More from Books

Wednesday

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.

Lewis Jones

A dark family past

Like the Dombeys, Pitts, Amises et al, les Dumas are famously père et fils, but there was of course also a grand-père, Thomas-Alexandre, or ‘Alex’ the first, who was a wildly romantic figure, a gallant and tragic hero, and the defining influence on his son’s life and work. In his memoirs, of which he devotes more than 200 pages to his father’s life, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo, (Dumas père) remembers how, one night in 1806, when he was not yet four, he was woken with news of his father’s death: ‘taken by God’. He asked where God lived: heaven. Soon afterwards his mother found him with one of his father’s guns. He explained that he was going to heaven, ‘to kill God, who killed Papa’.

Emily Read

The naked body in the pool

Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted novel has, at first sight, all the ingredients of a standard villa holiday-from-Hell story, or indeed film. But this creepy and unsettling tale has more layers to it than most. Two couples, famous poet Joe Jacobs and his foreign correspondent wife Isabel and their friends, fat Mitchell and tall Laura, share a villa outside Nice for a sweltering summer in 1994. Joe and Isabel’s 14-year-old daughter Nina is the uncomfortable and bored observer of the grown-ups’ bickering, and of rapidly surfacing misery. Mitchell is in a permanent rage, which takes the form of shooting and trapping any animal he can lay his hands on — it turns out that their business has gone bust and his life is rapidly disintegrating.

Jonathan Mirsky

‘Ill luck was my faithful attendant’

Here is the melancholy story of Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of President Abraham Lincoln, who was shot next to her on 12 April 1865 as they were watching a play. He died three days later. The book has a single theme with two strands: was Mrs. Lincoln insane before as well as after her husband’s murder? And in subsequent years was she treated with continuous and sympathetic care by her son, Robert, or was he a greedy monster who ensured that his mother was declared insane so that he could get his hands on her substantial estate? Jason Emerson, a journalist and specialist on the Lincoln family, has examined every available document, especially letters, including some he discovered in a trunk never previously opened.

Thursday

Colin Falck

World

when the two-footed Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains The dignity of room, the value of rareness Robinson Jeffers Spengler was wrong: the world has become the West. Japan has bowed out now; in China they buy art, drink wine, play late Rachmaninov, groom themselves for decline in Prada or Bulgari, wonder which limousines are best. Our hard-won vision fades: dead faiths are reborn; circuses rule the airwaves; Darwin makes way. While bearded prophets prognosticate, announce their day, their raw congregations pray and exchange their porn. Time to turn out the lights. Too late to rely on gold, ammunition, canned food; to make plans to revive old powers we have lost: they are lost. Our last wildness gone, we drift to our ending.

Caroline Shenton

Spin city

‘That terrible place known as Westminster’: many readers might well agree with this, the first mention of our political capital in a charter dated 735 AD. However, as Robert Shepherd, journalist and political biographer, explains in his new book, all is not what it seems. The charter is a fake, cooked up by a 12th-century abbot of Westminster to get one over on those pesky monks at rival St Albans. Westminster, Shepherd asserts, was from the first a city of spin and has remained so ever since (and ‘terrible’ meant awe-inspiringly sacred, not awful, by the way). The boundaries of Shepherd’s ‘historic’ Westminster are tightly drawn.

Marcus Berkmann

Games over

It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and I have already read one. Nicholas Lezard’s The Nolympics (Penguin, £7.99) was originally planned as a counterblast, a fusillade of righteous rage against what we all expected to be an administrative and sporting catastrophe that would blight what remained of Britain’s international reputation forever. Instead, he was as swept up by it all as the rest of us. Even so, his book is less about watching the Olympics than about being forced to watch the Olympics, and then write 1,500 words a day about it. We can marvel at the wit and fluency he has achieved, faced with this impossible deadline, but to a great extent the book is the deadline.

Rod Liddle

A hero for our time?

They were in the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London on Valentine’s Day 1989 for Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service — all of London’s literary elite, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Antonia Fraser and the rest. Outside the cathedral the journalists and snappers had gathered, but they were not there for Chatwin. Halfway through the service Rushdie felt a tap on his arm. From the pew behind, the American novelist Paul Theroux whispered: ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sweetest songs of saddest thoughts

In February 1966, in the first flush of his fame, an interviewer asked Bob Dylan what his songs were about. ‘Oh, some are about four minutes,’ he responded. ‘Some are about five. And some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.’ The joke was justified, in a sense. Why should any artist be made to reduce his work to a soundbite? At the same time, in Dylan’s case, the verbal sleight was part of a pathology of evasiveness, a refusal, even an inability, to meet the eye of a question, which presents the would-be biographer with serious difficulties.

Michela Wrong

The first casualty

Some years ago, I was included in a round- robin from a group of African writers trying to whip up support for an anti-Ryszard Kapuscinski campaign. The plan, as I recall it, was that members of the African intelligentsia should loudly denounce the legendary Polish reporter’s depiction of their continent at the readings he was due to give during a US book tour. I ignored the email, which had the tang of a witch-hunt. The determination of a group, whose members presumably embraced the principle of free speech, to crush a colleague’s work had echoes of the Rushdie affair. A colleague, what was more, who was old, ill and clearly reaching the end of his productive life.

Roger Lewis

Rollicking self-invention

When I was in the sixth form, I thought Anthony Burgess the greatest writer imaginable. The outlandish vocabulary, the fireworks, the bravura, the glorious showmanship — surely this was what literature was all about? Then I grew up and realised he was absolutely terrible — a cackling and grim caricaturist, pseudo-forceful and very dead. Whilst it is true that few of his 60 or so books come off at all — and that his confidence in himself was never as great as he pretended it to be — I rather love the old rogue again now. There is something splendid and heroic about his boastful, mendacious personality (‘At the moment I’m working on a novel about the life of Christ’).

Michael Paraskos

An everyday story of country folk

It is not a criticism of Philip Almond that The Lancashire Witches, published to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, is a depressing read. On the contrary, Almond has produced a fine and lively study of the events in 1612 when eight women and two men were tried for witchcraft. What is depressing is how ordinary those involved seem to be. This is not a story of gothic horror or bizarre group psychosis. It is a tale of people being caught out for doing relatively ordinary things. The Pendle witches were not members of some pagan or Wiccan cult, or even genuine devil-worshippers. As Almond makes clear, much of the folklore and superstition that came to be called witchcraft had previously been part of life.

D.J. Taylor

Bleak expectations

Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of a Sri Lankan trip, whose 80th page he had reached when he suffered the heart attack that killed him, was issued posthumously in 1986. He was much loved (see the portrait by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Absent Friends, 1989), much admired, much abused and — almost inevitably, given some of the things he wrote about — much misunderstood. The memorial essay prize instituted in his name by The Spectator after his death has been revived this year.