More from Books

Thursday

Christopher Meyer

A peacekeeping body at war with itself

It takes less than an hour to fly from Washington DC to New York City. But, if you are a diplomat, you might as well be travelling to a distant planet, such is the gulf in diplomatic culture between America’s capital and the United Nations’ headquarters. Whenever I went to see my opposite number at the UN, Jeremy Greenstock, I felt that I was entering a hermetically sealed universe, where ambassadors marched to an arcane beat governed by the mysteries of multilateral diplomacy. During my time in Washington, a new French ambassador arrived, who had been transferred directly from the UN. He confessed to me that, of all his postings, he had the greatest difficulty getting used to Washington, only 200 miles or so down the road from Manhattan.

Stig Abell

The growing pains of spirited youth

It is initially unsettling to read a new novel by an acclaimed author that is not really new at all, merely available in an English translation for the first time. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner, wrote Silent House way back in 1983. It was his second novel, and helped to cement his reputation as the rising star of Turkish fiction. It has since been translated into a variety of European languages, and has already lived its literary life as a multilingual triumph and mused-over example of Pamuk’s ‘early’ period. It is rather thrilling for us monoglot Brits to be able now to share in the experience.

Ferdinand Mount

A life of sad romance

‘What porridge had John Keats?’ Browning offers this as the crass sort of question that stupid people ask. But in fact the first person to answer it would have been John Keats himself. He loved to talk about food, good and bad. He writes to his dying brother Tom from Kirkcudbright that ‘we dined yesterday on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs and dirtiest potatoes with a slice of salmon’. As Keats and his Hampstead friend Charles Brown tramped round Loch Fyne, he complained that all they had to live off were eggs, oatcake and whisky: I lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down from her Palfrey in passing; approach me with her saddle bags  — and give me a dozen or two capital roast beef sandwiches.

Thursday

Claudia FitzHerbert

A guide to the media circus

Caitlin Moran’s  bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in a council house in Wolverhampton) to the political (better pornography, larger pants, more body hair). Her latest effort, Moranthology (Ebury Press, £18.99) casts a retrospective glow of gravity over its predecessor. That was a manifesto of sorts; this is proper-job knockabout. Moran, who writes three columns a week for The Times, gives us a mish-mash of interviews, ‘celebrity watches’ and other ephemera from the past 20 years. Her skill as an interviewer lies not in the killer question but in the way she conveys being there and messing it up.

Ed Smith

The prophetic fallacy

This book isn’t just about prediction, or even the limits of knowledge. It is about the ascent of man. According to Nate Silver, the American electoral analyst, the digital age and its explosion of knowledge constitute a great turning point in human history. Never before have we had so much evidence on which to base our predictions of the future. Yes, there have been setbacks along the way, but we should feel optimistic about the direction of travel. Yet there is a paradox about the evolution of prediction. Innovations in technology and information make it possible to analyse data far more quickly and extensively.  The availability of so much raw data, however, means that much of the analysis is woeful. There are many more bullets; but also many more inept marksmen. T. S.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Man of many parts

My father, a man not given to hero-worship, once told me that the only actor he really admired was Richard Burton. Some years later, I put the question to Peter O’Toole, who had been reading excerpts from his lushly overwritten memoirs at the Oxford Union. ‘Mr O’Toole,’ I said, ‘I was wondering if…’ A shy undergraduate, I may have stammered a little. ‘Which is to say, is there any actor … Or rather, which actor, of those you’ve acted with, or those you haven’t, among the living, or, indeed, the dead, would you say you’ve most admired, or aspired to emulate, in your acting career?’ To which the ageing thespian replied with a single word: ‘Richard.

