More from Books

Saturday

Michael Henderson

The great game

Some of the best writing about sport in recent years has been done by journalists who tend their soil, so to speak, in another parish. Peter Oborne’s biography of the Cape Town-born England cricketer Basil D’Oliveira was a deserved prize-winner, and another political scribe, Leo McKinstry, has done justice to Geoffrey Boycott, the Charlton brothers and Sir Alf Ramsey. Now he has turned his attention to a batsman whose career, measured in statistics, goes a long way to justifying the subtitle of this latest book, ‘England’s Greatest Cricketer’. Born in a modest Cambridge home, admired by all who played with him for his decency as well as his skill at the crease, Hobbs was the first professional cricketer to be knighted.

Michael Jacobs

Relics of old Castile

Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. He has certainly written one of the strangest books on the country in recent years. His approach is gloriously and provocatively unfashionable. Whereas other authors on Spain today might dwell on its innovative new chefs, the modernity of Barcelona and Bilbao, the tawdry Costa del Sol, and such persistent Andalucían-based stereotypes as duende, bullfighting and Moorish sensuality, Howse has concentrated on an aspect of the country that was once no less integral to its image — its austere and spiritual side.

David Crane

The price of victory

In the patriotic mythology of British arms 1759 may be the one true annus mirabilis, the ‘year of victories’, the year of Minden, Quebec and Quiberon Bay, but has there ever been a year comparable to 1918? In that year 20,000 British soldiers surrendered on a single day, 31 March, and yet within six months Britain and her allies had recaptured all the territory lost since 1914, destroyed Austrian and Bulgarian resistance in Italy and Macedonia, encircled a Turkish army in Palestine, mastered the submarine menace at sea, and fought the German army to the brink of disintegration and the German empire to the point of revolt.

Saturday

Colin Amery

Bookends: Bloodbath

It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath (£12) remains a real shocker. The fury of his polemic against the powers in Bath that seemed hell-bent on destroying everything except a few grand Georgian set- pieces in that beautiful city still has a terrible relevance today. It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath (£12) remains a real shocker. The fury of his polemic against the powers in Bath that seemed hell-bent on destroying everything except a few grand Georgian set- pieces in that beautiful city still has a terrible relevance today.

Philip Hensher

Honour the most exalted poet

What’s your punishment going to be, when you get to Hell? At least as envisaged by Dante, you might be somewhat surprised. Hitler (mass murderer) is in the outer ring of the seventh circle, up to his eyebrows in a river of blood and fire. Still, that’s a little better than the innocent manager of your local HSBC (banker), who is in the inner ring, running perpetually on burning sand. Both get off much lighter than the poor lady who, the other day, told me how much she’d enjoyed something or other I’d written (flatterer). She’s a whole circle lower down in the second bolgia, or pit, sitting in excrement forever, which seems rather harsh. Corrupt politicians are immersed in boiling pitch, but they are nowhere near as far down as the impersonators.

Rupert Christiansen

Hall of mirrors

After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. Alan Riding’s new study of the episode forcefully reminds one that it was never that simple: objectively researched and soberly balanced though the book is, navigating its moral maze leaves one queasy with mixed feelings.

Judith Flanders

Pearls before swine

The story of Harry the Valet is the stuff of fiction. He was a dazzlingly adept, smooth, glamorous jewel thief, who never stooped to petty crime but carried off the kind of robberies more commonly found in novels and films: huge ruby necklaces, diamonds and pearls all poured out, pirate-treasure fashion, into his waiting hands. The Valet was the son of a successful lower-middle-class tradesman, a picture-framer, who died when he was a young man, leaving his widow to carry on his business, unsuccessfully. Harry meanwhile bet on horses, drank and smoked and revelled in bad company, soon finding himself with no money and no profession. He took the easy way out, deciding to steal a living, rather than earn one.

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 4 June 2011

Mo Hayder has a considerable and well-deserved reputation as a writer of horrific crime novels that often revolve around the physical violence men do to women. Her latest, Hanging Hill (Bantam, £18.99), is no exception. Set in Bath, it’s the story of two estranged sisters — Zoe, a detective inspector equipped with a motorbike and a welter of scars, both physical and emotional; and Sally, the divorced mother of a teenage girl, who is struggling to cope with her vertiginous plunge from the agreeable plateau inhabited by Bath’s affluent middle classes. The narrative moves alternately between the sisters’ lives and the impact that the murder of a beautiful teenage girl has upon them.

Ian Thomson

Deep, dark mysteries

For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure. London Under, his brief account of the capital’s catacombs and other murky zones, manages to radiate a dark mystery and sulphur reek. ‘There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground’, Ackroyd announces, like a Victorian raree-show merchant. This is an entertaining if slightly daft book, that reveals what a weird world lies beneath our feet. Whether Ackroyd has actually been to all the places he describes is uncertain. Journalists have contorted themselves through narrow, stinking cave-galleries and risked leptospirosis from rat urine in their quest for London subterranea. But the stately Ackroyd? The London sewers are vividly described here.

