More from Books

Saturday

Michael Howard

Whitehall’s murky recesses

Peter Hennessy is one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators of our time, so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that I approached his latest book. This was increased when I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that he had stood as the Conservative candidate in his school’s 1964 mock general election. My anticipation was heightened by his introduction, which promises an examination of the roles of myth and imagination in the writing of history. Of the many quotations we are treated to, the one which seemed best to reinforce that promise appears on the very first page, and comes from Enoch Powell: All history is myth. It is a pattern which men weave out of the materials of the past.

Anthony Daniels

For richer, for poorer

It is an old-established truth, a truism in fact, that money does not buy you happiness — though, as the late Professor Joad pointed out, it does allow you to be miserable in comfort. Yet the great majority of people, knowing this, nevertheless devote their energies to increasing their wealth, which suggests that happiness is not actually their ultimate goal. In fact, most people don’t have an ultimate goal. The authors of this book, father and son, seek to persuade us that we should devote more of our energies to things that are done for their own sake, that are good in themselves, rather than spend our lives on the treadmill of getting and spending, which is ultimately no more satisfying than the work of prisoners who are forced to dig holes only to fill them again.

Philip Hensher

End of a dry season

The Letters of T.S.Eliot is a project which already seems to belong to another world, of leisure and detailed scholarship. It was conceived of decades ago, and the first volume, under the editorship of Eliot’s widow Valerie, came out in 1988. A second volume, with the support of the excellent John Haffenden, emerged 21 years later; this third takes us only up to 1927, with a good 40 years of a busy professional life to follow. There may be a dozen volumes to go, and the undertaking in the end will rival the great Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters in scale. The editing of the Eliot letters is exemplary in its detail, authority and quality of annotation. It is the closest thing to a perfect edition of a great writer’s correspondence that can be imagined.

Paul Johnson

Fearsome and devilish

This life of the 11th Lord Lovat, executed on Tower Hill in 1747, in the aftermath of the ‘Forty-Five’ Rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, is primarily a work of pietas. Its author is the daughter-in-law of the last Lord Lovat, who landed with the first fighting troops of the D-Day invasion of Europe, striding ahead of them accompanied only by his piper. But Sarah Fraser deserves to be acclaimed as a notable biographer, too, for she tells a complex and sometimes bewildering story which she has amassed from a vast quantity of often intractable material. This is a brave and meaty book. The years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the accession of George III in 1760 constituted the great age of double-dealing in British politics.

Tuesday

Clive Aslet

Et in arcadia ego

The economy is in tatters, Europe in turmoil — but don’t worry: there is an antidote to the prevailing angst, and it’s provided by this book. It could be read simply as a close look at an undemonstrative corner of the English countryside, informed by the special understanding of a landowner, Jason Gathorne-Hardy, and an artist, Tessa Newcomb. But really it offers a philosophy. ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin,’ said Voltaire. And that’s just what author and illustrator do here, both practically and imaginatively.   Each of the monthly chapters opens with a paragraph of ‘garden notes’, compiled from the diaries of working gardeners. So much for the practical side.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Bookends: One for the road

Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety. In The Juice (Bloomsbury, £14.99), his third collection of wine columns (most of them for House & Garden and the Wall Street Journal), he exhibits a similar mix of qualities, contriving to be both jaded and puppyish, sometimes simultaneously, as when he boasts of his ‘Bad to the Beaune’ T-shirt. Like the character in the film Sideways, McInerney deplores what he calls the ‘ripe, fruity, oaky, over-manipulated Frankenwine’ that has been typical of so much New World production, and loves the subtle yet earthy charm of pinot noir, above all the sublime reds of Burgundy, which he writes about with knowledge, passion and wit.

