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Thursday

Roger Lewis

The Diana effect

My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris Klunt.’ Diana’s ambition was to have ‘a big house, a swimming pool and a cream telephone’. She achieved these, plus psychopathic husbands, bankruptcy and an early death from cancer. It is a wonderfully sleazy and vivacious tale, told in po-faced fashion by Niema Ash in Connecting Dors (Purple Inc Press, £14.99).

John Preston

The further tragedy of unknowing

Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He did not discuss the possibility of his own death.’ A month later, she returned from the newsagents to see a casually dressed man outside her house ‘apparently loitering with some intent’. He explained that he was a major in the Army and asked if they could talk inside. Two days after that, Evison was being driven to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham when an ambulance sped by with a police escort. Inside was Mark. He had been shot while out on patrol in Helmand.

Philip Ziegler

More Lothario than Hamlet

Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is different. At one point he refers to himself as ‘a struggling actor approaching middle age’. (His wife somewhat brutally agreed: ‘Let’s be honest, you’ve had your chance as an actor, and at 40 you still haven’t made it.

J P O'Malley

A chapter of history

Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a young woman, fond of her freedom, who is betrothed to a respectable New England mill-owner. Isabel is unexpectedly rescued from this engagement, however, and taken by her aunt to Europe. Soon she inherits a fortune, which will bring with it, she believes, the independence she craves. But then, in Italy, she falls for the fascinating charm of Gilbert Osmond, and eventually marries him. It is here that the novel explores themes of morality, freedom and civilisation.

Molly Guinness

Women, beware these women

When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation, and get the fabulous payoff: a guy who is crazy about you!’ Time and again, women have thought they could ignore just one of the Rules, only to find themselves paying $300 for an emergency consultation with Fein and Schneider. When their first book of Rules came out in the 1990s, it was a surprise bestseller. It has spawned a relationship consultancy and a clutch of spin-off books.

Michael Holroyd

Controversial confessions

Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst who has worked in the United States and Britain. Over his career he has been ‘sitting with patients for thousands of hours,’ he writes. Occasionally he has used his notes and observations for addresses at clinical seminars or for contributions to psycho-analytical journals. But this is the first time he has consulted his files in order to publish a book for the general reader. ‘This book is about change,’ he tells us. Naturally his troubled patients are seeking change, though they sometimes shield themselves from his professional intrusiveness. There is the risk, too, of change being for the worse — for the consultant as well as for the patient. These sessions are a learning process for both of them.

Piers Paul-Read

Horrors too close to home

Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not even write essays but rather ‘texts’; and I see that Notting Hill Editions, whose elegant slim editions resemble those published by Suhrkamp or the Carl Hansa Verlag at the time, also use the word ‘texts’ for literary writing. W.G.

Friday

Lewis Jones

The Wiggins streak

As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an ordinary Kilburn lad he keeps dropping hints about a knighthood. So it is only fitting that, at the age of 32 and with the help of William Fotheringham, he has written My Time (Yellow Jersey Press, £20). Beneath the dustjacket its covers are the dashing yellow of the maillot jaune, with portraits of our hero front and back and ‘WIGGO’ on the spine, the ‘O’ shaped as a Mod roundel. Inside are more than 40 photographic plates, most of which show him looking pained and moody on bicycles; there is one of him shaving, but only his face, as he sculpts those celebrated sideburns.

John Preston

Torn between ideology and compassion

On 1 September 1978, the then prime minister Jim Callaghan invited six leading trade unionists to dinner at his Elizabethan farmhouse in Sussex. By all accounts it was a very jolly affair with Callaghan’s wife Audrey doing the cooking and their granddaughter Tamsin Jay handing round the dishes. The trade union grandees went away convinced that Callaghan was about to call a general election. Instead, he sat on his hands and waited. It proved to be a catastrophic misjudgment. Just four months later they all met up again — this time to discuss declaring a national emergency.

Daisy Dunn

Renaissance superwoman

In 1471 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, led a brash entourage of wine-swilling, jewel-bedecked courtiers into Florence. It was Lent. This was not the most auspicious way to begin a diplomatic mission to settle the dispute over Imola, the tiny Romagna fiefdom that Galeazzo had offered to sell to Lorenzo de’Medici. Even Lorenzo, epitome of the parvenu, was stunned by the fanfare. But for all the wrangling, within two years the territory would fall into Papal hands with the dowry of Caterina Sforza. The Deadly Sisterhood is a wide-ranging historical narrative about the women and power struggles that dominated Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

Paul Henry

A flock of bells…

A flock of bells takes the air and you come to me, out of nowehere and I smile, knowing you’ll visit me always, that this is how it will be till the last thread of an island slips through a bell-ringer’s hands and they put me in the listening earth.

