More from Books

Thursday

Lewis Jones

Agonies and ecstasies

William James considered an hallucination to be ‘as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there’, except that the ‘object happens to be not there, that is all’ — an admirable definition, and a favourite of Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist, who has written what he calls ‘a sort of natural history or anthology of hallucinations’, which he thinks are an essential part of the human condition. He excludes schizophrenic hallucinations, on the grounds that they demand separate consideration, but includes every other kind.

Rhian Edwards

Fourth Floor

I reason with the crown of the tree. Surely from this fourth floor window, we are equals now. I calculate the trajectory, whether it would catch me if I threw myself at it. I comb for clues from the uneasy rocking of the branches, the slow swimming of its fingers stirring the air. There must be something in the moth flutterings of the mylar balloon trapped between the twigs; a pincered ghost, failing to tear itself away even with the wind as an ally. You can’t blame the Poplar for wanting to hoard it, the only fruit it has ever held onto or is capable of bearing.

Marcus Berkmann

A choice of stocking-fillers

There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing something for people to buy for other people who would rather have been given something else. Having produced one or two of the things myself, I suspect that most Christmas books aren’t even opened, let alone read. And possibly for good reason, because the majority of them are crushingly mediocre. Here, though, are a few that are really rather good.

Jonathan Mirsky

The plot thickens | 6 December 2012

At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or ... as a primer in a particular field, or to provide a new angle on an old subject. You can read on the move or in a spare moment for less than the price of a cup of coffee. So what do you get from this Special? John Garnaut, an Australian journalist who specialises in Chinese affairs, describes here, in steamy prose foreshadowed by the sub-title, an example of the self-cannibalism that has wracked most communist regimes, and certainly the Chinese Communist Party almost since its founding in 1921.

Jane Rye

Tormented talent

We know a great deal about Keith Vaughan both as a painter and as a man, from the journals he kept between 1939 until his death in 1977. They have been described as ‘one of the greatest pieces of confessional writing of the 20th century’, and provide a fascinating record of an artist’s thoughts and working habits, and of the technical and philosophical problems facing a painter (particularly a figurative painter, and more particularly a homosexual figurative painter whose primary subject was the male nude, individually and in groups) in the 1950s and ’60s.

Thursday

Micheal Mott

Missing

What is so noticeably lacking in Mathew Brady’s interviews with the dead are the smells; likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses their faces gnawed by hogs near the Greenbrier, Cheat, Gauley; or the wounded roasted in gullies a foot deep in leaves at Shiloh, Spotsylvania; and you, reader, cannot supply what is left out.  So how much more eludes us? . . . the scent in the rain.

Mark Mason

Classic Coe

You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of the Five Rings: it’s about his favourite subject. ‘I am known for many things,’ he says. And ‘I’ve always been able to read people pretty well.’ ‘Good athletes tend not to be good ball players, but I may be the exception that proves the rule.’ A crowd gets ‘classic Coe being Coe’. He even praises his own handwriting. Other people receive plaudits, but only for bringing out the best in Seb. Chief among these is the second-most important person in Coe’s life, his late father Peter, the athlete’s trainer for much of his career. Not that the relationship was saccharine.

Mary Kenny

Wild, wild times

There are, I believe, only two jokes in Diarmaid Ferriter’s latest voluminous tome: one, citing Liam Cosgrave, sometime Taoiseach, considered a rather dull character, who apparently said that ‘the Jews and the Muslims should settle their differences in a Christian manner’ (which is almost as insightful as the Tyrone newspaper which once carried the headline: ‘Catholics and Protestants unite against ecumenism’). The second is a quotation from a woman in Sandy Row, in deeply Loyalist Belfast, expressing her distaste for a United Ireland with the words ‘Dublin would have us practising celibacy on the streets’.

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 29 November 2012

My 20-month-old granddaughter totters into the room. Her eyes are shining with the fervour of St Bernadette. She has caught a glimpse of the divine. Two small stuffed pigs are clasped in her arms. Clearly she has been in heaven. Actually she has just returned from a visit to Peppa Pig World, the most exciting experience of her short life. Anyone who has contact with very small children today will be all too familiar with Peppa, the toddlers’ Harry Potter in her universal appeal. There are two new Peppa books out this Christmas, both published by Ladybird at £4.99. Peppa’s Christmas Wish is a robust board book for the rougher young reader.

Ian Thomson

A heady mix of vice and voodoo

By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of timber for charcoal, has destroyed much of the green. Since independence in 1804, moreover, a succession of emperors, kings and presidents-for-life has contrived to instil terror in the people. François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, entertained more than an anthropological interest in Afro-Caribbean sorcery rituals. His wardrobe of black suits and black homburgs lent him the aspect, says Bernard Diederich, of the voodoo divinity Baron Samedi, who haunts the churchyards in a top hat and tails like a ghoulish Groucho Marx.

William Wootten

The Ladies’ Man

The ladies that he spoke to, soft and sure, Believed in dresses longing to be made Of no material but that very shade Of fabric he laid out. So his demure Debs’ fingers would dip gracefully to azure Yards of silk, and his housewives’ eyes, displayed A deep vermillion with a silver braid, Would find themselves seduced by its allure. On flipping round the CLOSED sign for the day, Before easing his scissors on their hook, The pleasant-suited draper paused a while At his tall mirror, practising his smile, Trying to figure quite how he might look Now all his many ladies were away.

