We walked the cliff of Portnahaven listening to the grey seals sing on Orsay and Eilean Mhic Coinnich across the little harbour. Were they singing for the love of being here in this place, like us, far from griefs — and were they also singing, as we were, to each other?
James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He drew on his own Grub Street life for this discursive lexicon, from A.D. (‘a drink’) to Zulu Express (the nickname for a Great Western service), published, days before his death in 1909, as Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase. The Bodder has faked it up nicely in smudgy facsimile, with burgundy end-papers, a new title and an introduction by John Simpson of the OED, who devours dictionaries with his morning porridge.
Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these two cities cherish a rivalry and have followed different paths. Edinburgh, a royal capital until 1603 and a seat of parliament until 1707, and again in recent years, home to a great university and medical school and nurse to writers from Walter Scott to Joanne Rowling, has made almost as much history as Jerusalem. Edinburgh peers down from Castle Hill as if over a newspaper on its toiling rival to the west, besmirched with tobacco and slavery and laden with locomotives, boilers, ships, Vanguard-class nuclear submarines and incessant rain.
Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison finds himself prostrate on the icy sidewalk of Madison Avenue. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says a plump, sweaty-faced middle-aged woman as she hauls him to his feet. This is Mimi, the antithesis of Harrison’s neurotic patients, and — it transpires, after a few more twists and turns — the love of his life. Harrison has recently parted from pretentious Gertrude, a woman who conceived a child by ‘parthenogenesis’ and ‘batiks without irony’.
Stripping down prose is not a risk-free undertaking. The excision of adverbs and the passive voice is sound practice in journalism. However, to make very bare writing a thing of beauty in fiction requires enormous skill. Hemingway’s short stories — those clean, well-lighted places — manage it. Despite its author’s fellow possession of a Nobel prize, J.M. Coetzee’s new novel does not. In The Childhood of Jesus the South African eschews the baroque only to tend to the banal. Davíd and Simón arrive by boat in an unmanned Hispanophone country. They come to the city of Novilla, where a bureaucracy serves the needs of newcomers. Davíd is about five.
It is 32 years since the first edition of this hefty book appeared in 1981. The original was based on the research materials amassed by Charles Handley-Read, the pioneer scholar and collector of Victorian decorative arts and one-time art master at Bryanston, who killed himself in 1971. Other people’s research notes are often not easy to use, and Joe Crook has greatly expanded that core material, and presented it in an illuminating schematic way. This second, revised and enlarged edition, as well as correcting errors and fine-tuning matters of detail, incorporates many hitherto ‘lost’ art objects by Burges, rediscovered in the aftermath of the first edition. The rich ‘cream and brandy’ literary mannerisms have also been toned down slightly.
Mick Jagger, the Danny La Rue of rock, impersonates a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls. Vaudeville performers in the Jagger mould love to put on lipstick and ‘false bubbies’ (as Neil McKenna calls them). Boy X-Factor contestants, with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings and nails lovingly manicured, present an almost Gloria Swanson-like image of adornment. Perhaps it is merely romantic to suggest that the stylised wigs and gowns worn by our bishops and high court judges also have a homoerotic component. The former Pope Benedict XVI’s ruby-red pumps were nothing compared to the faux ermines worn in the House of Lords.
You might not expect Sara Wheeler, the intrepid literary traveller, to be anxious about passing the half-century point. Surely a person who can survive the mental and physical rigours of Antarctica, as she brilliantly documented in Terra Incognita, can cope with ageing and menopause? Wheeler herself was not so certain. In her restless, creative way, she met the advent of what she calls ‘the Frumpy Years’ by taking to the road, following the trails of six indomitable Victorian women across the United States. The combination of that nation of eternal makeover and of Wheeler’s travelling companions makes O My America! a curious and teasing book.
A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed to death in the street — an apparently senseless crime. The tragedy of the happy couple touches and disturbs her. Then, almost accidentally, she finds herself becoming involved with the widow and the dead man’s best friend. At first all is straightforward: loss, grieving, consolation. Gradually the relationship becomes more complex: she begins an affair with the friend, recognising that she is little more than a stopgap in his life.
‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives. But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is comparable to child abuse.
The former Soviet Union is so down on its economic luck that it can no longer maintain Lenin’s embalmed body. A brash official from rural China called Liu Yingque decides to buy the deteriorating corpse, create a red tourist attraction in his own county, and so make the area rich beyond its wildest dreams. Liu’s only difficulty is finding the millions of yuan necessary to purchase Lenin. He soon hits upon a solution: he recruits a performing troupe from nearby Liven, a village in which every resident is disabled in some way, and dispatches them on a nationwide fundraising tour.
‘All human life is binary’, explains a Vestal Virgin to the time-travelling heroine of Ranjit Bolt’s verse novel, Losing It. Young and lovely, Lucy’s plan is to lose her virginity. Entertainingly delivered, it’s an engaging subject, universal and rich in comic scope. Bolt’s burlesque is a frolicsome addition to a scanty genre, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales via Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. He plunders deep erudition for this bawdy bildungsroman; not so much virtue rewarded as its abandonment thwarted.
Max Beerbohm, dandy, cartoonist and penetrating drama critic, was par excellence the observer of the glittering English period that stretched from the 1890s to the death of Edward VII, poking unsparing but mainly good-humoured fun at the peculiarities of its political and cultural leaders: Swinburne, Asquith, Lloyd George, Chesterton, Kipling and the King among them. At the same time he was himself part of the scene, the master of a carefully cultivated style. His fellow critic Desmond MacCarthy once wrote of him: I remember walking one night down Piccadilly behind that high-hat with its deep mourning band. It was then perched above a very long dark top-coat with an astrakhan collar... In a gloved hand this figure held an ebony stick with an ivory collar...
The bus slows at the dancing blue and ignis fatuus of yellow vest and chequered bodywork. There’s one car in the ditch and one with an L slewed across the featureless straight run from Cambridge. Our driver rolls down the glass – five or six hours, it’s as bad as it gets – and lets the swish and flip and grim theatricality as emergency vehicles keep arriving (cutting tools, the doors of an ambulance swung back) enter the overheated bus alongside cold rumour. Caxton Gibbet watches. So do the chicken bones of that restaurant we had booked for the day of the fire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.