More from Books

Thursday

Patrick Boyle

When the Yankees came

From the London opening of Oklahoma in 1947 until the age of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, stage musicals were regarded as an almost exclusively American art-form. Sometime after their opening on Broadway, the best of them transferred to London’s West End. Over half the musicals you have ever heard of and continue to see revived and performed in local operatic societies originated during this period — Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, The Music Man, The King and I, The Sound of Music and Cabaret to name some of the more famous.

Ian Thomson

A model of micro-history

Adolf Hitler considered jazz a ‘racially inferior’ form of American black music, and banned it from the airwaves. Germany’s gilded youth flouted the prohibition by playing Duke Ellington in secret and greeting each other loudly in English: ‘Hallo, Old Swing Boy!’ Resistance was useless. The Brownshirts raided parties and even beaches in search of portable wind-up gramophones and gleefully kicked the shellac records to pieces. By 1942, Hitler’s police were arresting up to 50 people a day in Berlin alone. On learning of Hitler’s death in Berlin in January 1945, however, the Reich Chancellery staff put on jazz records and brought on the dancing girls.

Thursday

Cressida Connolly

Growing old disgracefully | 17 January 2013

Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local residents’ association and does a fair bit of knitting may not sound like the most alluring reading. Then there’s the title — facetious and forgettable at the same time. It would be less embarrassing to ask for something saucy at the chemist than to enquire after this at your local bookshop. Don’t be put off, though, because Ironside knows what she’s doing. Her heroine Marie Sharp may be an OAP, but as her name suggests, there’s nothing muted about her.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Understated elegance

A man raised by apes is discovered in Africa, recognised as an English lord, and escorted home. At a formal dinner, he raises a bowl of soup to his lips and slurps noisily. His grandfather, noting consternation among the other guests, immediately does the same, murmuring, ‘Quite right! Quite right! I hate spoons.’ This scene in the strangely underrated 1984 movie Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (with a wild-eyed Christopher Lambert as the apeman, and a wild-haired Ralph Richardson as his lovable grandfather) illustrates, I think, the two defining components of good manners: etiquette and decency. Occasionally, as here, they come into conflict, in which case (as Richardson shows) decency comes first.

Matthew Adams

The greatest puzzle of all | 17 January 2013

A few months before he passed away, responding to a question about his doubts and beliefs, Jorge Luis Borges offered a rapt and potted account of the many cultural and religious registers in which human beings have for centuries been telling themselves stories about their own deaths. He then posed the following question: ‘Where does this tendency of man come from, to try to imagine and describe something that he cannot possibly know?’ Though Borges’s words do not feature in The Undiscovered Country, the force of his question can be felt on almost every page. For what Carl Watkins offers is an account of how ‘ordinary people’, from the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Great War, have imagined, limned, mourned and memorialised the dead.

Catherine Ormell

Delish!

An English peculiar, the -ish feeling comes from arriving at eightish, peckish, giving one’s hostess a warm kiss, at home among Leticia’s crowd, sardonic, lusty and brisk. Between the lettuce and the liquorice, I talk to an egyptologist who dabbles in hypnosis; intrigued, I let her practice, and see my parents farming radishes on a precipice... out of the mist I emerge ...then pish! my boyhood vanishes, my new friend’s turned to someone in financial services – do you know, they both summer in villas in the Tamarisk? Raptly they discuss the likelihood of a zombocalypse... my napkin slips away, I languish, familiar with the interstice between the skating plates, the pause before a conversational hit or miss, the heat and sweat of sheepishness.

Fiona Maddocks

Bach, the Beatles and back

Leaping from Paleolithic cave paintings to Egyptian tombs to Gregorian chant in barely half a chapter, as Howard Goodall does in his breezy but effective The Story of Music, requires panache. He compresses several millennia into little over 300 pages with the first 40,000 years — when admittedly little happened beyond some inter-cave sonar-style singing — dispatched in a few paragraphs. Goodall, known as the composer of theme tunes for Blackadder, QI and Red Dwarf and also responsible for the music for the London 2012 opening ceremony, could never be called shy. For the past three decades he has enjoyed the limelight as one of those rare beings: a musician who can play, compose and evangelise.

Andro Linklater

Italy’s first Duce

There is something to be said for a bald-headed gnome with the power, according to his biographer, to seduce any woman he wanted, including the most celebrated and desirable actress of the day, despite being handicapped by red-rimmed eyes, bad breath and crooked teeth ‘of three colours, white, yellow and black’. And something more deserves to be said about the seducer’s rabble-rousing demagoguery that allowed him to pave the way for fascism, and for the nationalist hatred of democracy that blighted Europe after the first world war. But whether those deserts really require 200,000 words is another matter. The gnome was Gabriele d’Annunzio, who stumbled into the footnotes of history when he seized the Yugoslav city of Rijeka, or Fiume, in 1919 on behalf of Italy.

Byron Rogers

Part of the pantheon

Henry Fonda once said that he had never had any ambition to be a film star. But then how could a man want to become someone who came out of nowhere, had no past, so that even the names we know them by were mostly not ones bestowed on them by their parents and the registrar? An old college football star (John Wayne), a virtual tramp who had served time on a chain gang (Robert Mitchum), circus acrobats (Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster)— each had served no professional apprenticeship, but had become more famous than men had ever been, their subsequent careers a source of wonder not just to the world but to themselves. They were the Hollywood film stars of the mid- 20th century, not actors — actors will come again — but stars. These men never will.

Alexander Chancellor

Scaling the musical Matterhorn

This book is an account by the music-loving editor of the Guardian of how he set himself the task of learning to play one of the most daunting virtuoso pieces in the piano repertoire, and to do so within the space of what turned out to be perhaps the most hectic year in the newspaper’s history. Alan Rusbridger didn’t actually meet his self-imposed deadline. He had been overwhelmed by developments at his newspaper — the Wikileaks and phone-hacking exposures (both huge Guardian scoops), the Arab revolutions, the English urban riots, the near-collapse of the European financial system, not to mention the huge financial problems created for the paper by the digital revolution — and so could not put in the hours of practice he needed.

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

Chills, but no thrills

‘Mary and Geordie have lost a child ...Why should they feel they are entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace.’ Paul Torday’s latest novel is full of such assertions. We are in the Border country, in 2010, and three children have disappeared. Neither the police nor social services can be persuaded to take much interest. ‘Tell you what,’ says the editor of the local paper to Mary, distraught mother of missing Theo, ‘I’ll diary it. If he hasn’t come back in a year’s time we’ll run an anniversary special on him. I can’t say fairer than that.’ The unlikeliness of this response, and the inauthenticity of the tone, undermine what is in some ways a well-crafted novel. There are clumsinesses.

Simon Baker

Novel ways of writing

If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change your mind. Royle (pictured above) teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and in this book he gives us Paul Kinder, who teaches creative writing at Manchester while trying to write a novel. The comparisons that we are invited to draw are clear, but to complicate things the novel also contains ‘Nicholas’, a character in a novella by Grace, one of Paul’s students; Nicholas has the same name and is the same age as the author.

Ben Hamilton

A consummate craftsman

It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange, dirty artefacts among the glossier SF-tinged material. Tenth of December is such a strong collection because the wackiness is mostly kept at bay. These are stories about people who are trying to do the right thing in an ungrateful world, and there is less of the shrill goofiness that comprised much of his previous collection, In Persuasion Nation.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Pig in the middle

With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’. Somerville-Large, who was born in Dublin and educated partly at St Columba’s, — a boarding school modelled on English public schools — is a historical social observer of merciless accuracy and caustic wit, moderated with just a touch of nostalgia.

Fiona Maddocks

His own man | 10 January 2013

Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure that his name stays in the frame of 20th-century British musical life forever. Yet this self-effacing figure, quick to praise others above himself, has rarely enjoyed the spotlight. He deserves his own twirl. A new collection of writings, letters and interviews, edited by his one-time pupil Peter Dickinson, offers an easily digested introduction to the composer and his milieu.

Caroline Moorehead

Apocalypse now | 10 January 2013

In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012, a newly elected government under a former university professor who once worked for the UN is bringing stability to the country, exiled Somalis are going home, Mogadishu is being rebuilt and the pirate menace, if not exactly under control, is being contained. It may be so. But the country Fergusson describes is the stuff of nightmares. In 1960, the former British protectorate and Italian colony united to become an independent Somali republic, under a civilian government.

Jane Ridley

Taking a pop at the Queen

On 10 June 1840 an 18-year-old out-of-work Londoner named Edward Oxford cocked his pistol and fired two shots at Queen Victoria as she made her daily carriage drive with Prince Albert on Constitution Hill. Oxford was mobbed by the crowd, who shouted ‘Kill him!’ He was charged with high treason. Though he claimed that his cheap flintlock pistol was loaded, no ball was ever found. Oxford, who (according to Prince Albert) was ‘a little mean-looking man’, delighted in the attention the shooting brought him. During the trial the family insisted that he was mad. He was found guilty but insane, and sentenced to confinement for life in Bethlem hospital. Oxford was the first of seven men who attempted to kill or assault Queen Victoria.

John Mole

The Afterlife of Literary Fame

I can’t read fiction any more And that’s a fact. Don’t ask me why. God only knows, old fruit. If a poem doesn’t rhyme, forget it. I certainly have. Today’s lunch Was a damned good salmon en croute, And tomorrow more tests, more tests To hear my ticker count its beats Like Tennyson. So put in the boot With the old one two. Pour me a double Straight down the horse’s neck And sound mortality’s horn. Toot toot. As I sit here in the tweeds of bufferdom I try to forget myself. Who’s in, Who’s out? Why should I give a hoot? You won’t persuade me otherwise, Lord Cobber, I’m far too far gone for that. All I shall do is shrug, deny, refute But hope at least this feature you intend Will turn a penny for us both.

Mark Mason

How not to steal a million

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ crackled the voice over the Buckinghamshire police radio in the pre-dawn light of Thursday 8 August 1963. ‘They’ve stolen a train.’ Fifty years on, we can’t believe it either. And to the extent that we do, our fascination with the Great Train Robbery shows no sign of fading. It’s Britain’s real-life Wizard of Oz — no matter how familiar the tale, we can never resist savouring it just one more time. By this new book’s own admission, the ‘definitive’ of its subtitle cannot mean ‘statement of fact’, a single, unarguable version of the the truth.

Margaret Drabble

Her fighting soul

The subtitle of Deirdre David’s life of Olivia Manning, ‘A Woman at War’, has a resonant double meaning. She was, as we are repeatedly informed, a unique example of a woman novelist who wrote as well about war and battles as a man. But she was also at war with herself, with her colleagues, and, most enduringly and curiously, with her husband, the legendary R. D. Smith, known to all as ‘Reggie’. Manning is rightly best remembered for her largely autobiographical novels describing the second world war, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, which gained an afterlife in a memorable 1987 BBC television series.