Cressida Connolly

The thin end of the wedge

Aunts, generally of an antic or highly unconventional kind, are a literary staple. Anyone wanting to find the best of them would do well to turn to Rupert Christiansen’s excellent companion study of the breed, The Complete Book of Aunts. Literary uncles are rarer, but no less enjoyable to meet. Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew is one of the great comic creations, while Laura Shaine Cunningham’s Sleeping Arrangements is moving and funny by turns. A memoir of the two very peculiar bachelor uncles who brought her up after the early death of her mother, it is one of those yardstick books: you couldn’t really like anyone who didn’t like it. Now Selina Guinness has written a memoir, The Crocodile by the Door, which introduces a memorable new uncle.

David Ekserdjian

A selection of recent art books

With one or two exciting exceptions, almost all art books fall into a very limited number of easily identified categories, such as the monograph and the exhibition catalogue. In some cases, of course, they cunningly manage to be both, not least since the authors of some exhibition catalogues seem to feel that the last thing they want to do is to provide a simple guide to the material for visitors to their show. A case in point is The Early Dürer by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Thames & Hudson, £40), which is brim-full of cutting-edge and often revisionist scholarship, but is written by specialists for specialists.

William Skidelsky

Rich pickings | 29 November 2012

Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for centuries. However, as the editors point out in their introduction (itself a kind of fake, being presented as a ‘how to’ guide), ours is an age awash with different types of written communication, from texts, blogs and emails to marketing mailshots, application forms and end-of-year-reports. Any writer inclined to fake it, therefore, has a wide variety of formats to choose from.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The gulf of greatness

Ladies and gentlemen,’ Laurence Olivier declared in his clipped, semi-metallic tones to the audience at the Vic as he took his curtain call, ‘tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter.’ The man playing Laertes to Olivier’s Hamlet on that evening in January 1937 was Michael Redgrave. The daughter was Vanessa, who would, as Olivier foretold, grow up to be a great actress. This vignette, you might say, contains all the majesty and mawkishness of the theatre. And a touch of its tawdriness, too. For rather than hurry to the bedside of his wife Rachel, Redgrave, it is said, slipped away instead to spend the night with his mistress, the incomparable Edith Evans. Does the possession of genius necessarily bring with it a moral carte blanche?

Wynn Wheldon

Redemption through rock and roll

‘I’m the President, but he’s the Boss’, Barack Obama declared a couple of years ago, and most Spectator readers will know Bruce Springsteen as the President’s celebrity pop star friend. (One of the first of the many pleasures Peter Ames Carlin’s book affords is the story of how Springsteen came byhis nickname: he was a ruthless player of ‘Cut-throat’ Monopoly.) Bruce Springsteen is much more than a celebrity, and Carlin’s book far from a dispiriting celebrity hagiography. Although written with the full co-operation of Springsteen himself, it pulls no punches in describing the singer’s faults and weaknesses, cruelties and mistakes.

Nigel Jones

Two angry old men

Though lasting literary friendships between natural rivals are not rare — Byron and Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spring to mind — few have been as durable as the one that began in the Front Quad of St John’s College, Oxford, one afternoon in May 1941 when a mutual friend introduced what their biographer calls ‘the odd couple’ by pointing his fingers at Kingsley Amis while imitating the sound of a gunshot. On cue, the fair-haired freshman yelled in pain, clutched his chest and staggered back to fall on a convenient pile of laundry sacks.

Thursday

John Gohorry

The effects of rain

Rain keeps us indoors, so we live by constraint and denial. No walk on the beach, no sea-swimming, no bicycle ride, no watching the peep-and-vanish of lizards. Instead, the clock ticks and one page of the book turns to another. Our fingertips now and again touch as if to suggest the inside and outside of love are the same.

Anne Chisholm

Truth and beauty

Almost 20 years ago, Alice Munro, the Canadian genius of the short story, was interviewed by the Paris Review. She recalled a time when she was having trouble with her writing, and found herself looking round the ‘great literature’ on the shelves of the bookshop she was then running with her first husband as if seeking help. All she could think was: ‘You fool. What are you doing here?’ She was admired then, but has gone on to huge acclaim. There was some early rudeness from nervous local newspapers in small- town Ontario, where she grew up and where her fiction is rooted, but nowadays, and for a long time, the waves of praise come steadily and grow with every new book. Awed comparisons with Chekhov are routine.

A.N. Wilson

Such fun!

Nearly all the pages in this book are filled with thank-you letters. As a child, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was writing to thank for presents of sweets and chocolates. As the Duke of York’s betrothed, she was writing ‘Dear Prince Bertie, Thank you ten million times for sending me all those gramophone records, which arrived in record time (oh! A joke, accident I promise).’ To Queen Mary, as a dutiful Duchess of York, she was writing  ‘Thank you very much for my delightful time at Balmoral’. As a widow, ‘My darling Lilibet, I did so love my week at Windsor, and send millions of thanks for so much sweetness & thought and care for your venerable parent.