More from Books

Saturday

Matthew Ridley

Resisting evolution

There lived a happy Coelacanth In dim, primordial seas; He ate and mated, hunted, slept, Completely at his ease. Dame Nature urged: ‘Evolve!’ He said: ‘Excuse me, Ma’am, You get on with making Darwin, I’m staying as I am.’ Horace Shipp’s little hymn to the ‘living fossil’ fish-with-legs — thought long extinct then astonishingly discovered in a South African fish market in the 1930s — gets the evolutionary process upside down, of course. Evolution is not something that a fish, or a dame, wills; it just happens. Nonetheless, the poem captures the curiosity of the fact that, while some lineages change dramatically over time, others do not.

Alistair Horne

Discomforting

Britain has not been lucky with her Defence Secretaries. I cannot remember one ‘fit for purpose’ since George Robertson, back in 1999. There followed, under New Socialism, the colourless provincial lawyer who helped Blair lie his way into Iraq (I forget his name, as it’s always imprudent to libel a lawyer). Then came the wee Scottie, Dr John Reid, who promised us that troops would leave Helmand ‘without a single shot being fired’. (That was in 2006; already by 2008 four million bullets had been fired by the British armed forces—and we’re still there). Finally, Socialism presented the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantryman) with Bob, the bemused sheet-metalworker.

Susan Hill

The great detective

As a child, Mark Girouard must have been easy to buy for at Christmas.  An ideal gift would have been a puzzle, preferably the sort that looks easy, but is actually fiendish; one you have patiently to tease away at for hours until finally you unlock it, and long to share its cunning solution. This is more or less what Girouard does in several of the essays in this delightful collection. Girouard is our most distinguished architectural historian and writer on great houses, but here he solves puzzles, and also reveals a rich and diverse literary taste. He solves puzzles because he is sure there is something more to this or that received version of a story than meets the eye, and wants to dig deeper. Take two well-known facts about the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde.

Charles Cumming

Timely Thriller

Talk about timing. Just as Robert Harris’s cautionary tale about the perils of meddling with the financial markets was hitting the shelves, Greece was teetering on the edge of default and Swiss Bank UBS announced that unauthorised trading by one of the company’s investment bankers had led to $2.3 billion worth of losses. Harris has always had a nose for the topical. His 1999 novel, Archangel, noted that curious, self-sabotaging flaw in the Russian character which yearns for a totalitarian hard man in the Kremlin; a few years later, Vladimir Putin had completed his quiet ascent to the presidency. Harris’s wonderful 2007 thriller, The Ghost, functioned as a critique of the Blair government’s acquiescence in the face of grotesque American power.

Otto Saumarez Smith

Wealth of experience

In 1902 Jack London determined to travel to East London. He relates in People of the Abyss how he approached Thomas Cook & Son, but was disappointed to find that though a travel agent unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Tibet, but to the East of London, barely a stone’s distant from Ludgate Circus, [they] know not the way. For many of the late Victorian middle class the East End was as mysteriously exotic a place as the furthest reaches of the Empire. In contrast to any bemused Thomas Cook operator, John Marriott’s new history of the East End, Beyond the Tower, is an expert guide to the area.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends | 1 October 2011

Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never be able to do it in a trillion years. At any one time, though, there are only a couple of sketchwriters who are any good at all, and some of us find we move papers in order to read them. I realise now I must have been a very strange teenager to turn to Frank Johnson first every morning, and now I am an even stranger man in middle age reading Simon Hoggart every morning. Send Up The Clowns (Guardian Books, £8.99) is a selection of his sketches since 2007, beginning with the long, agonising changeover from Blair to Brown: hard now to read about without a large glass of red wine to hand.

