More from Books

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Dark days in the Dale

One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds. Published in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Jamaicans and other West Indians resident in Britain. Throughout, Hinds is haunted by the ‘race disturbances’ that swept Britain in 1958. Tensions erupted first in Nottingham then, more grievously, in west London. White youths (‘Teddy Boys’ to the tabloid press) beat up blacks and Asians in Shepherd’s Bush and the area then known as Notting Dale between the factories of Wood Lane and the newly claimed middle-class streets of Notting Hill Gate.

Victor Sebestyen

City of the dead

Russian officials today, much like the Soviet authorities of a past generation,  encourage a cult of the Great Patriotic War. In the national narrative, this was their Finest Hour, still invoked on significant anniversary days as an example of heroism and sacrifice by politicians such as Vladimir Putin. For Russians the most painful trauma in that conflict was the three-year-long siege of Leningrad. As Anna Reid points out in this  masterly and beautifully written account, the deadliest blockade of any city in history has received little attention in the West. Antony Beevor has been followed by a few historians who focused on the nightmare of the Eastern Front, where most of the fighting and dying against Nazism took place — Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands for example.

Alan Judd

The human factor | 17 September 2011

Accounts of the secret world usually fall into one of two camps, the authoritative or the popular.  The authoritative — such as Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 and Keith Jeffery’s of MI6 — are officially sanctioned, based on the file record and reliable. They are incomplete because, inevitably, there are episodes the authors are not (yet) permitted to publish, and Jeffery’s ends anyway in 1949. The popular accounts, which invariably claim to be complete and uncensored — and never are — tend to be drawn partly from the National Archive, partly from anonymous retired officials and partly from other popular accounts, some by disaffected former employees.

Lloyd Evans

A good man in a crisis

It’s debatable whether politicians of the Left or the Right are better at handling the public finances. But we do seem to learn more about economics under a Labour government. Alistair Darling’s memoir chronicles his turbulent years at the Treasury as he watched the world slithering into a financial volcano. Though the material is extremely dramatic, Darling’s sober, measured prose doesn’t quite suit the story’s explosive theatricality. He was haunted by the Northern Rock crisis of 2007 and the global impact of TV images showing panicking investors queuing up to withdraw all their cash. That, he determined, must never happen again.

Byron Rogers

Nobody turns up

This is not a book likely to figure in the lists of the reading circles of Home Counties England. There is for a start the little problem of a title, which on the spine is How to Disappear but then itself does, for the centre of its frontispiece is A Memoir for Misfits. A dedication follows, ‘To my old friend Pedro Friedeberg whom I’ve never met’. Just three pages in, and every fuse in the brains of the respectable matrons who meet to talk about books will have blown over the Bristol Cream. And that is before they have even started reading. What about?

Mark Mason

Bookends | 17 September 2011

One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne: A Global History by Becky Sue Epstein (Reaktion Books, £9.99). The Perignon tale is in there, along with many more lively and engaging stories from the history of sparkling wine (which, Epstein assures us, goes back much further than those three short centuries).

Saturday

Jonathan Bate

Homage to Gloriana

The period between the defeat of the Spanish fleet in 1588 and the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was among the most dramatic in English history. It was a time of Irish ‘troubles’, of war and plague, faction and rebellion, global exploration and religious fanaticism. These 15 years also witnessed the dazzling career and mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe, the publication of English literature’s national epic (The Faerie Queene), the intellectual brilliance and emotional intensity of John Donne’s love poetry, and the first performance of an astonishing variety of Shakespeare’s plays, ranging from his English histories to his greatest comedies to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

Nicky Haslam

Amen to an era

It must be said that Patrick Lichfield — the outer man — wore his ego proudly and loudly on his sleeve. It must be said that Patrick Lichfield — the outer man — wore his ego proudly and loudly on his sleeve. And with his aristocratic yet trendy good looks, his Harrovian education, the brigade of Guards, his titled ancestry, royal connections and friendships, his persistent anecdotal recall, his ruffles and velvet or leather and denim, his stately pile, his dashing dare-devilry, let alone his reputed lotharian appetites, one can hardly blame him. Inwardly, perhaps, this braggadocio was a salad-days reaction, for Lichfield’s youth was marred by family problems.

Lloyd Evans

The horror movie experience

Mark Kermode is not happy. And his discontent is a joy to witness. The centrepiece of his new book about Hollywood blockbusters is a brutally hilarious account of his attempt to see The Life and Death of Charlie St Cloud with his teenage daughter. First he books two tickets online. At the multiplex, the machine denies all knowledge of his purchase. He joins the queue and attempts to buy the seats he’s already reserved. ‘They’re taken,’ says the ‘zombie’ attendant. (‘He was conclusive proof that Darwin had been full of shit, and we were all heading back to the swamp’). Kermode buys two new tickets (for the price of four) and is then asked for a tub of popcorn by his hungry daughter. Costing a few pence to produce, and on sale for £4.

John Casey

Pawn or game-changer?

The British were in Burma for more than 120 years, but were never sure what to do with it. They completed their conquest in 1885, annexing Upper Burma and abolishing the ancient, semi-divine monarchy, apparently on the whim of Randolph Churchill. This was contrary to the British imperial tradition of indirect rule, and brought about a crisis of legitimacy which was never overcome. British rule was never fully accepted, even though the country prospered under the Raj, becoming the greatest exporter of rice in the world. In the short-lived democracy after independence, the rather bumbling U-Nu kept winning landslide victories in elections.

