More from Books

Saturday

Nicky Haslam

Fish and chaps

This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. It focuses on that singular decade between the years of rockers and punks, when toffs, freed from school or army uniforms, and toughs, discarding skinhead aggression, found a sartorial meeting point. This new style, the cool child of late Fifties mods, had been given a huge public oomph by the Beatles and ‘their silly little suits’ as David Bailey (who has stated that he, along with myself, was the unwitting originator of the look) succinctly puts it. It was sharper, leaner and hinted at androgeny. Its creators were no longer found in caverns down Carnaby Street, nor high in the King’s Road, but centered round that time-honoured dandy’s inferno, Savile Row.

John Gimlette

The world according to ants

The South American rain forest is the perfect environment for a dank, uncomfortable thriller. It’s brutally competitive; life is thrillingly vulnerable; you can’t safely touch or taste anything, and, beyond a few yards, you can see nothing at all. Even Amerindians are anxious in this environment, and credit it with all manner of horrors. In my own experience, it is, in every sense, a spine-tingling environment. So novelist Edward Docx has chosen well in the setting for his dark tale. It’s not a complex plot but there’s the constant feeling that you’re not seeing the whole picture, and that nothing is quite as it seems. Docx is a master of disquiet, and brilliantly captures the bewildering effect of the forest.

Douglas Hurd

Go out and govern New South Wales

‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. ‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. Straight-backed, grey-haired, he had the bright eye and bristled moustache of an ageing fox-terrier.’ Reading this, at the beginning of a chapter, we cannot be sure whether what follows will be Lytton Strachey or John Buchan. The tale might go either way. The letter might be either an invitation to shoot grouse or in answer to a summons to cope with a crisis threatening the British empire. The second guess would be right.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Bookends: A felicitous trouper

When, during rehearsals for a production of Lorca, Celia Imrie expressed an opinion about a bit of business, a fellow player said to her: ‘And what would you know about playing Lorca? You are nothing but a mere TV comedienne.’ She slapped the impertinent thespian’s face, and quite right too. Though proud to bill herself as ‘Light Ent’, Celia Imrie is more accurately a great comic actor, not only in Acorn Antiques and Coronation Street, but also in The School for Scandal and The Way of the World. When, during rehearsals for a production of Lorca, Celia Imrie expressed an opinion about a bit of business, a fellow player said to her: ‘And what would you know about playing Lorca? You are nothing but a mere TV comedienne.

Sam Leith

An existential hero

Sam Leith is enthralled by a masterpiece on monotony, but is devastated by its author’s death When David Foster Wallace took his own life two and a half years ago, we lost someone for whom I don’t think the word genius was an empty superlative. He was an overpowering stylist, and a dazzling comedian of ideas. He could be gasp-makingly funny, but had an agonising moral seriousness. There’s more on one page of Wallace than on ten of most of his contemporaries. His mind seemed to have more buzzing in it than the rest of us could imagine being able to cope with, and perhaps than he could. The Pale King, assembled from his notes and papers by his editor Michael Pietsch, is an unfinished novel of more than 500 pages about the American IRS.

Jonathan Mirsky

Pet obsession

I declare two interests. I own a dog, Lily, and I admire the New York Review of Books. What could go wrong? Especially because, according to the enthusiastic introduction, back in 1999, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, My Dog Tulip won golden opinions from its first publication in 1956, notably from Julian Huxley and E. M. Forster. (I must say I saw Forster almost daily in 1954—1955 during his short walks at Kings College, Cambridge and he didn’t have a dog.) As Thomas wrote, here is the memoir of an unremarkable, badly behaved dog that adored her master, who loved her in return. A ‘man of letters’, as they used to say, and a bachelor, Ackerley was a veteran of the Great War, scornful of women, with a timid maiden cousin with whom he sometimes stayed.

Charlotte Moore

In Di’s guise

What if Princess Diana hadn’t died, but, aided by her besotted press secretary, had faked her death and fled to America to live under an assumed identity? Is this an interesting question? Is a novelist justified in exploring such a supposition? I believe the answer to both questions is ‘no’. What if Princess Diana hadn’t died, but, aided by her besotted press secretary, had faked her death and fled to America to live under an assumed identity? Is this an interesting question? Is a novelist justified in exploring such a supposition? I believe the answer to both questions is ‘no’. In writing Untold Story, Monica Ali has made a serious mistake. Ali relocates Diana, ten years on, to a dull American town called Kensington (geddit?).

Nicola Shulman

King of spin

Draw two two-inch triangles, tip to tip, one on top of the other. A little way down the left flank of the upper triangle, take a perpendicular line out to an inch, then turn your pencil at a right angle and continue another inch. Repeat on the other side. Next, draw two short, splayed lines down from the base of the lower triangle. Finally, put an acute accent, an inch long, about two inches above the whole. What have you got? According to Dr David Starkey, who performs this trick at schools all over the country, Henry VIII in 13 lines. Apparently he is recognisable in this form as far afield as Japan, America, and even France. Each generation makes history in its own image and we, preoccupied with spin and profile-management, are impressed anew with Henry for his genius in this field.

Quentin Letts

Slippery Jack

A mad, muscular Sally Bercow cavorts on the Commons chair, diminutive husband on her knee, his features impish. With a few scratches of the nib, the Independent’s merciless Dan Brown, in his cover design for this biography, passes judgment more viciously than Bobby Friedman manages over the next 250 often unexciting pages. The book is not entirely without merit. It is earnest in the manner of a schoolgirl’s essay. There are not too many spelling mistakes. The author has plainly made scores of telephone calls to old acquaintances of the man we must now, revoltingly, call Mr Speaker. Friedman deserves a B-plus for effort. His book is not, however, as vivid as it should have been, given the preening, sycophantic, short-tempered grotesque it has for a subject.

