More from Books

Saturday

Sam Leith

The bigger picture

Many among you, I know, have been fretting that thanks to a combination of political correctness, New Labour educational policy and the European Union’s usurpation of everything the free-born Englishman holds dear, big-picture narrative history is on the point of vanishing from the earth. All that our children’s children will know of British history, you worry, will be a vague sense of how beastly the Nazis were to Mary Seacole. Well, there is good news for you. Here are two new histories (of England, mind — not of Britain) by two of our best writers. Gosh, though. They could scarcely be more different. Peter Ackroyd’s is very long — or promises to be.

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Nothing left to lose

In chess, the king is never taken. When defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Or they are toppled and replaced by fresh leaders who sue for terms, like Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, Reynaud in 1940 and Mussolini in 1943. ‘Wars are finally decided’, Adolf Hitler told his military commanders in December 1944, ‘by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more.’ Yet Hitler himself was to be virtually the only exception to the rule, unless we count Saddam Hussein. At the time that he uttered these words Hitler was facing enemies on two fronts, each disposing of immeasurably greater forces than he could muster on all fronts combined.

Christopher Howse

What the eye don’t see

  Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein, a one-man art movement, intends to expose some of them in The Redstone Book of the Eye, a collection of almost 300 full-page pictures with very little commentary. It’s about seeing, and the eye is secondary, really, even though we are drawn to others’ eyes in daily conversation. Or in some cases we avoid eye-contact. In British culture this may signify guilt; in Caribbean culture it may signify deference. It is a pity to mistake the one for the other.

Andrew Rosenheim

A menacing corruption

E. L. Doctorow became an American household name with the publication of Ragtime in 1975. It was a jaunty book (later a successful movie) which lightened an American mood darkened by the lingering war in Vietnam. It benefited from having authentic historical figures — Harry Houdini and J. P. Morgan among them — interspersed with its fictional cast, a device that seemed a marvellous novelty at the time, though today it has become a wearingly common convention.   In this new collection of Doctorow’s short fiction, most of the stories are also set in America (with one exception), but the range of subjects is impressively eclectic.

Jason Goodwin

Sting in the tale

Bees are news. The advent of a sinister condition dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder has concentrated many minds on the future of the honey bee, not least in the US where the disorder is prevalent and pollination by bees accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce. Bees are news. The advent of a sinister condition dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder has concentrated many minds on the future of the honey bee, not least in the US where the disorder is prevalent and pollination by bees accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce. Over here, CCD isn’t officially a problem, but numbers appear to be down. Both these new bee books address the issues.

Harry Mount

An indispensable guide

It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. The small, southern county was chosen for the prosaic reason that it didn’t need much rationed fuel for research. His achievement still looks unlikely to be matched: 46 volumes in 23 years, most of them involving 2,000-mile road trips. It isn’t just Pevsner’s architectural scholarship that impresses in this meticulously researched biography, but his physical stamina, at a time when roadside hospitality was at its bleakest. Penguin paid for petrol, but contributed little towards food and accommodation.

Richard Davenporthines

When the great ship went down

The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank as it scraped the side of an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912, presents publishers with a tactical challenge. The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank as it scraped the side of an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912, presents publishers with a tactical challenge. Almost as many books and articles have been written about the stricken liner as about Jack the Ripper — and for the same reason. Like the Whitechapel murders, the deaths at sea of 1,517 souls created a media storm which has never abated.

A.N. Wilson

Worshippers at the high altar

What grabbed me about Newman and His Contemporaries was a puff from an Australian writer quoted on the back. This book, it said, ‘is like a Victorian Dance to the Music of Time’. Sounded like my kind of thing, especially since the central figure interlocking the characters is in this case not Widmerpool but that elusive, ethereal and indefinable figure, John Henry Newman. It is probably hard for a modern reader to grasp how important Newman was to his contemporaries. Since his beatification last summer, Newman will seem a little bit less real to many people, a bit more of a plaster saint. And it will be perhaps more difficult to recognise how important he was to those who did not share his faith, as well as to those who did.

Paul Binding

The father of songs

‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ ‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ The great German poet’s statement shows him as belonging to our own phase of Western civilisation. For us Orpheus — born probably a generation before Homer, who never once mentions him — is eminently a lover. His grief at his wife Eurydice’s death (generally ascribed to snake-bite) drove him to the Underworld itself, to find her and bring her back. His love for her made him accept the harsh injunction never to look at her during their return-journey — and, tragically, caused him also to disobey it.

Jonathan Mirsky

Ignorance is bliss

This novel frightened me several times. Here is how Chan Koonchung, brought up in Hong Kong but now living in Beijing, does it. He sets the story in a very near future, 2013, that closely resembles China today, but with two creepy additional elements: an entire month, during 2011, has vanished from most written records, and almost everyone feels happy all the time. In addition to not missing the vanished month, people no longer remember the Maoist persecutions, the 1959-1961 famine in which 45 million starved to death, and the Tiananmen killings. Chen, the novel’s central character, who has spent most of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but now lives in Beijing, was a moderately successful writer before he moved to China — and now can’t write a word.