Sara Maitland

Human smoke alarm

For five months of the year Philip Connors (once an editor at the Wall Street Journal) has a fascinating job: he is a firewatcher in the vast Gila National Forest in New Mexico, USA. He lives in a hut five miles off any road and, from a high tower, watches for tell-tale plumes of smoke that mark the start of another forest fire. The job only lasts from April to August because such forests only catch fire in the summer; some of the fires in the Gila are caused by human stupidity, but most are started by lightning. In between watching and reporting fires, Connors gets to roam through, fish and look at one of the great stretches of remaining wilderness in the USA — and read, maintain his cabin and write.

Molly Guinness

Leave it to the French

Elaine Sciolino was advised to find herself a French lover for research purposes; as far as it’s possible to tell, she didn’t, but this may be the only stone left unturned in this extraordinarily thorough study of French seduction. Elaine Sciolino was advised to find herself a French lover for research purposes; as far as it’s possible to tell, she didn’t, but this may be the only stone left unturned in this extraordinarily thorough study of French seduction. Sciolino, a correspondent and former bureau chief for the New York Times, has managed to turn the mysterious process of seduction into a thesis.

John Preston

More dark material

If there’s one thing guaranteed to send a reviewer’s spirits plummeting, it’s opening a book and finding that the spellyng is orl rong If there’s one thing guaranteed to send a reviewer’s spirits plummeting, it’s opening a book and finding that the spellyng is orl rong. Bugga thys 4 a larque, hee thynks (awe wurds 2 dat effec). S’enuf 2 mayk mi brayne hert. The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean is David Almond’s first novel for adults —his children’s books have won two Whitbread Awards. However, it shares plenty of the same preoccupations as his other work: mice, small birds, angels and an air of apocalyptic gloom.

Judith Flanders

An upside-down world

Last year, with William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, detective-fiction aficionados welcomed the thrillingly horrific first instalment in a new series set in 1930s Moscow. Last year, with William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, detective-fiction aficionados welcomed the thrillingly horrific first instalment in a new series set in 1930s Moscow. In his first outing, Alexei Dmitrievich Korolev, a detective in the Moscow militia, managed to navigate the murky waters following the fall of Yagoda, head of the NKVD, and the onslaught of Stalin’s Great Purge.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends | 10 September 2011

Harry Enfield has said that ‘comedy without Galton and Simpson would be like literature without Dickens,’ and he may be right. Their two most lasting creations, Hancock’s Half Hour (illustrated above) and Steptoe & Son, influenced almost everything of worth that came after, from Fawlty Towers and Porridge to The Office and Gavin and Stacey. Nonetheless, you can’t imagine any show as bleak as Steptoe being commissioned today: two men sitting in a room arguing, forever. For this reason, and maybe others, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson haven’t received their due. The comedy archivist Christ-opher Stevens corrects this with The Masters of Sitcom (Michael O’Mara Books, £20), a lovingly compiled and annotated selection of some of their best scripts.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Day of reckoning | 3 September 2011

No one could say that we didn’t have warning of these events in the most specific terms. A month before 11 September 2001, the President’s daily intelligence brief was headed ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’ Other official warnings from this time and earlier were so specific, and so specifically ignored, that a former National Security Adviser at the White House, Sandy Berger, would on four separate occasions in 2002 and 2003 abstract official top secret documents from the National Archives by stuffing them in his socks. (Because of Berger, we now don’t know what these warnings consisted of). There were any number of commentators, too, who saw exactly what was coming.

Ian Thomson

A dancer’s progress

In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was ten and it was my first trip abroad. My father worked for Brooke Bond, and had ‘tea business’ to attend downtown. First we checked into the Taj Hotel. On the waterfront, beggar children with lurid wounds and deformities were shaking tins at passers-by. The poverty unsettled me. The Taj was swank, I could see that, but outside all was dirt and destitution. (At a cinema nearby, jarringly, Carry on Loving was being advertised as the comedy ‘fillum’ sensation of the year.) Over dinner, my parents explained that Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, was under attack. Bombay seemed strange enough to me.

Simon Baker

Friendships resurrected

A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand — in spite of their familiarity they are raced through in just a few lines. It is, however, perhaps the very terseness of the Bible that has caused at least as much ink as blood to be spilled in its cause; had it spelled the answer out, for instance, medieval scholars could never have whiled away so many jaw-droppingly fatuous hours in wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and other pressing questions. In his new novel Richard Beard draws attention to this brevity and uses it as a springboard.

Anne Applebaum

Thus do empires end

‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and knew most of the principal actors. ‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and knew most of the principal actors.

Peter Oborne

The enemy within | 3 September 2011

The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. As head of Pakistan’s special forces, Alavi found himself in a bitter struggle against influential military opponents in the Pakistan army. They favoured secret deals, paying large sums to the Taleban leader Baitullah Mehsud so that his supporters should not target the army. Alavi was by contrast desperate to attack the Taleban, and made no secret of this when on a visit to SAS headquarters at Hereford in 2005.