Charlotte Moore

Welsh wizardry

After Brock is a slightly eccentric rite-of-passage novel rooted firmly in the Marches. In September 2009, we are told, an 18-year-old boy called Nat Kempsey disappeared for five days into the Berwyn mountains, on the Welsh side of the border. Paul Binding is at all times specific about time, place and names; the story has an air of veracity which carries the reader with it even when the dialogue seems forced and the coincidences improbable. Nat, recovering from his mountain ordeal in the bedroom above his father’s kite shop in Leominster, tells his story to a more-than-averagely alert reporter from the local newspaper. It soon becomes evident that the story that really needs telling belongs to Nat’s father, Pete.

Justin Marozzi

Travails with Auntie

He’s the Housewives’ Favourite, the Voice of Middle England on Radio 2, one moment discussing the perils of your other half leaving the gas on, the next slipping on an Elvis Costello track to liven up your lunch. Bit of a cheeky chappie, affable, engaging, amusing, doesn’t appear to take himself too seriously. We like that in a broadcaster. Self-important windbags James Naughtie, Nick Robinson and John Simpson, do please take note. Jeremy discusses neighbours who keep sofas and old cars in their garden, no-fault dismissal, how a tragic car crash shattered one family’s lives and breastfeeding three-year olds, the show’s website declares of his latest programme. This is the sort of stuff that he and his several million listeners are preoccupied by.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

There’s something about Mary

I like books which have their own linguistic microclimate. Fictional first-person narratives are where you tend to find these.  The moment you step inside a good one, you enter a distinctive country as encountered by the narrator, using his or her limited vocabulary. It’s the very constrictedness of the vocabulary that makes the story gripping: it forces you to live inside the narrator’s mind. Blinkered fictional characters created by unblinkered authors can make for surprisingly illuminating books.   How about this for a microclimate to step into? this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand. in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things.

Mark Ashurst

Never go back

Doctor Livingstone is said to have found the swamps of Elephant Marsh impenetrable. Ellis Hock has no such trouble. A long flight, hired car and motorcycle taxi carry the kindly American across the Malawian hinterland, where the Shire river feeds the Zambezi at its border with Mozambique. Lured by the ‘green glow’ of memory, Hock returns gratefully to the cluster of mud huts where, in the bright dawn of Independence, he spent four years as a graduate volunteer in the US Peace Corps. Now 62, every day of Hock’s adult life — as the nattily dressed owner of a menswear store in small-town Massachussetts — has been freighted with nostalgia. He recalls the local language, Sena. He remembers a capacity for happiness, an idea of the future.

Ian Thomson

Man smart

Port Antonio, in Jamaica, radiates a torrid, hothouse air. At night the inshore breeze smells faintly of bananas. Port Antonio was once Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out an average of three million bunches of ‘green gold’ a year. Harry Belafonte’s greatest hit, ‘The Banana Boat Song’, was sung by Port Antonio dock workers at the break of daylight when their shift was over. You know the song. The workers are tired and they want the day’s banana haul to be tallied and paid for: ‘Come, Mister Tally Man, tally me banana.’ Belafonte, an American of Jamaican heritage, understood the poverty of Caribbean life.

David Gilmour

Humanity on the scrapheap

One night a few years ago in Washington DC, Katherine Boo tripped over an ‘unabridged dictionary’, broke three ribs, punctured a lung and, as she lay on the floor unable to reach a telephone, ‘arrived at a certain clarity’ about her future. With most people — certainly those like Boo with a history of wretched health — the clarity would have taken the form of some assuasive advice: ‘Take it easy,’ ‘Don’t push yourself,’ ‘Find something less difficult to write about.’ For Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has written mainly about poverty in the US, clarity suggested the opposite.

Allan Massie

Give me excess of it

There is a joke about a retired colonel whose aberrant behaviour had him referred to a psychoanalyst. He emerged from the session fuming. ‘Damn fool says I’m in love with my umbrella. Bloody nonsense.’ Long pause, then: ‘I’m fond of it of course.’ Quite so, and likewise while people may not actually fall in love with their iPhone, 18 out of 200 students surveyed at Stanford University admitted to ‘patting’ the little thing. They may be as uncomfortable without it as an alcoholic in need of a drink before opening time. The Fix is a fascinating and at times alarming study of addiction. Damian Thompson writes with the authority of experience reinforced by wide-ranging research.

