More from Books

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

My Dear Governess, edited by Irene Goldman Price

‘I have finished Julius Caesar since I last wrote & I cannot say that it left a very glowing impression on me. It was too much like my own earliest attempts at tragedy to move me in the least.’ So wrote the 16-year-old Edith Wharton in 1878 to Anna Bahlmann, her governess and literary confidante. Wharton’s letters to Bahlmann only came to light in 2009. Edited and carefully annotated by Irene Goldman-Price, they chart Wharton’s progress from precocious adolescent, to brilliant New York socialite, to sophisticated queen of European literary society, to tireless charity worker, divorced, estranged from her family, struggling to ease the plight of refugees in a Paris torn apart by the first world war.

Olivia Glazebrook

Even the Dogs, by Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor’s debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002 and won both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in the following year. So Many Ways to Begin, his second novel, was on the Booker longlist in 2006 and last month his third book, Even the Dogs (which was published in 2010), won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. McGregor’s talent is formidable, his purpose is serious and his discipline is exemplary: this novel turns an unflinching gaze on its subject — a group of homeless drug addicts in a depressed Midlands town — and expects an equal commitment from the reader.

Claudia FitzHerbert

The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson Claudia FitzHerbert

The story of the Pendle witch trials in 1612 is well known, thanks to the publication of The Wonderfull Disoverie of Witches in Lancashire by Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancashire Assizes in which ten of the 12 accused were condemned to death by hanging. But it is also unknown because Potts’s certainties are not ours. We know who was accused of what but not why, although several of the cases collapsed into each other, with one defendant being released after a witness was ‘proved’ to have been in the pay of a Catholic priest. Witchery and popery were equally reprehensible, target culture making it imperative for Potts and his cronies to nail someone for something.

Caroline Moorehead

Occupation Diaries, by Raja Shehadeh

A group of friends, Palestinian and foreign, go to picnic at a wadi between Jerusalem and Jericho. They are wearing bright, casual summer clothes. On a nearby rock sits another party of picnickers, only they are dressed in veils, long skirts and black coats. For a while no one says anything. Then, suddenly, over a gesture of defiance, a row erupts between these secular liberals and the devout Islamicists. Once upon a time, writes Raja Shehadeh in Occupation Diaries, the two groups would have exchanged friendly greetings. Today there is only suspicion and antagonism; the people of Palestine, who not so long ago lived peacefully together, are now driven apart by deep rifts.

Peter Jay

National Service, by Colin Shindler

For over 15 years after the second world war young men between the ages of 18 and 20 were conscripted by law to serve in Britain’s armed forces for two years. This was officially in order to man the army, navy and air force sufficiently for them to be able to perform the roles which government assigned to them, mainly in the management of British colonies and, after the formation of Nato, in opposing the feared westward expansion of the Soviet Union. Some serious fighting was done in Korea and later in Malaya, which was surprisingly successful from the colonial point of view. Others of us disported ourselves in the Middle and Near East, in Cyprus, in Africa and — reputedly the most boring — in the British Army on the Rhine. Some were just stuck in Britain.

Minoo Dinshaw

The First Crusade, by Peter Frankopan

Perhaps more than any other single historical event, the First Crusade (1096-99) lends itself to the narrative technique. This was the quest — and a successful one — on the part of Roman Catholic Europe to regain the Holy Lands taken during the Muslim conquests of the Levant four centuries earlier. Its rich cast of characters — among them Bohemond of Taranto, Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon — caught between conflicting motives of faith, avarice, loyalty and ambition, have inspired magnificent epic poetry. Their ultimate goal was the recovery of Jerusalem — and as Sir Ronald Storrs, British Governor during the Mandate once said, ‘There can be no promotion after Jerusalem.’ Where that quest began, however, is  more vexing.

