More from Books

Saturday

Andro Linklater

To the Ends of the Earth by T.M. Devine

When Scotland’s rugby team landed in Invercargill for the World Cup, they were greeted by a piper in full Highland fig and a cheering crowd of more than 500 New Zealanders, bedecked in tartan and waving St Andrew flags. The significance of both welcome and dress went beyond sport or nationality. Two important currents of modern life were at work, the ancient ability of the British empire to create societies in its own image, and the new power of the heritage industry to invent the past. Together they have made it necessary to update the old formula, ‘history is written by the winners,’ with the qualification, ‘but heritage is created by the losers’.

Anne Chisholm

Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford by Leslie Brody

Has the Mitford saga delighted us long enough? Some 17 non-fiction books about the family, mostly by its own members, have now been published; the first, in 1960, was Jessica Mitford’s memoir Hons and Rebels,  and the latest is this biography. In between there have been four fat books of letters, five individual biographies (the first of Unity, the fascist one, in 1977, then two each of Nancy, the writer and Diana Mosley, the other fascist one), two group biographies and five more autobiographies: a sequel from Jessica, and two each from Diana and Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the youngest of the sisters and the only one still alive.

Mark Mason

Bookends: Circling the Square Mile

You want the two-word review of this new book about the City? ‘London porn.’ For those of you with more time, The City of London by Nicholas Kenyon (Thames & Hudson, £40) is as comprehensive a photographic record of London’s financial centre as you could wish for. If a building is impressive or important, or has been either of those things in the last 2,000 years, it’s here, together with details of its design, construction and role in the capital’s history. There are also maps and illustrations, working together to tell the story of how this small plot of land became a magnet for the world’s bean-counters. It’s not just Mammon that gets a look-in, either; churches and livery halls and pubs are covered too.

John Preston

What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis

The start of What Am I Still Doing Here? finds Roger Lewis in a state of deep gloom. But then so does the middle of the book — and indeed the end. This, of course, is just as it should be. The last thing one wants from a professional curmudgeon is brimming red-cheeked jollity, and I’m delighted to be able to report there’s nothing like that here. There are, however, all kinds of other pleasures. In some respects, this comes as a surprise. If happiness writes white — as every creative writing student is told — you might think that churning discontent should come in a similarly unvarying shade of black. But one of Lewis’s great virtues as a chronicler of his own dissatisfaction is the breadth of his range.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Masques of beauty and blackness

Sam Leith on the paradoxical nature of Britain’s first literary celebrity What a piece of work was Ben Jonson! If you lived in Elizabethan England and had just narrowly escaped the gallows after stabbing a man to death in an illegal duel, wouldn’t you want to keep your head down for a bit? Not Jonson. He converted to Catholicism. A few months after the bishops of Canterbury and London, in 1599, declared the writing of satire illegal, what did Jonson produce? Every Man out of his Humour, a self-declared ‘comical satire’. The writing of history was also proscribed — Tacitean history being a particular sore point. So in 1603 Jonson produced Sejanus, a history play based on Tacitus. Epigrams were banned too. By 1612, Jonson got round to publishing some.

Bevis Hillier

Stranger than fiction

Asked to review this book, which I was told was about encounters between unlikely pairs of people, I assumed it would be on the lines of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Craig Brown is our premier parodist, the best since the incomparable Max. Might his chatting twosomes include Cleopatra and Janet Street-Porter? The Marquis de Sade and Mary Whitehouse? No one could do that better, I thought; and by the end of it I’d be writhing on the Axminster, to borrow a phrase from the late Alan Coren. I couldn’t wait to split my sides. I was quite wrong. To my surprise, the book describes real encounters. Truth being stranger than fiction, many of them are every bit as bizarre as anything Brown could have invented, and some are as funny.

Barnaby Jones

The devil’s in the detail | 15 October 2011

This is a book for our times, a pair of linked essays, the first, by Rory Stewart, on the troubled decade of Western intervention in Afghanistan, followed by the success story of the ten years of Western intervention in Bosnia by Gerald Knaus. The authors write not for glory, or to secure a professorial chair, but out of desperation. Year on year over the last decade, the leaders of the West have immersed us ever deeper in ‘sorting out’ Afghanistan. They do this from the best possible motives — a sense of obligation and moral decency — but also out of fear, hubris and historical ignorance. As a result, our soldiers and our treasuries bleed, and so, to a much greater extent, do the poor, war-devastated people of Afghanistan.

Melissa Kite

A question of faith

Perhaps beginnings are meant to be disorientating sometimes. For many pages of Mohammed Hanif’s second novel I cannot get my bearings and start to worry that, far from finding my way into the dense narrative, I am becoming more and more lost. I fret about what the problem might be. Is it overwritten? The earthiness of the description of downtown Karachi is glorious, but I begin to panic that if there are many more phrases such as ‘breasts like abandoned puppies’ I will get squeamish and miss the point. There are pages and pages where nearly everything is throbbing or sweating or getting punched, eaten, licked, raped or shot to pieces. There are a lot of blood, guts and fleshy bits. I can barely think for the din of hungry stomachs rumbling.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The best and bravest

‘The candle is burning out and I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can ­— that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this — with the best news, which will also be the quickest. It is 50-to-1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud. Great love to you. Ever your loving, George. ‘ Thus wrote the magnificent (and in many ways muddle-headed) mountaineer George Mallory on 27 May 1924. It was his last ever letter to his wife Ruth before he disappeared into the blizzard that swirled around the summit of Mt Everest, never to return. Did he reach the top? That is a question that cannot conclusively be answered and Wade Davis doesn’t try to. Instead, in his quite brilliant new book, he applies himself to the question of why.

