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Wednesday

Philip Marsden

Rock of ages | 19 September 2012

By any measure the small town of Lalibela, hidden away amongst the gorges and plateaux of Ethiopia’s central highlands, is one of the most remarkable religious sites on earth. A dozen or so churches have been carved out of the rock and connected by a labyrinth of trenches, tunnels, culverts and crypts. The churches are substantial, elaborate and in their overall effect unlike anything else in the Christian world. Interiors disappear into chiselled-out arcades and apses; the light falls through intricate cruciform windows. The columns are so evenly spaced, the vaults so regular that it is easy to forget that every inch of these ‘buildings’ had to be designed and executed using negative space, a stone-carver’s technique that allows for no margin of error.

Lloyd Evans

Variety was the spice of life

Tough job being a disused prime minister. John Major has resisted the temptation to flounce off in a sulk, or to play the international peacemaker, or (as Harold Macmillan was said to do during the 1970s) to fantasise about a glorious comeback urged on him by a despairing populace eager to rediscover its lost greatness. Instead, Major has become a social historian. After a book on cricket he now offers us a personal history of the music hall. His father, Tom Major (b. 1879), made a living as a comic artiste for over 30 years, and his recollections are the starting-point for Major’s investigations. Music hall grew out of the glee clubs and saloon theatres of the 18th century where ‘catches’ (hummable melodies) were played to boozing crowds by impromptu artistes.

Sebastian Faulks

The writing bug

Authors seem to be more unhealthy than most people. Sometimes the sick room simply offers time to read and a sense of grievance or detachment; but the relationship between health and writing may be more complex. John Ross, a practising physician and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard, has happily violated every rule of patient confidentiality in this gossipy, highly conjectural and entertaining piece of medical bookchat. Some of it is a bit far-fetched. Did Shakespeare have syphilis, and if so did a mercury cure cause tremors and personality changes? Ross thinks Shakespeare may have had an STD, that mercurial rage may have surfaced later, that he may have struggled to complete his last plays and that perhaps a syphilitic chancre increased his sympathy for others.

Alistair Horne

The bravest of the brave

I suppose I may be one of the few people still alive to have known Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville), though, perhaps regrettably, not as well as many others in her brilliant, stormy but eventually tragic life. Today she would have been over 100. Of all the women agents who risked their lives in Nazi-occupied Europe in the second world war, Polish-born Krystyna must surely rate as one of the bravest of the brave. As they used to say in army vernacular, the George Medal (which was about as close to a VC as a foreign national could get), the OBE and the Croix de Guerre did not exactly ‘come up with the rations’. Churchill is alleged to have rated Skarbek his ‘favourite spy’. The reason?

Andrew Gimson

This Kohlian abomination

In the year when East and West Germany were being reunited Günter Grass felt he must start keeping a diary. He was sure what was taking place was a dreadful mistake: At night I often toss and turn, haunted by images of a Germany that can no longer be mine. This Kohlian abomination: egomaniacal, bombastic, jovial, tough, condescending, domineering, feigning harmlessness. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was a power politician of genius. Although taken by surprise by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, he soon saw how to make himself the architect of reunification. Grass was dismayed to see how easily the Germans were led by this philistine.

Molly Guinness

Finery down to a fine art

The Impressionists adored clothes. They delighted in strapontins, polonaises and paletots; fans, hats and umbrellas were an extra treat. They were keen on couture, but they didn’t restrict themselves to painting grand ladies; it was the golden age of flânerie, and Paris had been transformed from a higgledy-piggledy labyrinth into an elegant public space of boulevards and parks. The artists got out of their studios and started studying the people in action. Debra Mancoff looks at their paintings with a dressmaker’s eye. She can tell you not only what the outfits are made of, but also what’s under them, who made them and how they have held their shape despite the heat of an Impressionist picnic.

Victoria Glendinning

Everyone is lost in the forest

The Grimm brothers’ fairy tales are gruesome. Heads are cut off and sometimes stuck back on again. Children are maimed, or chopped up, cooked and eaten. Broken promises are punished horribly, though a magic bird or a talking animal can sometimes make everything come right. Yet those tender-minded parents are misguided who keep their children away from Grimms’ tales for fear of instilling terrors. Little children know about terror already because they are afraid of being abandoned, and of big strangers. With no prompting from anyone, they play games involving much noisy bashing and killing of imaginary monsters.

Anthony Horowitz

…to the other

Here’s the paradox. By any standards, Arthur Conan Doyle was an extraordinary man; a doctor, a politician, a keen sportsman (he once took the wicket of W.G. Grace and he was skiing almost before the word was invented), a social campaigner, a spiritualist and of course a very great writer, not just of detective stories but history, horror and even poetry. And yet the slate of his life was wiped almost entirely clean by his single, greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle himself was aware of it. ‘I am in the middle of the last Holmes story,’ he wrote to his mother in 1892. ‘After which the gentleman vanishes, never, never to reappear. I am weary of his name.’ It didn’t work, of course.

Robert Macfarlane

From one extreme…

A century ago, Antarctica was a seriously tough place in which to be a scientist. In February 1912, a German expedition established its research station on an ice-shelf in the Weddell Sea, only for that section of shelf to break loose ‘with an explosive boom’, and drift away — pursued by the German ship. When Apsley Cherry Garrard journeyed to the emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier in July 1911, to investigate the embryology of the birds, he and his companions carried reindeer-fur-lined sleeping bags which froze solid during the days, weighed 21 kg at their heaviest, and could take up to 45 minutes of melting and wriggling to enter each night.

Thursday

Julia Copus

The Orange Rug

for Antony and David Impossible to picture a time without it there beneath the living room window, afloat in the shadows of our father’s desk. Its flattened tassels were the rays of sun in a child’s drawing; it was where we must gather, three breathless children, our coats on for school, or to show who was first to be ready for bed, and if we’d a score to settle this was where we must do it. When was the last time we stood there, myself and my two, fly brothers, in the days before their bodies hardened and wives and children hovered round them? It is late, perhaps – a splash of moon at the window. Outside, a row of curtained houses looks blindly away from two small boys and their sister, who have not even thought to arrange the order of their going.

Alan Jenkins

Sisters

These two, DOROTHY AND CLARICE DENCH — A pair of local spinster sisters, as I guess — Both died, two years apart, aged ninety-five. Yet ‘We are only here a little while’ Is carved, with names and dates, into this bench: A saying of theirs, perhaps, that raised a smile When each new birthday found them still alive, That friends recalled with wry tenderness? Did they walk their dogs here every day Then stop at ‘their’ bench and sit gratefully, Half-hearing distant cries (Howzat? or Play!), Half-watching men in whites move on the green As ‘Flush’ and ‘Bingo’ barked at long leg-drives That rolled, to dry applause, towards the screen?

Mark Mason

Our national obsession

If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list of official sports. We’d clean up at Rio. Strange, mind you, that we don’t actually know very much about the subject which consumes so much of our conversation. How rainclouds form, why lightning happens, where Britain’s first windmill was — that sort of thing. One man determined to put this right is Charlie Connelly. Bring Me Sunshine (Little, Brown, £12.99) is his anecdotal, layman-friendly exploration of the elements and what they do to us.

Paul Binding

A snake in the grass

‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to meet what this boy really cares about. The school is in Jewel, a small town in south-west Saskatchewan, and Michael, always happier out-of-doors, really did bring in a snake, to display its beauty. Finding it, Parley killed it with his blackboard-pointer. Unfortunately the best Michael can do with the sentence is: ‘He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake.

Alan Brownjohn

Pigeonholing the poets

Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to ‘the diversity and eclecticism’ of present-day British poetry. It isn’t a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century — W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin — and perhaps rather confused and unclear about what is happening now. Sampson herself is a notable poet, critic and editor who enjoys and admires a wide range of contemporary poetry, and Beyond the Lyric should assist any intelligent readers infected by her enthusiasms and wanting to update their knowledge.

Byron Rogers

More vindictive than merry

At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on a muggy summer afternoon in 1658.’ All it needs is the dusty main street of the frontier town with two men, one all in black, facing each other against the sky, with one of Dmitri Tiomkin’s lush orchestral soundtracks gulping away in the background. Another death — that of Charles I by execution on 29 January 1649 in Whitehall: carpenters are putting the finishing touches to his scaffold and, according to the authors, the sound awakens the King. Fair enough.

Mary Kenny

Sweetness and light

Yes, shamefully, I did immediately look myself up in the index, since I had known Mary Robinson (née Bourke) when we were both young feminists in Dublin in 1970. Indeed, she sat in my Dublin flat sharing ‘conscious-raising’ sessions, and I published one of the first political interviews with her — which has been cited in all previous biographies of the lady. Our paths, to say the least, have diverged. She became President of Ireland (and annoyingly, a very good one), and has graduated to being one of the world’s great panjandrums, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with 49 honorary doctorates from universities all over the globe and honours from half a dozen countries, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by President Obama.

Cressida Connolly

Contrarian to the last

We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was dying in character. It matters very much to us that the people we are close to should retain the essence of their natures, until the end. The foibles of the dying are life-rafts thrown to their friends and family: proof that their uniqueness and the force of their personalities are stronger than death itself. Christopher Hitchens died as he had lived, holding court, boasting, arguing on the side of logic and reason, dismissive of religion and superstition alike; with great intellectual curiosity, wit and panache. This little book was meant to be a longer one, but death came sooner than he had bargained for.

James Walton

Over-cooked

Starting with Lemprière’s Dictionary — an unexpected worldwide hit in the early 1990s — Lawrence Norfolk has never been a man for the slim novella. Complicated of plot and huge of cast, his books generally serve up a combination of almost obsessively researched history and somewhat arcane mythology. Now, 12 years since his last one, comes John Saturnall’s Feast —  a novel, I think it’s fair to say, that doesn’t mark a radical change of direction. The year is 1625, and in the Oxfordshire village of Buckland the puritans are on the march. For 11-year-old John Saturnall, this is particularly worrying, because his mother Susan is widely (and, it would seem, accurately) regarded as the local witch.

William Leith

An exercise in torment

In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He tries to explain what it was like to kill, and what it was like to be under fire. He tries to make sense of the relationships he had with other soldiers. His brain is full of lurid visions, the memories he is constantly attacked and ambushed by. But he can’t make sense of them, because he can’t find a way back to the person he was before the war. His story is an exercise in torment. Why did he join the army? Why did his friend Daniel ‘Murph’ Murphy, who did not come back, join the army?

Wynn Wheldon

Pitch perfect

It is fashionable, in the wake of all those rowers and cyclists and runners, abled and otherwise, who do what they do for something — glory, pride, joy of physical exertion?  — other than for money, to disparage football, and to regard it as somehow vulgar and its practitioners over-indulged. Despite the fairytale exploits of Chelsea and Manchester City at the end of last season, football is seen as having a lot of catching up to do. It is, after all, almost impossible not to be cynical about a sport that rewards its players so extravagantly. This book reminds us that football too has its virtues.