James Walton

Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell

Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book, The Saint Zita Society (Hutchinson, £12.99), works best as a portrait of modern London, sharing many of the characteristics of novels like John Lanchester’s Capital and Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December. The murders, when they finally happen, not only go unsolved, but even largely uninvestigated. They also feel rather sketchily plotted and weirdly peripheral to the action. The setting is an upmarket street in Pimlico whose inhabitants include a paediatrician, a classic gentlewoman of the old school and, naturally, a horrible City financier and his lazy wife.

Stig Abell

Umbrella, by Will Self

James Joyce once described Ulysses — in dog Italian — as a ‘maledettisimo romanzaccione’, or monstrously big novel. It has come to stand as a modernist masterpiece, and also the acme of difficult, inaccessible, unwieldy fiction. It is to be read (if at all) effortfully, in sweaty admiration, and mercifully short chunks. One cannot help recalling Joyce when grappling with Will Self’s big new monster of a novel. And just occasionally, Self allows his formidable phrasemaking to drift towards bad Joycean pastiche: breastfeeding seen in terms of ‘hawsers and pipelines coiled away into milky fartysteam’, the ‘jewfoody stench’ of an old apartment, and the like. But no matter.

A.N. Wilson

Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, by Jane Ridley

This book deserves to be named in the same breath as those two great classics of royal biography, Roger Fulford’s Royal Dukes and James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. It shares with those two masterpieces the double advantage of being profoundly learned and a cracking good read. There is scarcely a paragraph of Bertie which does not contain new material, most of it culled from the Royal Archives, but also from a wide variety of other sources, including the diaries — which Jane Ridley discovered in the Royal College of Physicians — of Bertie’s German medic, Dr Sieveking. Its most affecting passages — and there are many — derive their power from the accumulation of carefully gathered detail.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Gentleman abstractionist

Adrian Heath (1920—92), like so many artists, was a mass of contradictions. Jane Rye begins her excellent study of him by quoting Elizabeth Bishop: ‘A life’s work is summed up as the dialectic of captivity and freedom, of fixed form and poetic extravagance, of social norms and personal deviance.’ Heath thought of his painting as an attempt to reconcile the intellectual and the sensual, a meeting point of classical and romantic. Roger Hilton complained that Heath couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a painter or an accountant. Certainly, Heath did not conform to the public’s cherished image of the artist as bohemian.

Wynn Wheldon

Tricks of the trade

If you are in the habit of reading short-story collections straight through you will not fail to notice the repetition of motifs in Ryan O’Neill’s playful debut. I’ve no doubt he would like you to, for his book is a set of variations on the theme of language. We meet tattoo artists, English teachers, readers of comics, short-story writers, parents uttering racist epithets (‘Chink’, ‘Abo’ ‘Goon’), translators and a failed novelist called Thomas Hardie; there are also maps, mail-order books, pornographic magazines and changes of name. Even buildings have last words: a ten-year-old headline outside a derelict newsagent, the walls of which were ‘a palimpsest of graffiti’.

Anne Chisholm

The serpent in the garden

Loss of innocence happens to us all and is one of the great themes of literature. With The River, a novella first published in 1946 and now rightly republished by Virago, Rumer Godden gave us not only her best book (she wrote more than 60) but a small masterpiece, a near perfect account of how childhood has to come to an end and the serpent must enter the garden. Her story of an English family living on a river in Bengal (now in Bangladesh) is closely based on her own early life.

Jonathan Mirsky

Star-crossed lovers

Having lived for 15 years in Japan, Lesley Downer has already written several highly informed books with Japanese themes. For her most famous, Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, she spent six months with those artful women who make every man they entertain with song, dance and chat feel adored, without — usually — going further than that. I found Downer’s novels readable but not especially memorable. Now she has written a really good novel, suffused with the atmosphere of Japan in the late 19th century — when westernising influences were begin to penetrate its traditional culture — and populated with believable characters, whose fates are not settled until the last few suspenseful pages.