Andro Linklater

‘I told them’

No messenger bearing bad news can expect to be popular. But to be dis- believed as well adds a particularly bitter twist, since the messenger’s character can only be vindicated by proving the truth of his horrific message. That was Jan Karski’s fate. He was the Polish resistance fighter sent to London in 1942 to tell the world that the Jews in Poland were being exterminated. Not in their hundreds, not in their thousands, but in their millions.There would be none left, Karski reported, unless the Allies publicly promised a retaliation sufficiently terrible to halt the Nazis in their tracks.

James Hamilton

A catastrophe waiting to happen

Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. The subtitle of the book is quite accurate. Vesuvius probably is the most famous volcano in the world, because unlike all others it has attracted for some 2,000 years multifarious extraordinary people to study it. Darley enumerates these in their legions, showing that Pliny the Younger, writing after the 79 AD eruption, was not the first.

Anthony Cummins

We are the past

Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). The Monument is rubble, Tower Bridge has ‘long gone’ and scavengers are chopping fingers off frozen bodies to snatch rings. Our narrator can’t remember much — two thirds of the book pass before we find out her name is Izzy — but a couple of randy fellow vagrants claim to know her, and some children say she’s their mum. By the time one of them ‘lifts off the ground and comes flying through the air’ — and vanishes — we’re not sure what to believe.

William Leith

Speak, Memory

One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. But he sees that a man called Ben Pridmore is the world’s ‘memory champion’. Foer is instantly intrigued. He himself has, he says, an average memory. He forgets lots of things — where he put his keys, for instance. And his girlfriend’s birthday. And Valentine’s day. Foer wonders what it would be like to be a memory champion.

Ferdinand Mount

Elegy for wild Wales

If you drive West out of Carmarthen on the A40, you pass through a landscape of dimpled hills and lonely chapels and little rivers full of salmon trout. This is Byron’s Country, the place where Byron Rogers was brought up in the late Forties, not knowing a word of English, until at the age of five he made the momentous journey a few miles east into Carmarthen town. It is a very odd place. In the graveyard at Cana, just beside the road, you will find the grave of Group Captain Ira Jones DSO, MC, DFC and bar, MM, one of Wales’s greatest war heroes. He was famous for killing Germans who had baled out and were dangling from their parachutes.

Saturday

Interconnect

Bookends | 28 May 2011

In the summer of 2003, in a bar in Malta, George Best was approached by a man holding a paper napkin and a pen. ‘It’s been my childhood dream,’ said the man, ‘to have George Best ask me for my autograph.’ Best obliged. As so often, his fame was so great that it turned normality upside down. The star’s own phrase was that fame ‘turns the dial up’. He may have been associated more with another f-word, but what comes across most strongly in Celia Walden’s excellent account of her time as Best’s journalistic minder (Babysitting George, Bloomsbury, £16.99) is the role in his story of public recognition.

Peter Parker

Goodbye to Berlin

Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and outspoken critic of the Nazis, and so forced to leave Germany in February 1933. He was based for several years in the south of France, while travelling around the world to denounce the regime he had left behind, and he eventually emigrated to America in 1940, settling in Los Angeles. Unlike many European emigrants who thrived in the Californian sun, Mann did not adapt well to transplantation.

Charlotte Moore

All shook up

Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Kit, painter of meretricious society portraits, has whisked Alice, his younger, pregnant girlfriend, off to Jordan for an indulgent weekend. Their car skids off a mountain road leaving Alice trapped inside. Kit behaves like an unheroic imperialist. ‘You bloody little man, Karim!’, he yells at the driver, but it is Karim who reminds him that they ought to be aiding Alice. They are rescued, but not all the artifice of a luxury hotel can prevent Alice’s miscarriage. Blood pours out of her ‘as if she were a vase, carelessly knocked over on a table.’ Glazebrook is good with similes.

Anthony Daniels

The mind’s I

The quasi-religious zeal with which certain popularising neuroscientists claim that man is no different, essentially, from the animals, and that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon, strikes me as distinctly odd. The popularisers seem to take a sado-masochistic delight in it, in the way that some people get a thrill from envisaging the end of the world. They also seem to imply that we now understand almost everything about ourselves, apart from a few odd details to be filled in by ever-more-sophisticated scanners. In other words, man has finally come to understand himself. Here is an addition to the fast-growing genre of books that claim scientific authority for the idea that we are, at base, not much different from the bacteria.

Anne Chisholm

What did you do in the war, Mummy?

By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. In this ambitious, humane and absorbing book Virginia Nicholson moves Mummy firmly to the centre of the stage as she chronicles, largely in their own words, the lives of British women during the second world war. It is dedicated to one of them, her own mother, Anne Popham, later Anne Olivier Bell, who as a young woman suffered agonising wartime loss but went on to marry and become one of the great editors of her time through her work on the diaries of her husband’s aunt (and Nicholson’s great-aunt) Virginia Woolf. Nicholson sees her as typical.

Richard Davenporthines

Victorian rough and tumble

Derby Day is meticulously plotted and written with bouncy confidence. It tells the story of a sordid, conniving rascal called Happerton who plots a betting swindle for a Derby of the 1860s. He marries the colourless but near-sociopathic daughter of a rich attorney, and cheats on her without noticing the intensity of her passion for him. The couple sedate the old man, reduce him to his dotage and raid his savings. Happerton also masterminds a raid on the strong-room of a City jewellers — echoes here of the jewellery raid in Taylor’s previous novel, At the Chime of a City Clock.