Vernon Bogdanor

Not lions, but ostriches

Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the colonisers. But that, surely, is a fallacy. For the British empire was, for most of its history, an elite project. There is little evidence that it ever enthused the British people, except perhaps in the decade following Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when Beatrice Webb found ‘all classes’ to be ‘drunk with the sightseeing and hysterical loyalty’.

Tony Gould

Fixing malaria

A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics. Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief of Time magazine and has ten years’ experience of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  He knows what happens on the ground, how small a fraction of charitable donations ever reaches the people it is intended to help; and he is not a fan of aid agencies, characterised here as ‘Western arrogance in a white SUV’. Perry’s hero is a man from New Jersey called Ray Chambers. Never heard of him?

John Julius-Norwich

Why didn’t I appreciate it more?

I should hesitate in any circumstances to compare myself with Marcel Proust; but on opening this marvellous book I knew exactly how he felt with that madeleine. My father was appointed Ambassador to France in 1944, moving in a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris; thus it was that from Christmas of that year — when I was 15 — and for the next three years I spent all my holidays at the Embassy. At that time, oddly enough, we had no other home; so it was there more than anywhere else that I felt I belonged.

Richard Shone

A lightning tour

In her foreword to this short study of Virginia Woolf,  Alexandra Harris writes that ‘it is meant as a first port of call for those new to Woolf and as an enticement to read more’. There is some justification for such a book — a synthesis giving the outline of Woolf’s life with pertinent interpretative commentary on the novels and other writings. While such an aim is not new, the book will inevitably reflect the concerns of the moment, the stamp of each generation’s particular interest. If this is so, the longer appeal of such a study is not necessarily guaranteed. Harris presents a Woolf for the early 21st century. Over the years, the variety of approaches to Virginia Woolf has been greater, perhaps, than for many another considerable figure.

James Booth

Fathers and sons

The ghost stalking this selection is Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley, who, Martin tells us in his introduction, ‘loved Philip with a near-physical passion’, and mused: ‘I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him.’ Ruth Bowman, to whom Philip Larkin was engaged in the late 1940s, remembers that Kingsley was ‘possessive of Philip and tried to keep me separate from him’. Kingsley always remained slightly offended by Larkin’s soft, feminine side, never understanding what the latter called ‘the dear passionately sentimental spinster that lurks within me’, and insisted that his friend be consistently masculine, abrasive, philistine. Martin Amis’s selection reflects his father’s version.

Cressida Connolly

Bookends: Squelch of the bladder-wrack

What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little essays that give the reader the gist of each place: if there’s a better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I’d like to see it. Lycett Green has written about front gardens and cottages, books full of interesting facts about history and buildings, conveyed in a pleasantly informal, even chatty, style. She also writes a column on unspoiled market towns and villages, which has already spawned one book, Unwrecked England. The present volume is along the same lines.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The Brilliance in the Room

It is difficult to conceive of a writer more passionately loved by his audience than Dickens was. It went on for a very long time, too. We learn from the historian David Kynaston that, immediately after the second world war, Dickens was one of the five most borrowed authors from public libraries. My grandmother was probably a typical reader of Dickens: she left school at 14 before the first world war, yet had a cheap set of Dickens in the house (I think it was a promotional giveaway by the Daily Express at some point in the 1930s.) I have the set — the typeface and the acid paper nearly make your eyes and fingers bleed. And yet she read most of them a lot more than once: the copy of David Copperfield falls apart as you open it.

Andrew Gimson

Work in progress

At long last Johnson Studies is starting to take off. It had always been my hope, after publishing my own slim volume on Boris Johnson, that the baton could be passed to younger and fitter hands who would place the subject on a proper academic footing. Scholars from Balliol to Bangor would churn out papers and hold seminars on the symbolism of the Boris bike, or the duel between Boris and George Osborne for the Tory leadership. Very soon the American and Chinese universities would insist on getting involved, and would buy up some of the best people. A young man from the University of Hull came to interview me for his thesis on the Cult of Boris, his idea being that Boris was developing into a minor divinity, of the kind so often worshipped in the ancient world.

Richard Davenporthines

Well-lived

‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. ‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. A little later Horne was being trained as a Guards officer at Pirbright camp, under a troop sergeant with terrifying powers of verbal demolition, well on his way into the pants of girls. One of Horne’s fellow cadets —heir to a dukedom — went to an Oxford cinema where he ‘partially lost his virtue’ to the ruthlessly roaming hands of ‘two beefy Land Girls who molested him from either side’ during a showing of Mrs Miniver.

James Mather

The radical imperialist

In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. A militia of several hundred barristers, equipped with muskets but doubtful aim, assembled to guard the Middle Temple.  At the 11th hour they were spared by the intervention of the army, whose firing into the crowd quelled the mayhem.

John Laughland

Deeply perplexing

This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only 49 returned to France. The book’s whimsical but ultimately uninformative title belies a book which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling. The first 150 pages deal with the women’s Resistance activities — attending secret meetings, arranging safe passage to the free zone, running clandestine printing presses. The second part is about their experiences in the camps.