Paul Johnson

A weakness for beauty

James Stourton is not only a successful auctioneer and chairman of Sotheby’s but also an accomplished writer, the author of the delightful Art Collectors of Our Time (2007). He has now produced a book about how the English, and subsequently the British, set about acquiring and presenting works of art. He has been helped by Charles Sebag-Montefiore, another successful businessman, who has assembled a magnificent art library on which the research for this volume has been based. It is a hefty tome which has the merit of showing, in most cases, what these private collections looked like in their original shape before their dispersal among public national or American collections. This is as it should be, for architecture is the basis of all English collecting.

John Casey

From riches to rags

So accustomed have we become to North Korea as a failed state, 15 times less prosperous than the south, and depending entirely on foreign aid to survive, that we forget that things were not ever thus. I remember meeting Japanese nationalists who boasted that Japan had put more effort into building the infrastructure of their colonies than any western power had done for theirs. This was entirely true of Korea. The Japanese rulers (since 1910) left a huge industrial base in the north, including mines, processing plants for coal, iron, magnesium and zinc, and many reservoirs and pumping stations which enabled the north to fertilise and irrigate its land.

Andrew Taylor

Acting on intelligence

Alan Furst’s thrillers have been compared to le Carré’s, which does neither author much service. His espionage novels are set mainly in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. They don’t form a series, though there are connections between their characters. Most of them explore the choices forced on ordinary people whom the current of history has washed up on the murky shores of intelligence-gathering. Not that Frederic Stahl, the main character of Furst’s 12th spy novel, Mission to Paris, is exactly ordinary. He’s Viennese by birth and, after a varied career, has turned to acting.

John Preston

Bookends: Umpty, umpty, umpty…

According to Ogden Nash, the reason the British aristocracy wrote so much is because they could never understand what they were saying to one another. Much of the advice proffered in Gentlemen’s Pursuits (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) from the pages of Country Life, seems aimed at people who can neither write nor talk. Take this tip on how to jump a fence from Lieut-Colonel MF McTaggert DSO in 1924: ‘Umpty, umpty, umpty, one, two, three over!’ Even to the layman this sounds worryingly short on technique. By contrast, lighting a bonfire is regarded as a brain-knottingly complex business: ‘To start the fire, push lighted paper into the hole and at once the flames draw away with a roaring noise.

Justin Marozzi

Embattled dystopia

Pity the modern dictator. Time was he could bump off a recalcitrant opposition figure, take out a dissident stronghold, massacre the entire population of a town and the world would be none the wiser. There might be a pesky reporter trying to get to the truth, but that could be taken care of, as President Assad’s security forces demonstrated earlier this year. Yet the digital world has made it much harder to brush war crimes and atrocities under the kilim. Thanks to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, surveillance states now find themselves under constant surveillance in turn. The spies are spied upon, lifting the lid — albeit only partially — on what is happening inside places like Syria.

David Crane

Another doomed youth

It is very possible that unless you are a Bulgarian or a Wykehamist or an SOE buff or ideally all three you will not have heard of Frank Thompson. Somewhere outside Sofia there is a railway station and a kinder-gartern named after him, but apart from one touching but derivative poem, printed in the Times on VJ Day 1945 and regularly anthologised since, Peter Conradi’s ‘very English hero’ is hardly known here at all. William Frank Thompson was born in Darjeeling in 1920, the son of a Methodist missionary and the grandson and great-grandson on his mother’s side of a formidable dynasty of American Presbyterian missionaries to Syria.

Saturday

David Crane

Against all odds

For more than 40 years now Clive Brittain has enjoyed a unique position in British racing. There are plenty of other trainers who could match his record in top races, but has there ever been anyone in the history of the sport who has tilted at so many unlikely windmills and so consistently hit them? Vedvyas at 33/1 for his first-ever winner, Julio Mariner at 28s for his first classic, Rajeem at 50s for the 2006 Falmouth and, most ludicrous of all, that old slow-boat of Lady Beaverbrook’s, Terimon, who slouched along at the back of Nashwan’s Derby before plugging on into a distant second at the absurd starting price of 500/1.