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Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

The one who got away with it

The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting, he sometimes struggles to finish. Some of the same prolixity characterises his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace (Viking, £14.75). No ghost writer has been allowed near this: it’s Young in all his ragged glory. The narrative — well, there isn’t one. Over several hundred short chapters, he darts hither and thither, telling stories, loving his family, remembering old friends and tour buses he liked, ranting about the quality of the sound on CDs and MP3s. If you like his music — and there’s little reason to pick this up if you don’t — you’ll have a fascinating insight into a very particular creative process.

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Narrative drive

Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example of ‘nostalgic intertextuality’, which is a grand way of saying that it is a bit of this and a bit of that. The this is the part cars have played in his family’s history and the that is the part they have played in the lives of the famous biographer’s famous subjects. We learn that Holroyd’s father liked to drive his Zodiac with his miniature German police dog on his lap, and that the author’s wife Margaret Drabble ‘plumbed a special telephone into her car’.

Lloyd Evans

He knows it teases

Simon Hoggart has spent 20 years going to Westminster to annoy people. He entertains no high-minded delusions about politics and he writes his Guardian sketches in a state of amused bewilderment by the sheer barminess and abnormality of most parliamentarians. This collection reads like the diary of an intelligent, mild-mannered child whose parents happen to own a knocking-shop. He makes enemies along the way. John Prescott has several times threatened to kill Hoggart, even though he directs very few explicit barbs at the former deputy prime minister. What he does is to quote him at length and with terrible accuracy. And because Prescott’s brain is like a wrecking-ball to his credibility, any transcription of his words is bound to inflict serious damage.

Paul Johnson

Apologia pro vita sua

Any fair-minded person who has looked into the matter knows that Conrad Black was wrongly convicted. Indeed under English law he would not have been prosecuted at all, I believe, and had he been so, the judge would have thrown the case out on the first day on the grounds that the pre-trial publicity had hopelessly prejudiced the case. He would then have jailed some of the hostile commentators until they had purged their contempt. However, it is just as well that Black has decided to describe exactly how and why he was wrongly convicted. He does so in fascinating detail, and in language which is always lively and sometimes achieves a kind of wild distinction. He has a genuine gift — almost a genius — for multisyllabic abuse.

Digby Anderson

Give me stress

Christmas is one of the few remaining occasions when the English feel obliged to cook a proper meal at home. To help them, in the autumn, kind publishers bring out lots of huge, glossy books. The idea, or collusive polite fiction, is that the cooks read the books carefully, plan their meals, buy ingredients and any necessary equipment — Jamie Oliver lists a vast amount — and then successfully cook a whole delicious meal. I have long suspected that in reality, the purchase of the book, its subsequent prominent display and discussion are acts of propitiation that take the place of actually cooking and excuse the cook from her obligations. These books certainly fulfil this second task. They are huge, very heavy and some contain as much garish illustration as text.

Blair Worden

A cavalier attitude to monarchy

Historians have long been more interested in the Roundheads than in the Cavaliers. It was the parliamentarians who achieved England’s revolution, or the nearest thing the country has come to one. It was they who overthrew the monarchy, the House of Lords and the bishops, they whose insistence on parliamentary rights, and whose attainment of a measure of religious toleration under Cromwell, apparently pointed ahead to modern values. Now the balance is changing. Historians have become less ardent for progress. Under their increasingly sceptical gaze the gap between parliamentarian thinking and the outlook of its later congratulators seems ever wider. Besides, over-population has driven students of the parliamentarian cause into neighbouring pastures.

David Gilmour

Fun and games — except with mother

The Duke of Edinburgh, a New Zealand typist claimed in 1954, was ‘the best investment that the royal family has made in all its history’. But would she have thought so had she seen him a few days earlier at a ‘crazy’ party where, according to his first cousin Pamela Hicks, he ‘excelled himself, managing to use three cracker blowers at once — one in his mouth and one up each nostril, the shiny rolls unravelling simultaneously’? Anecdotes like that are, I imagine, the chief reason why people buy books like this. Lady Pamela tells them well, especially those about her ancestors. The best-crafted character in the tale is her grandmother, Princess Victoria of Hesse, who was capable of carrying on three conversations in three languages at the same time.

Lewis Jones

Living on the brink

To write this book Aman Sethi, a journalist for the Hindu, spent five years hanging out with the casual labourers of Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, who live and die on the streets. ‘Why,’ asks one of them, ‘are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What can we teach you?’ He explains that he is trying to write a book. Who would want to read it? ‘I don’t know. I suppose my friends will buy it and maybe a few people interested in Delhi.’ But the lafunters have taught him a lot, and for its observation, sympathy and humour A Free Man deserves a far wider audience. I still don’t know exactly what a lafunter is — or, for that matter, a chootiya, masjid or pallu.

Jonathan Mirsky

All in the telling

I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes and listening to them from non-Jews, who invariably tell them badly. But if you like Jewish jokes written down, dozens and dozens of them, and you think Michael Winner a witty fellow, then this is the book for you. Better skip the introduction, though, because in it Winner reveals what he thinks is really funny. ‘Some of the funniest stories I have heard,’ he writes, were in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Bevis Hillier

Clay pride

What a superb potter Michael Cardew was. What a fascinating, complex man. And what a lovely book this is. Next to Bernard Leach, who as the seventh Kenzan (that is, seventh in line of pupillage to the 17th-century Japanese artist Kenzan I) had something of the status of an English pope in the world of studio pottery, Cardew is considered by many to be the greatest potter of the 20th century. Others might make claims for William Staite Murray, Hans Coper, Lucie Rie or Edmund de Waal, who visited Cardew just before the master’s death in 1983 and was described in his diary as ‘a very good young man’. Cardew was born of upper-middle-class stock in 1901 — just late enough to avoid being slaughtered in the Great War.