Wilko Johnson

Get Your Kicks on the B1014

He comes most nights — I hear his car pull up Outside and catch the glancing blur of lights Through curtains. Drinking Nescafe, we watch The Epilogue, laugh at the priest, then think Where to drive that night — we catalogue The usual suggestions and arrive At the same decision as usual. The road lies straight, lamps stream like amber flames Shot down the wind as we accelerate; Our talk of girls and cars, our journey’s end The all-night filling station’s ROBO-SERVE Coffee machine. That’s it — we talk until We’re bored and then drive back. It’s a routine Which kills night after night, yet always when We move, cabined, through empty streets, the half- Light seems loaded with strange drama and We thunder down an apprehensive road.

James Walton

Still Waters run deep

T.C. Boyle is not one of those authors who can be accused of writing the same novel again and again. Over the past 30 years, his subject matter has ranged from 18th-century Africa to the California of the future, from Mexican immigration to the sex life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Even so, what has tended to unify his work is verbal extravagance, dark comedy and a taste for satire that sometimes borders on contempt. All of which makes San Miguel his most unexpected book yet. A historical novel of almost heroic restraint, its prose remains resolutely unflashy, and its tone is sympathetic to the point of genuine warmth.

Andrew McKie

Homage to the Sage of Shepperton

L’Arénas, between Côte d’Azur airport and a dual carriageway patrolled by prostitutes, is a banal stretch of concrete, steel and glass offices, malls and hotels that seems always to be deserted. A few weeks ago, I watched an 18-month-old Korean boy playing on an iPad by a hotel pool there. ‘Ballardian’ was le mot juste. As with Kafka, Borges, Pinter, Orwell and others who have earned an adjective, the mental landscape conjured up by J.G. Ballard’s work is instantly recognisable — though to have been fully Ballardian, the pool should have been drained and overtaken by vegetation, zebras, wrecked Pontiacs and rusting B-29s.

Jasper Becker

A utopian nightmare

What must Mao have thought when in 1968 he heard that towering intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre were enthusiastically distributing newspapers on the prosperous boulevards of Paris bearing his portrait and eulogising his ideas? By then Mao, along with most Chinese, knew that just six years earlier his attempt to create a Marxist utopia in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962 had catastrophically failed. The Chinese revolution was effectively over. His People’s Communes had destroyed the lives of at least 36 million, and possibly many more. Millions of others were tortured, imprisoned or fled their homes to escape an orgy of violence and terror.

Andro Linklater

Eavesdropping on the enemy

Say ‘Colditz’, and the name immediately triggers an image of prisoners of war digging tunnels, building gliders and in general plotting outrageously to cross the barbed wire into freedom. You could shout ‘Trent Park’ from the rooftops and, until now, no one would have known what you were referring to. But this book should give the name as lively a notoriety as the brooding Saxon fortress. Trent Park in Middlesex was where Britain housed the cream of captured German officers. They were brought together, not to prevent their escape, but to encourage their conversation. Scattered throughout their cells and huts was a network of concealed microphones designed to record whatever they had to say about the war, the Nazis and Hitler himself.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Hell hath no fury…

We all know Edwina Currie as a shrill, tasteless, attention-seeking Thatcherite nuisance from Liverpool. But the private Edwina —  as revealed in her Diaries: Volume II, 1992-97 (Biteback, £20) — is thoughtful, engaging, witty, kind-hearted and, politically, very astute. Has anyone framed a neater analysis of John Major’s idiotic ‘Back to Basics’ drive than this? ‘It outlawed the one protective factor the Tory party has always relied on — hypocrisy.’ She watches senior colleagues plotting to replace him during the mid-1990s, and she sums them up with lethal concision. Michael Portillo: ‘very steely, very cool, very unpleasant’. Ken Clarke: ‘fine brain … lazy character’.

Jonathan Rugman

A voice that haunts

One cold evening in the middle of February this year I walked into a smoke-filled room in a town called Saraqib in northern Syria to find Anthony Shadid sitting shoeless on the floor like a Bedouin and conversing in Arabic with a tall, thin school teacher, one of the leaders of the town’s revolution. A cast-iron stove, fuelled by paraffin, heated the room, and Anthony, a bearded, somewhat burly man, seemed to glow with bear-like warmth. Through the cigarette smoke I could see three notebooks proudly stacked in front of the New York Times reporter, evidently bulging with his observations. Anthony had watched rebel fighters attempt to blow up an army tank earlier that day, and he was clearly shaken by the audacity and ferocity of Syria’s violence.

Philip Ziegler

A painless lesson in political history

This book is not a history, explains Ruth Winstone, who has edited this collection of excerpts from diaries published between 1921 and 2011. It is, she says, ‘an impressionist view of politically changing times’. It is, indeed, a patchwork quilt of a book, no two pieces precisely meshing with each other yet providing in total a remarkably clear and coherent portrait of 90 stressful years. It is ‘a political diary’, but Winstone admits that the definition of ‘political’ became more and more elastic as the book took shape. It is all the better for it.

Vernon Bogdanor

Still dancing around the problem

For at least 200 years, men have sought to create a world order that would ensure stability and eliminate threats to peace. But it is only in the 20th century that this ideal has been brought to fruition, first in the ill-fated League of Nations, established in 1919, which expired, almost unnoticed, after the outbreak of war in 1939, and then in the United Nations. Governing the World charts the history of the idea of international co-operation since the end of the Napoleonic wars. It is a penetrating and wide-ranging study, illuminating not just the history of internationalism but also the problems involved in realising it in the world of today.

Cressida Connolly

Urbs in rure

When people express nostalgia for the glory days of British television, it doesn’t take long for them to propose the 1966 BBC play Cathy Come Home as among the pinnacles of broadcasting. Not only a fine piece of drama, it also brought the plight of the homeless to the viewing public. And Jeremy Sandford, who wrote Cathy Come Home, didn’t stop there. Finding himself the owner of a large house in Shropshire, he invited various homeless people to take up residence. It would be nice to relate that these indigents responded with gratitude, courtesy and warmth. Nice, but not true. Terrible arguments broke out, hostile takeover bids were launched, areas of the house and grounds barricaded against its genial proprietor.

Colin Falck

October

October comes: the year resigns. The currents down life’s widening stream run faster now. Like unpaid fines the leaves pile up. Dark evenings seem drawn out and under-loaded: lines from poems that won’t come right: a dream of emptier nights. Encoded signs for endings rather more extreme.

Jane Ridley

No stone left unturned

Dickens, the inspiration and source for this book, was addicted to walking the London streets at night. A man who felt uneasy in the countryside without a pavement beneath his feet, he was said to know the mean streets of London better than any cabbie. His skill was to write about the city in his own time, describing the world of the London poor as if they had never been seen before. Dickens realised that to understand London, you need to know how to read the street. That is the idea behind Judith Flanders’s new book. Like Dickens, Londoners walked everywhere. In 1866 an estimated three-quarters of a million pedestrians poured in to work each day, a thick line of black-coated clerks tramping the streets.

Martha Read

Bricks and mortals

Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is widely considered to be a masterpiece of modern architecture, yet the woman for whom it was built complained of the ‘alienation’ she felt in it, and described her architect as ‘simply colder and more cruel than anybody I have ever known’. Though much visited, it is unlived in, and its minimalist form seems better left untainted by any signs of life or individuality. In contrast, a contemporary low-cost housing scheme in Chile by the architectural firm Elemental included future residents in the design process from the start.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The stuff of dreams

‘As I was writing this book and trying to discover what it was about .…’ With his very first words, David Thomson pulls out the carpet from under himself, drapes it over his head, and runs towards the nearest wall. For what he’s admitting in this opening sentence is that, when he began work on this 578-page history of cinema, he had no idea what he was going to say. And man you have to be good to pull that off. We live in an age of relativism, in which (arguably) assertions are often spliced with (this is only my opinion) apologetic parentheses. Yet books of this kind ought to be an exception. What we want is the Olympian overview or panoramic shot.