynn Wheldon

I Know You’re Going to be Happy: A Story of Love and Betrayal, by Rupert Christiansen – review

This is an unsettling book. On the face of it a memoir by the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, it veers from social history to intimate confessional, from objective understanding to subjective contempt, with strong elements of hatefulness. In the summer of 1959 the author’s father, a prominent journalist and son of Arthur Christiansen, Beaverbrook’s great editor of the Daily Express, left the family to live with (and eventually to marry and have a family with) his secretary. What Christiansen describes in his book is the fall out from this act of betrayal. The subtitle includes ‘love’, which must refer to the son’s love for his mother.

Penelope Lively

The Unknown Bridesmaid, by Margaret Forster – review

The power of the past, the directive hand of childhood: the themes of The Unknown Bridesmaid are familiar fictional territory. But Margaret Forster has a deft and idiosyncratic touch in this story of child psychologist Julia, whose young clients reflect the trauma of her own early years. Sessions with Camilla, Precious, Janice, Claire and others are intercut with Julia’s own memories, so that gradually we learn what happened to her after her father’s early death and that of her mother when Julia was a teenager. For the reader, she presents something of a challenge. The memories are candid: her behaviour was insufferable.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War, by Ursula Buchan – review

Here are some statistics about wartime fruit- and vegetable-growing in England which this book tells us. In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland. But in a 1944 survey, it was discovered that only 34 per cent of urban gardens were growing fruit and vegetables, and only 10.9 per cent of households cultivated an allotment. The north-west of England turned out the worst figures, with only 28 per cent of households growing vegetables. As Ursula Buchan writes, ‘Picking sun-warmed greenhouse tomatoes to add to a salad is a pleasure; weeding round shot-holed brassicas on a windswept allotment is not.’ And this was what weary English householders worked out for themselves, as the war wore on.

Maurice Riordan

The Cuckoo Clock

for Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004 Parking near St Pancras long before light, it wouldn’t spook if you peered from a shop front or popped from a grille — remembering the night we arranged a rendezvous at the Elephant, you like a meerkat in-and-out of the subways on the traffic island, head cocked but hesitant when I called A Mhíchíl through the sodium haze — who already must have felt in your brain a faint alert above the chug of the Riesenrad… I observed the scared look but never imagined you’d be panicked or with a farcical skip be gone: feral, too soft you were, but glad in your heart as you eyed up the sky, quickened your step of a sudden, and gave me the slip.

Richard Davenporthines

Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, by Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein – review

One often hears the caterwaul that the harsh new technology of emails has killed the gentle old craft of letter-writing.  Joseph Epstein and Frederic Raphael — septuagenarian pen-pals who have never met, the one based in Chicago and the other dividing his year between South Kensington and Périgord — have set out to prove the doomsayers wrong by publishing their email traffic for the year 2009. Epstein and Raphael start with one disadvantage, perhaps. They have the wit to be great letter-writers, but not the frustration.  It is unfulfilled talents or time-wasters, failing to find other means of self-expression, who excel as correspondents.

Peter Parker

The Blind Man’s Garden, by Nadeem Aslam – review

Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Nadeem Aslam fourth novel begins with two young Pakistani men slipping over the border into Afghanistan. Jeo is a third-year medical student who has secretly volunteered to treat those wounded in the ‘war against terror’, and he is accompanied by his adopted brother Mikal, who works at a gun shop. The action moves back and forth between the bloody chaos of Afghanistan and the small Pakistani town of Heer, where Naheed, who is married to Jeo but in love with Mikal, awaits their return. Trying to do the right thing in impossible circumstances, whether in love or in war, is central to the novel.

Paul Binding

The Child’s Child, by Barbara Vine – review

‘I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one,’ Ruth Rendell said to me in 1998. ‘In fact I believe that if I weren’t to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn’t be able to write it at all.’ A Barbara Vine — from the first, A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) onwards — tends to take a specific period, distinct in mores and cultural tensions, and to concentrate on emotionally charged events, invariably climaxing in violent death, which stand in metaphoric relationship to it. In the body of this latest Vine book — the 192-page narrative actually entitled ‘The Child’s Child’ — all these requirements are amply met.

Martin Gayford

The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard – review

There is a feeling about this publication of the biter bit, or rather, the observer observed. It consists of 16 essays by leading art historians about the most significant books about art published in the 20th century. The illustrations at the start of each section, rather than being of paintings and sculpture, are of scholars — as one might expect, a diffident-looking, bespectacled crew who look as if they spent more time in the archives than the gym. Anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject is likely to have at least a few of the books discussed here: E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960) for example, or Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936).

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique at 50

It’s the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. According to the quote on the cover of my Penguin edition, ‘Feminism … began with the work of a single person: Friedan.’ Quite something, then. In fact any mention of Betty Friedan brings out something like post-traumatic stress symptoms in me, even though she died in 2006. When I was a student I invited her to take part in a Cambridge Union debate on feminism. She came, and frankly it was like entertaining Cleopatra. She was heroically grand, heroically ugly and with a brilliantly American, unabashed sense of her own importance. She asked me what subject I was reading and I said clumsily that I was ‘in history’.

Molly Guinness

‘Diana Vreeland’, by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart – review

Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins. She seemed, recalled the writer Andrew Solomon, an impossible old lady who couldn’t let go of her control and who was making everyone’s lives miserable for no good reason. And they did everything she’d said, and it was transformed. Her nearly sightless eyes could pick out things my youthful vision could not; enfeebled, she was still supreme at the discipline of chic. From childhood, Diana Vreeland had operated with deep faith in the power of self-presentation.

Michael Paraskos

‘Lord Horror: Reverbstorm’, by David Britton and John Coulthart – review

As the son of the last British artist to be successfully prosecuted for displaying obscene paintings, I have some empathy with David Britton, the last person successfully prosecuted in Britain for publishing obscene literature. Unlike my father, who accidentally strayed into the purview of the police, Britton’s prosecution in 1992 was almost inevitable. His publisher, Manchester-based Savoy Books, was raided by the police with vindictive regularity between 1976 and 1997. Ironically, Savoy has often been reviled as much by the left for its lack of political correctness as by the right for attacking the shibboleths of authority. It embodies a longstanding tradition of non-conformist and essentially anarchist thinking in Britain that also underpins Reverbstorm.