More from Books

Saturday

Francis King

Miracles of compression

In the course of a lifetime of fiction reviewing, I have come to the conclusion that, though my colleagues are prepared doggedly to persevere with the reading of a novel from its muddled opening to its inconsequential end, they will read no more than four or five stories in a collection. What always guides them in this lazy choice is that one of the favoured stories will be the title one and another the most substantial. Since the title story is also the most substantial — in effect a novella — in Allan Massie’s Klaus, one can be absolutely certain that it will be the one on which every reviewer, including myself, chiefly concentrates.

Alexander Chancellor

Red badge of courage

The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up. The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up. The autobiography is of the stammering, sensitive figure of Roy Kerridge, the victim as a child of horrifying domestic circumstances.

Saturday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Self-help guide

P. J. O’Rourke is what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men. P. J. O’Rourke is what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men. Instead of sour-faced curmudgeons bleating that ‘politics is just a load of crap’, you get a succession of amusing and incisive observations about why politics is a load of crap. And his solution is that we should stop looking for solutions — from politics, that is. For the real solution, we need to look in the mirror. In his latest book, Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards (Grove/Atlantic, £16.99), O’Rourke’s humour is used to advance arguments (‘the government is taking a third of your pay ... is the government doing a third of your dishes?

William Feaver

Another form of segregation

N.B. This review was published without its final two paragraphs in the 18th December 2010 issue of The Spectator. These paragraphs have been reinstated for the online version below. These volumes — four for now, and a further six to come — are saddled with a title redolent of lantern lectures delivered in Godalming, say, round about the time that Rorke’s Drift became legendary overnight. The Image of the Black suggests people, or things, of a certain stamp. Penny blacks, so to speak: picked out with tweezers, profiles raised, their blackness being their distinction, their black face value assessed within the swelling majesty of Western Art.

David Sexton

From red giant to white dwarf

Richard Cohen, who was a publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder before moving to New York where he now teaches Creative Writing, is the author of one previous book: By the Sword: Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions (2002). This comprehensive history drew on his deep, personal knowledge of the subject, for Cohen was five times the British national sabre champion, selected for the Olympic team every time between 1972 and 1984. Its illustrations include a superb shot of the author flying through the air sideways, executing a ‘horizontal fleche’ against Dom Philip Jebb at Downside Abbey. Chasing the Sun is even more ambitious.

Rupert Christiansen

The wow factor

‘Nothing succeeds like excess,’ quipped Oscar Wilde, and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Aida at La Scala, Milan in 2006 bears him out: for sheer jaw-dropping, applause- garnering theatrical bling, I have never seen anything like it and I doubt I ever will. ‘Nothing succeeds like excess,’ quipped Oscar Wilde, and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Aida at La Scala, Milan in 2006 bears him out: for sheer jaw-dropping, applause- garnering theatrical bling, I have never seen anything like it and I doubt I ever will. People talk of empty spectacle, but this was full, full to the brim, exploding with colour, glittering with gilt, and jam-packed with near-naked extras.

Andrew McKie

A right song and dance

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. It was 42nd Street. The geography is confusing, but so is the history, and indeed the nomenclature. For 42nd Street was not, of course, a Broadway musical, but a musical film made in 1933, based on a novel about life backstage at a Broadway theatre, with staged setpieces — notably the title song — in Hollywood’s version of the style of Broadway musical theatre.

Susan Hill

M. R. James’s dark world

M. R. James died at peace with himself and the world. We can be reasonably confident in claiming that after reading about his last weeks, during which he was ill, tired, weak and bored but probably not in pain, and even more on learning what his sister Grace said of his final days. During the tedious weeks of illness a group of Monty’s closest friends had made him the present of ‘a radio- gramophone of the latest type’ and he had taken to it immediately. Grace wrote: The radiogram proved such a pleasure to him and I can see him now after dinner … listening so intently, with his pipe in his mouth and matches strewn around.

Bevis Hillier

Exotica, erotica, esoterica . . .

The humorist Paul Jennings suggested that book reviewers could be divided into five vowel-coded groups: batchers, betjers (‘Betjer I could have written this better than him/her’), bitchers, botchers and butchers. In this review of the year’s art books, I am primarily a batcher — dealing with several books at one go. But from time to time I shall take leave to be a bitcher, though not, I hope, a botcher or butcher. Two books stand out from the batch as absolute stars. Both are published by Prestel, a Munich-based publisher with tentacles in Berlin, London and New York. I am afraid either of the books will cost you £80, but they are value for money.