Allan Mallinson

From the playing fields of Eton to El Alamein

The fascination with the last of the cavalry is enduring, perhaps partly because of the horseman’s apocalyptic links: one of the contenders for the last cavalry charge, about which there is still no consensus, is the battle of Megiddo in 1918, on the Plain of Armageddon. Now we have another question: who was the last great cavalryman? Not that it is actually posed in this engaging biography of the British contender to the title, the little-known Sir Richard McCreery, who fought in France in the Great War on horseback, and commanded Eighth Army in Italy during the second world war from a tank and occasionally an aircraft. But it is implicit in the author’s criteria: ‘the only member of the [non-mechanised] cavalry arm after 1918 to lead a British army in wartime’.

Peter Phillips

Musical rivalries

Donald Greig’s first novel is a fluent knitting together of three distinct worlds: American musical academia, London professional singing and the life of a 15th-century composer. It is also something of a whodunnit, involving secret codes in combustible medieval manuscripts alongside skullduggery between some very famous historical characters. If this sounds like a remake of The Name of the Rose, it is a lot funnier. Greig is at pains to say that all the musicologists he knows are genuinely effective people, but one would be forgiven for doubting it if his main character is anything to go by. Over-earnest academics are sitting targets, of course, but the fall and rise of this one is a delight to follow.

Wednesday

Mark Mason

Rock solid

Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy her a really big Christmas present. After much thought, she chose a new bread bin. Feet that stay on the ground are obviously a family trait. Rod: The Autobiography (Century, £20) is excellent, like listening to the guy in the pub who became a rock star but still drinks at the local. You don’t sell 200 million records without knowing how to connect with people, and Stewart does that just as well on the page as in his songs. The young singer sets his hair with sugar dissolved in water. He and Ronnie Wood hide behind a pot plant to escape the amorous intentions of Janis Joplin.

Anthony Seldon

Those who can, teach

This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 40-year-old, who has never written a book before, hardly sounds promising. The topic, education, moreover is death to good literature: barely has a book been written about the subject that is not dull beyond belief. Yet, against all the odds, this book turns out to be an enthralling read. Teach First is one of the most inspiring ideas around in 21st-century Britain. The book tells the story of its first decade, from 2002-12. Rising from nowhere, it has become one of the top graduate employers in Britain and is slowly achieving its mission of transforming opportunities for socially disadvantaged young people.

Michael Heath

The Making of Snow White

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (or ‘Seven Little Men’, as Walt Disney called them — he didn’t want to ‘disrespect’ dwarfs) first previewed in 1937 at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood. Stars of stage, screen and radio turned up, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Capra. Most were sceptical about an animated feature film lasting more than three minutes, and no one was more worried than Walt. If it failed he would be on skid row. Luckily, the audience went berserk, laughing and crying at the same time. The film was a hit; it even made Chaplin laugh. The animators who helped bring this fairytale to life had the oddest names: Ham Luske, Art Babbitt, Grim Natwick and U.B. Iwerks. Crazy names, crazy guys.

Anthony Daniels

Family commitments

Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be released. By now they were certainly mad, but whether they were mad because they had been tied up, or tied up because they had been mad, it was impossible to say. And in one of the institutions — a prison — I found prisoners who had been acquitted or whose release had been ordered by a judge ten years before, but who did not have enough money to pay their gaolers to release them.

Maurice Riordan

Turkeys

emerge from the orchard. There now Aunt Kit says, pouring us lemonade. It’ll be another scorcher. The bronze birds drop wing, shake caruncle and snood engorged with purple blood, and rattle in full barding. My prize cock’s gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly — to shoot the short film frame by frame. In rue Ortolan I hear the chorus of gobbles roll across the mossed cobbles from distant Ophir.

Eric Christiansen

First pluck your crow

As fewer people write by hand, some of us who do venture to squeak a thin call of alarm, like mice behind the frescoes during the last days of Pompeii. Philip Hensher (novelist and university teacher) voices dismay more manfully in this eloquent account of what has been and will be lost by the ending of this ancient habit, now that thoughts are transferred on to screens by squirming thumbs on dwarf keyboards. He has a ten-point plan for restoring pen and ink to daily life, and urges us all, literate or semi-literate, to try it out.

Henrietta Leyser

In the cold light of dawn

In The English Cathedral Peter Marlow of Royal Mail fame (his photographs of eight world heritage sites were used on stamps in 2005 and in 2008 of six British cathedrals) has given us a complete set of photographs of England’s 42 Anglican cathedrals. Anyone who can name all 42 surely deserves an extra Christmas present, but those looking for a luscious coffee-table book to give away should be warned that this volume, despite appearances — it is very large and all text appears discreetly at the back — is not it. The English Cathedral is a remarkably austere book. The photographs are nearly all taken from west to east, just after sunrise and in natural light.