More from Books

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

As dark and heavy as plum pudding

Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd Brunner, who has also written monographs on bears, the moon and snowmen. As it’s translated into American, we have gray, color, luster, skeptics and travelers. But rather than reading it in an American accent, I read it in a German one.

Charles Cumming

Return of the living dead

What is it with dead American writers? Years after they’ve popped their clogs, some of the biggest names in crime fiction continue to produce novels from beyond the grave. Mario Puzo has been sleeping with the fishes since 1999, but that hasn’t stopped him clanking out Omertà (2000) and The Family (2001), the latter of which was based on an unfinished manuscript posthumously completed by his longterm girlfriend. Michael Crichton died in 2008. A year later, his fans were able to enjoy Pirate Latitudes, a novel based — once again — on an incomplete manuscript found among Crichton’s papers. Yet both men have been slouches in comparison to Robert Ludlum. The creator of Jason Bourne didn’t live to see Matt Damon’s incarnation of the character.

Nicky Haslam

Old King Noël

What is this I hold in my hands? Is it just a book? It’s quite heavy, but somehow, instinctively, one feels its light heart.  When I eventually prize its even glossier inner core from its glossy padded outer shell, I still ask: what is this? It looks like a book, but its pages don’t shut flat or lie open; they spring apart, gaping enticingly, as if someone had inserted bulky, once-essential memos or long-forgotten mementos between the pages. But shake it, and nothing falls out. No shopping list, no ribbon-tied bundles of unrequited love, no scrunched up scraps of half-remembered receipts. Open it at one of these many inviting gaps. What’s this? A manilla envelope, seemingly casually inserted, but integrally attached to the right-hand page.

Oliver Rackham

Of knowledge, life, good and evil

The British Museum contains more about trees than one might expect: trees in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and all kinds of small artefacts of wood and bark. Frances Carey, sometime Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings, discusses trees as viewed through the collections. She deals not with trees themselves — for that one goes to the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens — but with trees as interpreted (or misinterpreted) by botanical illustrators, divines, etchers, literary writers, medallists, metaphorists, mythologists, painters, poets, politicians and sculptors, on a worldwide scale going back to the Neolithic if not beyond. Discussions of people’s varied reactions to trees are followed by an ‘Arboretum’: 24 chapters each dealing with one genus of tree.

James Buchan

A bloody waste

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an act of frivolity without parallel in United States history. The destruction of the Baathist state caused Iraqis to flee into their ancient sectarian and racial communities, and laid out a killing-ground where animosities suppressed in other Muslim countries could be fought out to the last Iraqi. By early 2006, when Sunni extremists (usually called al-Qa’eda) blew up the holy Shia mosque in Samarra, the country was in civil war. The United States kept its nerve. With the dogged support of President George W. Bush in Washington, five additional fighting brigades and uncounted tons of reinforced concrete, Generals David H. Petraeus and Raymond T.

Thursday

Stewart Conn

Field Marks

The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that bears his name on the Isle of May; while in the cottage we shared, coffee-mugs and cigarette-butts cleared, and like as not whisky glasses from chess the night before, he’d set up his carousel of colour-slides to display the field marks of various species — pointing out such features as eye-stripes and wing-bars, nesting habits and flight-patterns — or draw lightning sketches, his profile more and more that of a raptor.

Alan Judd

A narrow escape

C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court. But he has also written two successful novels with 20th-century political themes. The first, Winter in Madrid, is a compelling evocation of Spain in 1940. His latest, Dominion (Mantle, £18.99), is set in Britain in 1952. But not the Britain we know; rather, one that made peace with Germany in 1940, with Halifax (pictured) rather than Churchill becoming prime minister, succeeded by the aged Lloyd George (an admirer of Hitler) and then Beaverbrook. By 1952 Britain has fallen increasingly under Nazi dominion, elections have been suspended and the opposition — led by Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan and Bevan — has been driven underground.

Ian Thomson

Erratic historian of alternative pop

Julian Cope, the well-read jester of English pop, was the founder member of the 1980s art-rock combo The Teardrop Explodes. With his antic appearance (Rommel overcoat, wild tawny hair), he falls into the erratic genius category. Drugs have played their part. By his own account, Cope has undertaken some dangerous chemical expeditions to the mind’s antipodes by means of lysergic acid. Yet he is no tiresome advert for drug-induced excess (still less for English whimsy). He is a recognised authority on the neolithic culture of Britain, for one thing, and has written two winningly eccentric volumes of musicology, Krautrocksampler and Japrock-sampler.

Christopher Howse

The beating of heavenly wings

How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular on greetings cards? It was surprising in the first place that their graven images should be set up at all, with eyes cast down and wings spread out, shielding the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, where the very glory of the Lord, the shekinah, descended with dangerous power. For Philo of Alexandria, a Platonist interpreter of Jewish belief, they were the same cherubim that guarded the gates of Paradise (from which mankind had been banished).

Aidan Hartley

Years of living dangerously

The son of a fish-paste factory manager in London’s East End, Alan Root fell in love with ornithology as a Blitz evacuee when he first clapped eyes on the pea-sized egg of a goldcrest, England’s smallest bird. After the war his father got a job manufacturing bully-beef in Kenya, where Root discovered a much richer diversity of birds. While still at school he began recording birdsong and then shot 8mm home movies of the snakes he collected. Root makes his rise to becoming the world’s greatest wildlife film-maker seem eccentric and easy. A lucky break started him working for Armand Denis, producer of the early TV series On Safari. On a flooded bridge over Uganda’s Ntungwe River a man from Anglia Television interviewed him like this: ‘Would you like the job?

Philip Mansel

Sublime port

Ports can challenge national stereotypes: think of the difference between St Petersburg and Russia, or Naples and Italy. Since England is so small, and London so big, few English ports have generated their own identities. In France, however, despite the alleged stranglehold of Paris, ports such as Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille have remained remarkably different in culture and character. Of them all, Marseille is not only the oldest city in France — it was founded by  Greeks in 600 BC — but also the most independent; in 1907 Jules Charles-Roux called it ‘a separate republic, neither national nor French’. Incredibly David Crackanthorpe’s wise, erudite and sensitive book on Marseille is the first in English.

Peter Parker

The land of lost content

Published at the author’s expense in 1896, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad did not at first attract many readers. It was only after it had been taken up by an ambitious young publisher called Grant Richards that it began to sell. The poems’ popularity increased further when English composers, deciding that they had found their own Heine or Müller, began setting them individually or as song cycles. Between 1906 and 1911 the average annual sale rose to more than 13,500, and by the time the first world war broke out the book was reputed to be ‘in every pocket’.

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 6 December 2012

Odd couples fascinate Frances Fyfield. Her latest novel, Gold Digger (Sphere, £12.99), centres on the relationship between an elderly man, a wealthy art collector named Thomas Porteous, and the youthful Di, whom he first encounters when she tries to burgle his house by the sea. Di has a natural taste for art and is overwhelmed by what she sees — and by Thomas himself. Against expectations, respect, affection and eventually love develop between them, leading to their marriage.

William Leith

Safety in danger

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb told us that the world is a much weirder place than we can bear to believe. It is full of occult forces and strange events. If we think we can control or predict these forces and events, we’re sorely mistaken. One minute, we think we’ve mastered the business of lending money and hedging our bets; the next, the economy crashes. One minute, we invent a way to send a message on a computer; the next, porn is everywhere and the music business is finished. One minute, we’re a bit plump; the next, we’re obese, and heading for a diabetic meltdown. We always think we know what will happen next. Get real, said Taleb; the world is non-linear. It’s a stranger place than we want it to be.

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.