Sara Wheeler

A new world in the making

Alexis de Tocqueville is a prophet for all seasons, continually reinterpreted as the zeitgeist shifts. He sailed to Jacksonian America to compile a report on the prison system, and ended up writing a meditation on the nature of democracy that remains in print after 160 years. In this latest addition to the fertile field of Tocquevillian studies, Arthur Kaledin analyses the Frenchman’s character and thought before, during and after his nine-month tour around the still partially formed USA. De Tocqueville set off in 1831 in the company of his friend Gustave de Beaumont.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends: The Jazz Baroness

She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her she was already known as the Jazz Baroness. By the age of 40, Nica had devoted herself to jazz and freed herself from the restrictive obligations of two illustrious banking dynasties. A generous Rothschild trust fund enabled her to live comfortably as an informal Lady Bountiful, nurturing her many needy friends among the jazz musicians of New York.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Laughing by the book

Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules (Faber & Faber, £14.99) by insisting that it is not a primer for would-be writers, but of course it is, and much more. Lynn was at Cambridge with the Pythons and the Goodies, co-wrote the Doctor series in the 1970s and Yes, Minister in the 1980s, and has since carved out a career directing comedy films in Hollywood, some of them funnier than others. But as Rule 138 (of 150) states, ‘Nobody knows how the audience will react to any play or film or joke.

Joanna Kavenna

Heroes of the Ice Age

In the early 20th century, explorers were goaded and galvanised by the blanks on the maps — the North and South Poles, and the mist-draped floes and glaciers around them. Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen set off with one prevailing purpose: to reach the extremities of the earth. Hardy, maniacal, even at times suicidal, they scattered ‘firsts’ and ‘furthests’ across the ice: the furthest south of Scott’s expedition of 1901-04, Shackleton’s furthest south of 1909, Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole in 1911.

Alexander Chancellor

The scandal that inspired La Dolce Vita

At about 5.15 p.m. on 9 April 1953, Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman of no account, leaves the three-room apartment in a northern suburb of Rome that she shares with her father, a carpenter, and five other members of the family and never returns. Thirty-six hours later her body is found by the edge of the sea at Torvaianica, a fishing village close to the capital. She is lying face down in the sand, wearing all her clothes apart from her shoes, her skirt, her stockings and her suspender belt, all of which are missing. She appears to have drowned. But why? Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Or could she have been murdered? There are no signs of violence to the body, so murder is not suspected. It is also difficult to conceive of a motive.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A well-told lie

Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old boy’s journey, alone among 600 passengers in an Orient Line ship, from Colombo to London in 1954 by way of Aden, Port Said and Gibraltar. The boy’s first name is the same as the author’s, and the circumstances are depicted so realistically one feels as though the two Michaels’ points of view are identical.

Allan Massie

The country of criticism

Karl Miller wrote a book called Doubles, exploring the duality of human nature, Jekyll and Hyde, and such like. Duality fascinates him. Another book was Cockburn’s Millennium, a study of the Scottish judge and autobiographer, an Edinburgh Reviewer, a figure so prominent in Edinburgh’s Golden Age that the society which sets out, not always successfully, to defend the urban heritage, takes its name from him. Cockburn, intensely sociable, was however never happier than when able to retire to his rural retreat on the slopes of the Pentland Hills. Miller himself, academic and journalist, founder of the London Review of Books, is a hard man to pin down.

Christopher Howse

Low life and high style

In 1977, Roy Kerridge was a lavatory cleaner; in 1979 he was a well-known contributor to The Spectator. Yet this was no rags-to-riches discovery of a literary talent. Apart from anything else Kerridge had perfected a line in second-hand clothes — a short sheepskin coat, a brown Dunn’s suit, pastel shirts — that fitted his own style: out of fashion and down at heel. After a busy decade in the 1980s we began to hear little from Kerridge. Had his star burnt out? In 1984, a slice of Roy Kerridge’s life in the 1970s appeared in The Lone Conformist. But he had travelled the same road 20 years earlier, and now his trajectory in the late 1950s from unqualified school-leaver to a darling of the New Statesman is told in Raised on Skiffle.

John Spurling

Deeper into Mervyn Peake

The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al — with more obvious contemporary relevance, Peake was beginning to suffer the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that killed him in 1968 at the age of 47.

Ed Smith

Delightfully not cricket

Even brilliantly accurate satirists can become boring unless they have something to say. That is the triumph of CrickiLeaks. Purporting to be a series of spoof Ashes diaries that reveal the innermost thoughts of famous English and Australian cricketers, CrickiLeaks doesn’t just superbly capture the players’ voices and vocabularies, it also makes them say surprising, hilarious things. Like a champion batsman, CrickiLeaks raises its game when the challenge is greatest. Consider the difficulty of taking on Geoff Boycott. Every cricket fan has heard dozens of decent imitations of Boycott’s thick Yorkshire accent and self-confident manner. How could a satirist put anything new into Boycott’s mouth?