Saturday

Tom Stacey

African Adventure

Every day in Kensington Gardens I jog round the bleak granite obelisk inscribed IN MEMORY OF SPEKE. VICTORIA NYANZA AND THE NILE 1864, which my family calls ‘Speke’s Spike’. That river is known to me a bit: I have stood on the glaciers of Ruwenzori at 16,000 feet, which feed it via Lake Albert. I was the first (with two others) to descend for 100 miles the water of the Blue Nile from its Ethiopian source. I have waded the Sudd with Anuak guerrillas.   Tim Jeal’s gripping book pulls the whole astonishing story together. Many a red-blooded Spectator reader will relish it, and buy it, since it’s as intricate and unexpected as the source of the river itself.

Lloyd Evans

The triumph of humility

‘John Smith is dead.’ These four blunt syllables, as elemental and atmospheric as the first line of a classic novel, form the opening of Chris Mullin’s new collection of diaries. This is a fascinating read, crammed with gossip, jokes, insights and anecdotes, not all of them political. Mullin’s first disclosure is that the ‘decent interval’ between a leader’s death and the tussle to succeed him lasts about three seconds. The ‘Stop Blair Camp’ formed as soon as Smith was buried. They try to court Mullin and he brushes them off. ‘I’m in the Win the Next Election Camp.’ He considers backing John Prescott, but ‘I can’t bear the thought of another phoney-left leader. Give me an honest right-winger any day.

Hugh Cecil

A soul in agony

In this compelling book, Matthew Hollis  analyses how Edward Thomas, for years a frustrated literary critic and prose writer on rural themes, became all at once, at the age of 36, a poet of genius. It was his close friendship with the American poet Robert Frost which, in 1914, precipitated this long-delayed fulfilment. Married while at Oxford University, Thomas, to support his wife Helen and the three children whom they rapidly produced, burdened himself with writing ill-paid book reviews — sometimes as many as 15 a week. Of his own numerous books some were potboilers, others more distinguished, and all rather heavy in the hand, including the life of his hero, Richard Jefferies, the great 19th-century nature and country writer.

William Leith

Chaos and the tidy mind

In this book, Alexander Masters, the unusual biographer, is living in Cambridge, having written Stuart: A Life Backwards, the story of a homeless man with a disordered mind. Masters lives on the ground floor of a house on Jesus Green; below him, in the basement flat, is Simon Norton, who owns the building. Norton’s flat is so incredibly untidy, so absolutely revoltingly messy, that I can’t go into it now; I’ll spend a couple of paragraphs on it in due course. More importantly, Norton is one of the cleverest mathematicians in the world. Possibly the cleverest. So Masters decides to write his biography. Stuart, who lived his life backwards, had a messy mind; Simon Norton has a messy flat. This flat, as Masters tells it, looks like a total disaster.

Judith Flanders

The odd couple | 24 September 2011

Carola Hicks was an acclaimed art historian, and, as she phrased it, a biographer of objects, exploring the ‘lives’ of art-historical subjects from the Bayeux tapestry to the stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel, and now Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’, deftly weaving together the history of the times in which the objects were created, art-historical analysis and a study of their afterlife, both how the pieces were treated by successive generations and what the cultural resonances of those treatments might tell us today.

Peter Oborne

A tangled web

Almost two decades ago, as a junior political reporter on the Evening Standard, I heard the cabinet office minister William Waldegrave tell a parliamentary committee that in certain circumstances it was right for a prime minister to lie. The words made no impression on the committee itself, but I nevertheless dashed up to my office in the press gallery and constructed a story around his observations, which duly appeared as the late edition Evening Standard splash. The most enormous row followed. There were calls for poor Waldegrave’s resignation. The Labour opposition made out that his comment showed that no Conservative government could be trusted. This was terribly unfair.

Philip Ziegler

At home in the corridors of power

To be the daughter of an enormously powerful man must always be an enthralling if sometimes daunting experience. To be close to that father when, almost single-handed, he is shaping the destinies of the nation, if not the world, is to be uniquely privileged. Mary Soames took no part in the decision-making that was happening above her head, but she was singularly well placed to sense what was going on and to understand the man who was riding the storm with such courage and aplomb. She was much younger than her siblings, her father was absorbed in his Herculean task, her mother knew that her first responsibility must be to her husband.  Mary Soames was therefore a solitary child, but she never felt neglected and was incapable of self-pity.