Sam Leith

A tough broad

When the modern reader thinks of Lillian Hellman, if he or she thinks of her at all, the image that presents itself is likely to be of a wizened old doll marooned in a gigantic mink coat, a still bigger hairdo — and wreathed in the smoke emanating not only from a cigarette but from her smouldering pants. Her enemy Mary McCarthy said in a 1979 television interview that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the” ’. That memorable zinger — and the lawsuit that followed, still ongoing at the time of Hellman’s death — all but did for her reputation. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about the golden age of Hollywood, Tell All, has as a running joke the eye-stretching lies told by Hellman.

Saturday

Zenga Longmore

Golden oldies

Jackie Kay, one of Scotland’s most celebrated living writers, is a woman of many voices. In her latest collection of short stories the voices mainly belong to women of middle to old age. Many are lonely, some are caring for barmy relatives, some are barmy relatives. Reality Reality’s most successful tales glow with a quiet radiance, touched as they are by the warmth of their creator’s heart. In ‘These Are Not My Clothes’, Margaret, a resident of an old people’s home, lives in fear of a sadistic matron who pinches and mocks her. Drifting in and out of reality, Margaret spends her time secretly plotting to ask the only kind nurse in the home to buy her a ‘tomato soup coloured cardigan’.

Penelope Lively

His own best story

A biography that is also a collaboration with its subject is something of a novelty. Here, Maggie Fergusson writes the life, while Michael Morpurgo contributes seven stories, each springing from the subject matter of the preceding section. Fergusson has previously written an excellent biography of George Mackay Brown, so has now moved from a detached consideration of a person no longer alive to work on and with someone very much around and active (who had himself proposed the idea of the book). In other words, this is a very different sort of project— and it could be said right away that this is no hagiography.

Sophia Waugh

From Luxor to Heston services

This wonderful book is not a history of food in 100 recipes at all; it is a history of the world in 100 recipes, as seen through the medium of what we ate and how we cooked it. William Sitwell’s erudite work never drags and should not be seen as a collection of recipes (although these are clearly chosen with modern-day cooking in mind) but as a window into the appetites and ways of life of our ancestors. We begin in Ancient Egypt, with a way of making bread extrapolated from pictures on the walls of a woman’s tomb in Luxor. This is one of the joys of the book; the recipes are not just retrieved from cookery books (the domstic kind, as we know them, did not really take off until the 18th century) but from many other sources, among them literature, the Bible and paintings.

Jonathan Mirsky

‘Am I not God’s chosen?’

Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK — something that Sir Harold, once editor of Murdoch’s classier Times, knows all too well.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Un poco goes a lang Weg

Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels, qui invented der irreverente lingua des Europanto, ‘eine mix van differente linguas sonder grammatica und regulationes,’ as el puts it sichself. Oui, c’est Franglais, aber more so and avec knobs on, und der late Kilomètres Kington ist doubtless revolvingante dans sa grave as I write. Marani, however, hast gehen even further que Kington and written un completa livre des short stories in diese bonkers lingua. Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot (Dedalus, £6.99) features cette ‘autentiquo europeane polizei’ solvingante des crimes and fightingante contra der evil, tout dans la cause de harmonia Europische.

James Walton

Don’t hold your breath

The case for Richard Ford isn’t hard to make. Ever since his breakthrough novel The Sportswriter in 1986, his multi-award-winning fiction has combined an unsparing intelligence with an unashamed high-mindedness about what literature can achieve — nothing less than a careful exploration of the best way to live. In some hands, this moral sense might feel self-conscious, sentimental or even faintly embarrassing. In Ford’s, it’s done with such measured skill that the impact is quietly overwhelming. Sentence by sentence, too, his prose is pretty much peerless. Every word that makes it onto the page has clearly been on trial for its life, before being triumphantly acquitted.