More from Books

Thursday

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.

Cecily Gayford

Too much time in the library

Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to trace a legacy left by the 17th-century composer Agostino Steffani, a slippery customer who mixed libretti with realpolitik in the courts of Europe. The bequest turns out to consist mainly of nasty secrets, which seem strangely important to the attractive yet shady lawyer who has hired Caterina. But despite having all the ingredients of a zippy historical mystery in an intriguing new genre, Jewels doesn’t quite deliver the goods. Caterina spends too much time in libraries, furtively eating energy bars, for the climax to have much more tension than an essay crisis.

Allan Massie

About to cop it?

Rebus is back, in a novel long, meaty and persuasive enough to make up for the years of absence. Actually, he is only part-way back — on a civilian attachment to the Edinburgh & Lothian Police, and working on cold cases. However, the retiring age has been raised, and he has applied for re-instatement. He may not succeed; the head of this small department is unlikely to recommend him, and Inspector Fox, the officer in charge of the complaints department, who has been the lead character in Rankin’s last two novels, regards him with suspicion, dislike and contempt. To his mind, Rebus is a type of policeman who should be extinct. He doesn’t play by the book.

James Walton

Crying and laughing about it all

For many biographers of popular musicians, the obvious problem is that the only interesting bit comes when your subjects are in their brief creative pomp. For Sylvie Simmons, the situation is rather different — and not just because Leonard Cohen has been somewhere near his pomp for nearly 50 years. The real trouble is that every other aspect of his life is fascinating too. To do the man justice, you first need to know about the wealthier parts of Jewish Montreal in the 1930s, where the new-born Cohen arrived home from hospital in a chauffeur-driven car.

Lloyd Evans

Tragically flawed

This is a story of impossible gifts. The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, stands to inherit a 17th-century baronetcy and a large fortune accumulated by his enterprising father. He was also blessed with intelligence, charm, ambition, eloquence and the mysterious ability to seek out power and use it for his own ends. His biographer, Janan Ganesh, has written a pacy, well-researched book whose only fault is its unquestioning fealty to its subject. Osborne excelled at St Paul’s and Oxford and then strolled into Conservative Central Office as a special adviser. No career but politics interested him. At 25, he was holding one-to-one briefings with the prime minister, John Major. In 2001, he became the youngest member of the Commons, after bagging the ultra-safe seat of Tatton.

Thursday

Sophia Waugh

A ladykiller at large

Ever since Sergeant Cuff appeared in The Moonstone in 1868, we English have loved our detectives. Moody Scandinavian fiction might come and go, but Peter Wimsey, Poirot, Marple and of course Sherlock Holmes continue to delight us. In Simon Serailler, Susan Hill has created a detective that ranks alongside all these greats. Like Cuff, he has his passion (drawing), like Wimsey he has a personal story, which is built up in each successive novel (this is the seventh in the series). A Question of Identity continues the tale of Serailler’s usually doomed love affairs, his ambivalent relationship with his father, his widowed sister’s single motherhood, and his care for her childen.

Kate Chisholm

Exhibitions of narcissism

The summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its overstuffed galleries and motley collection of overblown portraits, twee still lifes and garish landscapes has become an event where you go to be seen rather than to see; it’s less about the art than the experience. But the first-ever public show of paintings, sculpture, architectural drawings in London, which opened on 21 April 1760, was a truly artistic sensation. For the first time, it was possible for anyone to see the best of British paintings and sculpture, for the price of a modest entrance fee. Until then, viewing great masters had been strictly limited to those who could afford to travel abroad to the galleries of Florence, Rome, Paris, or who had rich friends with a private collection.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bionic bore

After wading through 646 pages of narcissistic gush and breathtaking vulgarity in the accents of Dr Kissinger and Dr Strangelove, I am consoled by the thought that the ordeal has not been entirely a waste of effort. Frequently able to put the book down, yet obliged every time but one to lift it up again, I have found the exercise has wonderfully enlarged, defined and beautified my deltoids, trapezii, latissimus dorsi and other muscles too intimate to mention. Now, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I can gaze into looking glasses with intensified Gemutlichkeit.

Joanna Kavenna

Homage to the Goddess Mother

Cometh the hour, cometh the many men (and women). The 2012 centenary of Captain Scott’s death inspired a series of heroic forays into print: glory-hungry (or just plain hungry) authors questing for something new to say about this much-described event. Next year is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, and so we might expect more of the same, with an icy blasted peak instead of an icy blasted pole. For those who approach these commemorative sorties with a heavy heart, Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1953 should come as a vertiginous relief.  The book is neither a flimsy reprise, nor a mercenary hatchet job. Instead, Conefrey crafts an exciting, moving account, with a few controversies revisited in an interesting way.

Alan Judd

An exhausting mixture of boredom and concentration

The wartime code-breaking successes of Bletchley Park are deservedly well known.  The story of how they decrypted German and Japanese codes, most famously the Enigma, has been the subject of histories, novels and films, so much so that Bletchley is glamour. Much less well known, however, and much less glamorous — rarely even thought about — is the story of how those clever cryptologists got the coded radio signals they worked on. Where did their daily and nightly fodder come from?  It certainly wasn’t from sticking an aerial in the attic and waiting to see what came out of it.

Chris Skidmore

The company of wolves

The 15th century is beginning to supplant the Tudor age in its allure for historians and novelists. It comes replete with regicide, civil war and — what seems a necessity to the modern market — a wealth of strong queens, or ‘she wolves’ behind every ruler. Sarah Gristwood’s sensitive approach marks out Blood Sisters as much more than the narrative of an age, however. It is an exploration of what it meant to be a medieval queen. The author focuses on the interplay and interdependence of seven women.

Molly Guinness

Slippery slopes | 1 November 2012

Being sent to finishing school in Bavaria in 1936 was a dream for some English girls: there were winter sports and sachertorte, opera and sausages, and troupes of handsome Nazis in shorts. In Rachel Johnson’s new book, Daphne Linden and Betsy Barton-Hill, 18-year-old beauties who’ve never properly met any boys, find themselves at large in Munich. In a museum 70 years later, Daphne’s grand-daughter Francie spots a picture of Hitler with her grandmother. She begins to make enquiries into Daphne’s National Socialist phase. Francie’s life has its own complications (she’s in love with her boss, and wondering whether or not to have children with her husband), and these develop as her investigation progresses.

Katrina Naomi

Nan’s Advice After My Partner’s Breakdown

What did you know of love? You, who slept in a separate bed, separate room, who knew nothing of us. You told me to let him be, let him get on with it, let him alone. You gave me your harshest advice, told me what you’d done after Grandpa was discharged from the Navy; hiding from the merest sound, from you. You made me hear every whistle and blast of your advice. And I never thanked you.