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 24 September 2011

In numerical terms, British police procedurals about maverick inspectors in big cities are probably at an all-time high. Few of their authors, however, have Mark Billingham’s talent for reinvigorating a flagging formula. Good As Dead (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the tenth of his London-based Tom Thorne thrillers. On her way to work, Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks, who previously appeared in Billingham’s standalone In The Dark, calls into her usual South London newsagent’s. This time she doesn’t come out with a bar of chocolate: the owner takes her and another customer hostage. Amin, his teenage son, has recently committed suicide in the young offenders institute where he was serving an eight-year sentence for manslaughter.

David Jones

Bookends | 24 September 2011

Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s she starred in film adaptations of her younger sister Jackie’s novels The Stud and The Bitch, and in the 1980s as Alexis Carrington in the American soap opera Dynasty. More recently she has reinvented herself, in these pages and elsewhere, as a grande dame and moral arbiter, bemoaning the debased standards and general vulgarity of our times. The World According to Joan (Constable, £12.99) finds her in full Lady Bracknell mode. ‘Chivalry is dead,’ one chapter begins, ‘manners have been thrown out of the window and politeness is an arcane word…’ Quite. O tempora! O mores!

Saturday

Jonathan Bate

The art of enchantment

Edward Burne-Jones was the archetypal literary-minded Victorian. Born in 1833, the son of a Birmingham picture-framer and gilder, he developed a taste for the Romantic poets while at school. Then, whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, he found a lifelong friend in William Morris. The university was supposed to be their route towards holy orders, but together they converted to the religion of art for art’s sake. Another student friend, Archibald MacLaren, gave Burne-Jones his first artistic break by asking him to provide illustrations for a collection of stories called The Fairy Family. Why did the Victorians spend so much time away with the fairies?

Lewis Jones

Call of Valhalla

In an appendix to this powerfully poetic and beautifully produced little book, A.S. Byatt explains that when Canongate invited her to write a myth, she knew immediately which one to choose: the myth of the Icelandic sagas and Wagner’s operas — ‘Ragnarök: the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed.’ When she began, she realised that she was writing for her childhood self, and the way she thought about the world when she first encountered the myth in her mother’s old copy of Asgard and the Gods, acquired as a crib for exams in Old Icelandic and Ancient Norse: ‘a solid volume, bound in green, with an intriguing, rushing image on the cover, of Odin’s Wild Hunt’.

John De-Falbe

Memories in a world of forgetting

It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about a week. Funder’s point of entry is Ruth, who, some 60 years later as a very old lady in Australia, receives in the post a copy of Toller’s auto-biography, I Was A German, with some manuscript amendments made by him in the week before he died, in 1939. Despite the gap in time and place, they are united by their passionate attachment to Ruth’s cousin, Dora Fabian, who was Toller’s amanuensis and the love of his life.

Anthony Cummins

Slightly strained

An escaped convict who took part in a slave-ship mutiny and a Liverpudlian banker hungry for land in a north-eastern pit village are the main characters of this novel set in 1767, which is a sequel to Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth’s excellent, Booker-sharing yarn about the slave trade (it and The English Patient won in 1992). The convict, Sullivan, is an Irish fiddler who slips out of Newgate and makes for Durham, where he hopes to find the family of Billy Blair, a dead shipmate and fellow mutineer. In the earlier book, Sullivan and Blair rose up against their captain as, en route to the Caribbean, he prepared to toss overboard sick slaves who would fetch more in insurance than on sale.

Douglas Hurd

No rules to waive

Kwasi Kwarteng is a young Tory MP and it is right and proper that he should begin his analysis of the British Empire with a quotation from Disraeli. The fact that he is of Ghanaian origin shows merely that we live in an unpredictable world: In the European nations there is confidence in this country …. While they know we can enforce our policy at the same time they know that our Empire is an Empire of liberty, truth and justice. Kwarteng finds it remarkable that Disraeli said nothing about democracy or economics. This would indeed be strange if he had been either a democrat or a believer in free trade; in fact he was neither.