Margaret Drabble

Mysteries and hauntings

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. All is not as pleasant as at first it seems, of course, and we soon enter his characteristically darker world of voyeurism, jealousy, revenge, doppelgängers and crime passionel.

Anne Chisholm

Lessons for life

All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. This development is routinely ascribed to the new frankness with which Michael Holroyd re-invented the genre in the late 1960s with his biography of Lytton Strachey, who had himself revitalised it 50 years earlier with his subversive portraits of Eminent Victorians.

David Crane

A lore unto himself

Barry Hills has never been an easy man to love but I don’t suppose he would have it any other way. Barry Hills has never been an easy man to love but I don’t suppose he would have it any other way. There are certain trainers who capture the public imagination and affection, but the same crowds who regularly dissolve into tears at the sight of a Henry Cecil winner would no more dream of intruding on Barry Hills than would a punter dare ignore a horse of his at the Chester May meeting. Respect, admiration, a certain wary apprehension, these are what ‘Mr Grumpy’ has always demanded of the world, and ‘hard’, ‘brave’, ‘professional’, ‘exacting’ and ‘combustible’ the terms in which he is most often described.

Saturday

Simon Baker

BOOKENDS: In the bleak midwinter

Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences.

Philip Hensher

Classic makeover

Philip Hensher finds Flaubert’s scorn for his characters relieved by hilarity Astonishingly, this is the 20th time Madame Bovary has been translated into English. I say ‘astonishing’ because, as everyone knows, great novels in foreign languages tend to get done once, if at all. Most of Theodore Fontane has never been translated, or Jean-Paul, or Stifter; only in the last few years have the antique H. T. Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann been superseded, and if you want to read most of Balzac’s immense work you will have to resort to 19th-century collected editions. Couldn’t one of those translators or publishers have turned their attention instead to Balzac’s Louis Lambert, a novel Flaubert himself loved?

Mary Keen

Pretty maids all in a row

It is received gardening wisdom that men tend lawns and women plant flowers. This is a good year to see how two exceptional writers on gardens live up to that definition. Our top horticultural columnists, Anna Pavord of the Independent and Robin Lane Fox of the Financial Times, have both published elegant and witty collections of journalism in 2010. Lane Fox’s Thoughtful Gardening (Particular Books, £25) has already been reviewed in The Spectator. For the purposes of male/ female comparison I can record that Lane Fox writes that flower gardening is what interests him, which makes a nonsense of received wisdom. He does not appear to mow much, but he is mad about killing weeds, bugs, badgers and foxes. In the Lane Fox plot it is a constant war on wildlife.

Andrew Rosenheim

Bad enemy, worse lover

Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. It’s less likely to boost his reputation as a man. Bellow was never humble about his talents, and the surviving early letters show an intellectual precocity leavened by the vernacular of melting-pot Chicago. Yet initially he was reluctant to plumb home-grown strengths for his work.

Fay Maschler

Wonders of the world’s fare

It was a slender hope, a moment of lunacy really, but I picked up Reinventing Food – Ferran Adrià: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat by Colman Andrews (Phaidon, £19.95) thinking that the improbable claim in the subtitle might in future serve to stem, or anyway divert, the tide of cookery books published every year. So remorseless is it that we now expect — and get — Christmas ‘annuals’. (In 2010 the best by far of the adult cook’s version of Dandy or Oor Wullie is Nigel Slater’s Tender, Volume II: A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden (HarperCollins, £30).

Marcus Berkmann

Perfectly inconsequential

At this stressful time of year, it is important to note the distinction between Christmas ‘funny’ books and Christmas ‘quirky’ books. Funnies we know only too well, mainly from the sinking feeling most of us experience when unwrapping one on Christmas morning. Quirkies are a more recent development, trading less on jokes and merriment than on oddness, silly facts, curious stories and generalised eccentricity. ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing,’ said Truman Capote of Jack Kerouac. Many of these books are just downloading. But a few are worth your while. The latest from the all-conquering QI franchise is The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (Faber, £12.99).

Jane Ridley

Mastering the k-word

The film The King’s Speech, which is due to appear in the UK in January, tells the story of George VI’s struggle to overcome his stammer. The film The King’s Speech, which is due to appear in the UK in January, tells the story of George VI’s struggle to overcome his stammer. The speech therapist who cured the King was an Australian called Lionel Logue, and Mark Logue is his grandson. This book grew out of the researches that he began when the film-makers approached him for information. Lionel Logue was an amateur actor and elocution teacher who made a career teaching Australians how to speak correctly, back in the long vanished days when they were ashamed of their lazy diction and half-open mouths.