Philip Hancock

Wear and Tear

Buttons like liquorice Catherine wheels on the cape coat I always loved you in. No longer flush, the top one dangles by two last threads, face down. A couple of minutes, why not sort it? For God’s sake, you say, turning back the lapel. You’re obsessed. Flip through the pages of your Grazia. Mum’ll fix it. Monday, doing it up for work, the shock, where, when — in the surge off the tube at Green Park, plucked from the back of the seat at the Curzon? Could be anywhere. Despite the miles of haberdasheries, nothing comes close.

Richard Davenporthines

The French connection | 15 November 2012

When novelists write essays, they often boom through megaphones, aggrandise the importance of their views and inflate their stature.  Julian Barnes, however, seems to be a novelist who enjoyed feeling special when young, but now finds increasing rueful comfort in reminders of his own insignificance.  Certainly there is no swagger in his 17 essays about truth and fiction collected in Through the Window. The book relies on stylish intelligence and cool calm to accomplish its mastery. Barnes sees novelists as solitary truth-seekers and public truth-tellers. ‘The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well,’ he writes. Novels inquire about the purpose, discipline, pleasures and value of life, and the meaning of its loss.

Stephen Bayley

A global hegemony of clean lines

Phaidon Press invented the art book. It was in 1930s Vienna that Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider established the format of the illustrated monograph: a short essay by an expert, usually an Austrian art historian hired for a modest fee, followed by a sumptuous range of high-quality repro. They left before the Anschluss and arrived in London, bringing their distinguished backlist with them. Effete British art history was immediately fortified by stern German-language methodology.  After several changes of ownership, direction and fortune, not all of them good, Phaidon is now perhaps the outstanding international publisher of illustrated books.

Amanda Herries

Scotland’s top ten

It is no mean feat to produce a publication of the type that used to be described as ‘a coffee-table book’, devoted to the subject of great Scottish houses, and manage to find a fresh slant on a genre that has illustrated and described country houses for decades.  James Knox and his photographer, James Fennell, have succeeded in doing just that. Whilst I might wonder if the coffee-table is still a must-have piece of furniture there is no doubt that this book is a feast for the eyes. Images shot in natural light provide luscious accompaniment to the text which achieves an easy harmony of informative history with light-hearted family and personal references.

Patrick Marnham

Making the bomb

Of the making of many books about J. Robert Oppenheimer there is apparently no end. There have been 23 previous lives, seven of them published since 2004. This situation, which would have delighted its subject, is now complicated by the appearance of Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk, previously the biographer of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. In a crisp introduction Professor Monk explains that he is joining the throng because there has been no ‘scientific biography’, and previous work has largely ignored Oppenheimer’s contribution to physics. In fact — as Inside the Centre makes clear — JRO’s major contribution to physics would scarcely have justified one biography, let alone 24.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Keeping calm and carrying on

An ordinary woman, rather like yourself.’ These were Peter Fleming’s words when he commissioned Jan Struther to write what became her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns for the Times. Critics complained then, and have complained ever since, that Mrs Miniver is no ‘ordinary woman’. She rings the bell for tea, takes taxis everywhere, and has a second home in Kent. As I read These Wonderful Rumours, the 1938-1945 diaries of a Derbyshire schoolteacher in her twenties called May Smith, I kept thinking, ‘Here is your perfect ordinary woman.’ And I was not being pejorative. Ordinary does not mean dull. It means unpretentious and normal.

John Sutherland

The most inscrutable of poets

Where our great Victorian writers are concerned we live in an age of rolling biography and contradictory interpretation. I’ve read half a dozen lives of the poet since picking up, as a schoolboy, the Penguin paperback of Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, with its diagnosis of a crippling case of Victorian timidity: ‘Tennyson was afraid of death and sex and God.’ I got the point, and read In Memoriam with knowing condescension. Case settled. But not for long.

Jonathan Rugman

Murderous mullah games

Montesquieu observed that popular governments are always more vindictive than monarchies. So it proved in Iran in 1979, where the demise of a 2,000-year-old monarchical tradition made most ‘Arab spring’ revolutions seem like child’s play. More than 30 years on, the descent of Ayatollah Khomeini from a jumbo jet, wearing an American bullet-proof vest, also remains arguably more significant. James Buchan concludes that Osama bin Laden was the extreme Sunni response to Khomeini’s clerical dictatorship; and without Khomeini, the Shias’ battle for survival would not have played out across the Middle East as violently as it has, including in Syria today.

David Crane

Carve their names with pride

On a ridge high above the River Ancre, four miles to the north of the town of Albert, stands the greatest of all Britain’s memorials to its dead. For some curious reason the Thiepval Arch has never touched the imagination in the same way as Blomfield’s Menin Gate, but as an evocation of the pity and horror of war, Lutyens’s astonishing pyramid of arches, rising high above the old battlefields of the Somme on the site of one of its bloodiest sectors, has no equal. It is the Marabar Cave of war memorials, the negation of every concept of honour or glory or fame that ever sent a soldier to his death, and on its walls are inscribed the ‘intolerably nameless names’ of the ‘Missing of the Somme’.

Anne Somerset

The strange potency of things

Building on the success of his acclaimed Radio 4 series and bestselling book A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor has now successfully narrowed down the format. Selecting 20 objects that he suggests formed part of ‘the mental scenery’ of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he exploits what he calls ‘the strange potency of things’ to illuminate the world they lived in. Some of the items chosen initially appear almost perversely mundane. The cloth cap that was the prescribed headgear for all non-gentrified Elizabethan males is scarcely intrinsically beautiful, but under MacGregor’s scrutiny this humble garment proves satisfyingly informative.