More from Books

Saturday

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.

James Walton

Little Miss Sunshine

James Kelman is famously not a man fond of making concessions — whether to bourgeois interviewers, literary fashions, traditional punctuation or his own readers. Sure enough, his latest novel comes in familiar form: a continuous, chapterless slab of interior monologue from a working-class Glaswegian struggling against the un-remitting toughness of what a character in his last book of short stories called the ‘greatbritishsocialsystem’. True, the protagonist here does represent one departure from the norm, by being a woman — thereby allowing Kelman to add another layer of oppression to the usual mix. Even so, the only thing remotely quirky about Mo said she was quirky is the title.

Caroline Moorehead

From Austria to Australia

Moriz Gallia from Moravia and Hermine Hamburger from Silesia met and married in Vienna in 1893, when the city was the third largest European capital after London and Paris. They were rich, from making and supplying gas mantles, and they were generous patrons of Vienna’s exceptionally lively artistic world. When their two daughters, Gretl and Käthe, fled to Australia after Kristallnacht, they took with them the finest collection of central European pictures, furniture, silver, glass, jewellery and porcelain to escape the Nazi looters.

Emily Read

Blowing hot and cold

The landscape is treeless and windswept but spectacular, with volcanoes, glaciers and geysers, the climate and cuisine nearly always disagreeably challenging: it is sometimes hard to explain the affection and loyalty Iceland has inspired in so many visitors, from Auden and Isherwood in the Thirties to the academic and novelist Sarah Moss in 2009. She too was drawn back when, long after a memorable gap-year visit, she took a job at the university and returned to live there with her family. My family also lived in Reykjavik, back in the Sixties, when my father was posted there as ambassador. Holidays with our Icelandic and American friends were good fun.

Andro Linklater

Fading ambition

‘Despite 30 years of war,’ remarked General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in 2009 of NATO forces in Afghanistan, ‘civilisation grows here like weeds.’ Unfortunately for the Afghans, their tribal, rural, autarchic civilisation that grows so readily has never been acceptable either to the western allies or to the Taleban.

Michael Carlson

Three shades of noir

In the days of cheap paperbacks, publishers sometimes printed two pulp novels in one volume, back to back. Ariel Winter has done one better, because The Twenty- Year Death consists of three novels, dealing with murders committed over the course of two decades, each told in the style of a great crime writer. The first is set in 1931 France, hommage to Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. A corpse found floating in the flooded drains of Verargent turns out to come from the local prison, from which there is no escape. Inspector Pelleter has just visited the prison to interview a serial killer he has arrested, and is drawn into the investigation.

Peter Parker

Blending the old with the new

Holker Hall is situated in a beautiful Cumbrian landscape within sight of Morecambe Bay, and in 1950 it became the second stately home, after Longleat, to be opened to the public. The house itself dates back to the 16th century, with a Victorian west wing replacing one that burned down in 1871. It is, however, the extensive park and gardens surrounding the house that have made it famous. Several generations of the Cavendish family have left their mark on this land, but the present garden is largely the creation of Hugh Cavendish — who was brought up at Holker and inherited it on his father’s death in 1972 — and his wife Grania. Taking on an historic garden involves one fundamental decision: whether to preserve or to evolve.

David Ekserdjian

The most Shakespearean of painters

Titian’s paintings have always been both loved and revered, and he is without question the most influential artist who has ever lived. In the 17th century, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez and Rembrandt were all under his benign spell, but even more remarkably over 400 years after his death his power continues to impress. It is not by chance that both the National Gallery and the Royal Ballet are currently celebrating Titian as a source of inspiration for newly created art, ballet and music, because he remains in so many ways the most contemporary of the Old Masters.

Lewis Jones

American enterprise

The title of A.A. Gill’s latest book comes from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor… I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ And its subtitle is a tribute to Alistair Cooke, who was a friend and colleague of Gill’s father, and ‘the most urbane, witty and readable journalist of his century’. Urbanity is hardly Gill’s forte, but he is often witty and always readable. ‘This book,’ he explains, ‘is the view of the New World from the Old.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Heading for the rough

Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey Press, £10.99), the first book by the eminent literary agent David Godwin, shows what can happen when you let this essentially ludicrous sport into your life. In Chapter 1 he is a normal person, thinking he should do a bit more exercise, and taking up golf mainly because he can’t face the idea of cycling. Within scarcely a dozen pages he is golfer more than he is human, thrashing his way round seaside courses in a clearly doomed quest to ‘break 80’, when the upper 90s and low 100s are more his natural habitat. He is not helped by his natural diffidence and dislike of most other golfers, especially  the ones who shout ‘Tuck your shirt in!

Cressida Connolly

More table talk

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin has a lot to answer for. In the months after its publication, it became the printed equivalent of holy communion: wheresoever two or three people gathered together to break bread, it was earnestly discussed. Shriver’s novel explored the possibility that a child could be born wicked; further, that it would be entirely possible for the mother of such a child actively to dislike her progeny. Whether the author set out to satirise the current western obsession with child-rearing, or simply to tell rather a chilling tale of American family life, Shriver produced a very readable and polished story. Now we need to talk about books, plays and films influenced by We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Jane Ridley

Another night to remember

At 6 o’clock on the evening of 16 October 1834 the old House of Lords burst into flames. By 3 a.m. most of the Palace of Westminster was a burned-out wreck. The Lords and the Commons, the Law Courts and the ramshackle mess of medieval offices, kitchens and houses which made up the Palace had gone up in smoke. Only Westminster Hall remained intact. It had taken roughly 500 minutes to torch over 500 years of English history. This disaster forms the subject of Caroline Shenton’s book. The crowd hailed the fire as retribution for the cruel Poor Law Act of 1834. Victims of social care cuts perhaps feel just as incendiary about parliament today. But this was no Guy Fawkes plot, and there was no hint of arson.

Saturday

Mark Mason

Bricks and nectar

Not many beekeepers ferry so many black bin liners in and out of their tower block that the local council suspect them of running a crack den (the same council who have missed the real crack den in the basement). Not many beekeepers transport their hives in a decommissioned London taxi, narrowly avoiding disaster when a would-be passenger tries to get in. Not many beekeepers end up having to coax their swarming bees into a cardboard box on Oxford Street, surrounded by people taking pictures and asking if they sting. Not many beekeepers, in other words, keep bees in London. Or rather, they do. The increasing popularity of the hobby in the capital has prompted Steve Benbow to produce The Urban Beekeeper, an informative and often touching book.