Philip Ziegler

A fate worse than death

Hugo Vickers has already produced a well-documented and balanced biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. To follow this with the Duchess of Windsor is as bold a left-and-right as one could ask for; like writing biographies of Shylock and Antonio or Cain and Abel. ‘I will go to my grave,’ wrote the lady-in-waiting Frances Campbell-Preston, ‘trying to convince people that the Queen Mother did not hate the Duchess of Windsor.’ ‘Hate’ is a strong word; but the Duchess certainly hated the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth was as much as anyone responsible for the fact that the Duchess was never fully accepted by the royal family. The subtitle to Vickers’s new book is at first sight surprising.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Bookends: The last laugh

In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), the 45 stagiaires who labour in Ferran Adria’s kitchen for a season in the hope of sharing in the magic. Ferran, you see, is no mere cook. With him, ‘hot turns into cold, sweet into savoury, solid into liquid or air’. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’.

Philip Hensher

Great among the nations

The King James Bible, while uniting the English-speaking world, gave birth to centuries of radicalism and Dissent. On its 400th anniversary, Philip Hensher examines the translation’s legacy Considered as a book, the Bible is far too long. Its characterisation is not all it should be: its hero, God, seems totally inconsistent, varying from a prankster with a bizarre sense of humour (Job) to a sensible dispenser of advice. You can’t help feeling that it is really rather patchy in quality: some of it is wonderfully entertaining, such as the Acts of the Apostles and the two Books of Kings, but some of it doesn’t seem to be interested in entertaining the reader one bit. (Look at the difference between the stonking first line of Kings and the droning way Chronicles kicks off.

Claudia FitzHerbert

Cuckoo in the nest

Caradoc King, the well-known literary agent, was adopted in 1948 as a baby into a family of three girls, shortly joined by a fourth, presided over by a difficult, unhappy mother and her feebly adoring husband. He grew up unaware of the adoption and has never discovered its motive. His adoptive mother, Jill, the moving spirit behind every family decision, may have simply longed for a boy. If so, she was singularly ill-prepared for standard boyish delinquencies. Young Carodoc liked playing with matches, embroidering the truth, and inspecting — in a spirit of scientific enquiry — the private parts of his younger sister.

Mark Mason

The wisdom of youth

‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. ‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. Fortunately P. Y. Betts, briefly a novelist in the 1930s, was 50 years later persuaded to do just that. Even more fortunately, her memories, now republished, are golddust. Betts was born in Wandsworth in 1909, meaning that many of the ‘people who say goodbye’ were saying hello to the trenches. Also, several of her childhood friends died of now treatable diseases.

Sebastian Smee

Whatever next?

Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Lovely to look at, the town is too small and insecure to be thought of as adult. In fact, it’s uncomfortably adolescent — a skittish concoction of class tension, shifting demographics and unwitting self-sabotage. The novel is full of unexpected turns. It’s also brilliant, sustained and weirdly captivating.

Colin Amery

Rather in the lurch

Will it ever end? The romantic interest in the architecture, history and life lived in the country house is as alive today as it was in 1978, when Mark Girouard wrote his seminal Life in the English Country House. There are now some three million members of the National Trust — guardians of the flame of country-house life that still just flickers in its teashops. The path to an instant peerage is along the passages of the imaginary Downton Abbey, and feudal splendour is still the dream destination of hedge-fund millionaires. How much is the dream driven by aesthetics, how much by nostalgia and how much by a fascination with social history?

Richard Davenporthines

Kill or cure

Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’. Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’. Scorching dismissals and mordant discomforting truths have been flowing ever since from the novelist, Oscar-winning scriptwriter, playwright, classicist and critic, who will turn 80 later this year. Some of his most enduring work only began to appear in 2001, when Raphael published the earliest extracts from the working notebooks that he began compiling as a teenager.

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction

Henning Mankell bestrides the landscape of Scandavian crime fiction like a despondent colossus. Last year’s The Man from Beijing, was a disappointing stand-alone thriller with too much polemical baggage. His new novel, The Troubled Man (Harvill Secker, £17.99), brings the return of his series hero, Inspector Kurt Wallender. The title says it all: now that he’s 60, Wallender’s trademark gloom is darkened still further by the creeping fear that his memory is no longer what it used to be, and that this is the first symptom of a far more serious condition. In the first few chapters, he also faces disciplinary action, breaks his wrist and gets mugged.

Fiona Maddocks

Hungarian rhapsody

Time was, or perhaps still is, though my friends long ago learned to behave, that a cutesy gift to musical acquaintances was a long, narrow notepad with the words ‘Chopin Liszt’ printed at the top and decorated with clefs and notes, free-floating and unplayable without a stave to anchor them. Stories from a Book of Liszts by John Spurling, read by Jonathan Keeble and Jilly Bond; piano played by János Balázs (Chrome Audio, 3CDs, 3hrs 16mins, £ 17.99, www.chromemedia.co.

Catherine Nixey

A choice of first novels

Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of a man on perhaps his darkest day: the day on which the police arrive at his door to tell him his son has just died of tuberculosis in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea. Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of a man on perhaps his darkest day: the day on which the police arrive at his door to tell him his son has just died of tuberculosis in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea.