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Thursday

Nicky Haslam

The worldling’s pleasure

Two women are the only heroes of this book. One is Princess Margaret, whom the author points out was far more instrumental in the early years of Colin Tennant’s ramshackle creation of Mustique than merely lending it her unparalleled presence. Quite apart from insisting, after Tennant had fallen out with a slew of architects, that Oliver Messel — now synonymous with the island’s building style — become involved, she advised him on possible investors and operators. She also stuck by him through all his quixotic irascibility. For his part, he flattered, feted, and fawned on this major star of his Caribbean fantasy. The other hero — or heroine —is his wife. ‘How wonderful Anne has been though all this,’ people say.

Roger Lewis

The darker side of Dawn

I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As her new novel, Oh Dear Silvia (Michael Joseph, £18.99) is set in a hospital, her darker side is gloriously indulged. We are at the bedside of the comatose Silvia, who has fallen off a balcony. Or was she pushed? Siblings and offspring trot to the ward; each chapter offers an internal monologue or confession — a gallimaufry of recriminations, alliances and reconciliations. What complex interactions there are with somebody who doesn’t move or say a word! Nevertheless, ‘somewhere deep inside the brain of this paralysed body there is life.’ New Age Jo is my favourite character.

Zenga Longmore

Getting the knives out

It’s odd that this book should be about a cleaner, because it exactly conjures up the emotions I felt when I worked as a cleaning lady many years ago. Contemplating the grease-encrusted kitchen floor I was about to scrub, I’d cry aloud: ‘How long must I perform this thankless, gruelling task? Why me?’ These agonised expressions were wordlessly repeated as I waded through this dismal novel. The main character is a girl called Agnes, and I spent many hours trying to work out whether she had no personality at all or too many personalities. She is wonderfully adept at managing restaurants, looking after babies and engaging in profound philosophical dialogue; yet she remains disturbingly dim. She is illiterate, but works as an accomplished secretary.

John Preston

Divided loyalties

On his first day at boarding school in Kenya in the early 1950s, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o stood to attention as the Union Jack was raised on the school flagpole. Afterwards the boys sang Psalm 51 which contains the line, ‘Wash me Redeemer and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Then came a tour of the headmaster’s house during which they were invited to gaze in wonder at his electric cooker and his gleaming pots and pans. The weirdness of this was not lost on Thiong’o, especially as his brother, Good Wallace, was fighting for the Mau-Mau guerrillas at the time. At the end of his first term, Thiong’o returned home to find that it no longer existed. His whole village had been razed and his family packed off to a detention camp.

Ian Thomson

The plight of the Poles

Was a nation ever so beset by calamity as Poland? During the second world war, Polish cities were bombed, fought over hand-to-hand and crushingly shelled. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler and Stalin were united in a determination to destroy the country. Without the Nazi-Soviet ‘friendship’ treaty of 1939, Hitler would not have been able to implement the mass killings of Jews in Poland, or Stalin been able to deport thousands of Poles as ‘enemies of the people’ to the frozen immensity of Siberia. Through their opportunist alliance, the dictators worked to undermine Polish statehood. At the war’s end, Poles found themselves dispersed in places as far-flung as India and Soviet Kazakhstan. History had blown them to a harsh lee shore.

Thursday

Jasper Becker

Disgusting, but not shocking

The joke doing the rounds in Beijing is that the Swedes gave the Nobel Literature prize to the wrong Chinese. It should have gone to the Communist Party’s propaganda department, for writing the enthralling fantasy about the Politburo’s wife who (supposedly) pours cyanide into the mouth of a British businessman (or spy, as most people believe). Then, in a country which happily executes people for stealing bicycles, it lets off Neil Heyward’s murderer, Gu Kailai, with a suspended death sentence. Meanwhile, her husband, Bo Xilai, who (supposedly) siphoned off billions by extorting money from private businessmen, has so far only lost his party card.

Marcus Berkmann

Hart-felt praise

‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may or may not come as a surprise to her readers. ‘I am nowhere close to one of them French philosophers; I basically lollop through life like an amiable hound.’ If self-knowledge tends to be hard won, Is It Just Me? (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) suggests that Hart has won it mainly by saying the wrong thing and falling over a lot. Whether you like this book, or even open it, probably depends on how much you enjoy her work on TV, although it’s unlikely you will have read even this far if you didn’t.

John Gimlette

Little house on the pampas

It’s hard to tell Argentina’s story without moments of despair. Even those who are fond of this country — like me — can struggle to identify the bright spots in its history. It’s been a tale of genocide, shrinking borders, pointless wars, hyper-inflation and vicious dictators. Even the end of the second world war brought little joy, given that Argentines had spent much of it egging on the Nazis. Part of the problem has been one of grandiose expectations. A century ago, Argentina believed itself on the brink of greatness, its fortune built on meat. Immigrants arrived in their millions, and a few — like Aristotle Onassis — became unhealthily rich.

Charlotte Moore

Mother of sorrows

This novella tells the story of the Crucifixion from the point of view of Mary. Contrary to art historical belief she was not, we are now told, kneeling at the foot of the Cross nor cradling her son’s broken body in her arms. Instead, she left the scene early, slipping away to save her own skin, stealing to meet her needs as she fled. It’s the sort of idea Carol Ann Duffy might make a poem about, except she’d do it with humour, and without Tóibín’s faintly sententious tone. ‘Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones’; there’s a lot of that kind of thing. Mary is now an old woman, living out her days under surveillance, somewhere far from her native land. It’s probably Greece.

Roger Lewis

Burning his bridges

They have mostly achieved eminence, the original cast members who appeared on stage or in the film adaptation, 30 years ago, of Julian Mitchell’s homoerotic spy fable Another Country. Kenneth Branagh has his coveted knighthood, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth have won Oscars — and Rupert Everett? I’m not quite sure what has happened to Rupert Everett. He never quite caught on as a leading man, despite being strapping. He was so languid, you felt his co-stars had to organise their movements in order to nudge him awake, jostling him into coming up with a reaction. It was only when in drag as Miss Fritton, Alastair Sim’s old role in the St Trinians films, that his eyes began to sparkle — and Everett at last came alive as an actor.

Colin Falck

B-Troop

A degree in maths might have helped. ‘Correction of the Day,’ wind charts, slide-rules, log tables, maps of the terrain, OP reports — all combined (again and again) to make four 25-pounders point the right way. B-Troop, ‘officer material,’ we learned our parts: don’t get VD; take care when choosing your friends; prefer gin and tonic; wear a hat at weekends; believe in the Empire (ignore what you know in your hearts). There was never much sense of who we were — except once, when the Colonel said ‘You gents are lucky to be here.

Byron Rogers

Now we know what happened

First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the World. Then there was H.G.Wells, who cut a swathe through the high-minded girl intellectuals of the early 20th century, a new species, before writing The Outline of History. World history and women may sound an odd pairing, but they seem to go together. For now there is Andrew Marr, who, after apologising in the papers for his misdemeanours, has written A History of the World. And when you have stopped sniggering consider this: it is a wonderful book.

Stoker Devonshire

The winning streak

Fortunately the author explained how he came to make the choices for this book in his column here (29 September), because otherwise your reviewer might have wasted words in debating the criteria for inclusion. These are the 100 of the top racehorses that Robin Oakley admires the most and which he thinks are particularly popular. I will not argue the merits of what he has included, nor suggest horses which he should have made room for, but I must comment on the way the little histories are presented, and the disappointing errors. Clearly this book is written for aficionados, employing racing jargon without much explanation — ‘jamstick’, ‘a nursery stakes’, ‘only the size of a pony’.

Clive Aslet

Old palaces for new plutocrats

Having lived in London for 35 years, I thought I knew its architectural highlights pretty well, but this book is a revelation. It shows an aspect of the city that I hardly realised existed. I had always believed that, in what must now be called the Downton years, Britain’s grandest families preferred to sacrifice their London palaces in order to hang onto their country seats. The French had their priorities the other way about, our attachment to rural life being one of the things that made us British. Devonshire House, on Piccadilly, which was demolished in the 1920s, along with so many other Georgian buidlings, symbolised this retreat from the capital.

Molly Guinness

The whole kitchen caboodle

Pretentious, effeminate, sinister and even obscene, the fork of folktale was a sign of loose morals, silly decadence or sexual deviancy. To insist on eating with a fork was a very bad sign until the 17th century. Italians were the first to relax their stance on ‘furcifers’ (fork bearers, like the devil) when they recognised that three prongs were better than one for twirling spaghetti; but even up until the end of the 19th century British sailors were still demonstrating their manliness by eating without forks. Consider the Fork is a delightful compendium of the tools, techniques and cultures of cooking and eating. Be it a tong or a chopstick, a runcible spoon or a cleaver, Bee Wilson approaches it with loving curiosity and thoroughness.

Wynn Wheldon

Miami vice

This is an exhilarating novel. Its general gist is that in a multicultural society so-called honour often trumps virtue, political expediency frequently wins out over inconvenient truth, and comforting illusion tends to be preferable to disagreeable reality. And assimilation is very hard, especially in Miami, where the entire story is set. The two central characters are Nestor and Magdalena, second-generation Cubans, who begin the book as a couple. Each has a difficult journey to its end, both have to combat monsters (Nestor literally) and both learn a little more about themselves and a lot more about the wider world as a consequence.

Mark Mason

Just a guy who writes songs

There is a famous piece of film — well, famous to those of us who know more about the Beatles than is possibly good for our health — where John Lennon encounters a fan who has broken into the star’s Berkshire estate. Clearly a lost soul, the fan is searching for meaning, signficance, some sort of connection with his idol. Lennon replies, very calmly and kindly: ‘I’m just a guy, man, who writes songs.’ Sadly, this book proves him right. The good stuff first. It looks beautiful: the cover is ‘Imagine’-white, the pages carefully designed to weave Hunter Davies’s commentary around both the letters themselves and their transcripts.

John Preston

Colossal windbags

‘Senior British diplomats really knew how to write,’ declares Matthew Parris in his introduction to The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, a collection of ambassadorial despatches about funny foreigners and filthy, far-flung climes. Well, up to a point. The pieces in this collection, a successor to Parting Shots, are often elegantly phrased and colourful, but at the same time there’s a weird sense that they were all written by the same person — someone peering down a very long nose beneath which lies an indulgently curled lip. In 1962, Sir John Russell, the then ambassador to Brazil, writes that his plane had to make an unscheduled stop in a place called Belem. ‘The usual scruffy Brazilian airport,’ he notes.

Matthew Dennison

Another bleak house on the Fens

Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and the dramatic and sensational possibilities of this encounter. Hill’s ghost stories are consciously literary creations. Beginning with The Woman in Black, she revels in the long shadow of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

Thursday

Jonathan Croall

Gielgoodies

Timothy Bateson Richard Burton was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic, but he was very nervous and not at his best. John came round to his dressing-room afterwards, to find him stark naked. ‘I’m so sorry, Richard,’ he said. ‘Shall I come back later when you’re better — I mean when you’re dressed?’   To Vivien Leigh, after she suggested playing a scene from Romeo and Juliet for a wartime concert party: ‘Oh no, Vivien! Only a great actress can do that sort of thing.’   To Alec Guinness, then a rising young star, on meeting him in Piccadilly: ‘I can’t think why you want to play big parts. Why don’t you stick to the little people you do so well?