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Saturday

William Waldegrave

Almost a great man

Of those prime ministers whom the old grammar schools escalator propelled from the bottom to the top of British society since the second world war, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher were in many ways the most alike. Wilson, that classic greasy-pole climber, tactically brilliant, strategically trivial; Major, decent, straightforward, a good man lifted to power on the shoulders of his many friends as a healer who could unite: both these are types, the one less admirable than the other, but familiar to history. Heath and Thatcher are much odder, more dangerous and more remarkable. It is an extraordinary tribute to the modern Conservative Party that both chose it as the instrument through which to try to deliver their radical visions — as it is to the party that it chose them.

John Preston

Odd men out

The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. One player turned up wearing pyjamas, another held the bat the wrong way round while a third — a Frenchman — thought the game had finished every time the umpire called ‘Over’. The Allahakbarries were skittled out for just 11 runs and under the circumstances it seemed entirely appropriate that the team’s name should have been derived from the Moorish phrase for ‘Heaven Help Us’. However, the team’s captain, the playwright, J. M.

Francis King

Not as sweet as he seemed

There are already three biographies of E. M. Forster: P. N. Furbank’s two- volume, authorised heavyweight; Nicola Beauman’s less compendious, more engaging middleweight; and my own bantamweight, little more than an extended essay. There are already three biographies of E. M. Forster: P. N. Furbank’s two- volume, authorised heavyweight; Nicola Beauman’s less compendious, more engaging middleweight; and my own bantamweight, little more than an extended essay. For readers who want a coherent, psychologically penetrating, well-written account of the life, with a minimum of critical analysis, this new biography is the one that I now recommend. Most people would regard the writing of his novels as the dominant preoccupation of Forster’s life.

Diana Hendry

The loss of innocents

Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Rachel Billington’s Missing Boy is Dan, a 13-year- old runaway. Dan’s disappearance marks the beginning of a nightmare for his parents, Eve and Max, plus aunt Martha. Has Dan run away or has he been kidnapped? Will he be found? The if, where and how are the questions that torment them. As Ronnie, the police liaison officer puts it, though families vary, when there’s a missing child the suffering is always the same, a pattern of ‘disbelief, anger, terror, despair, endurance.

Chris Mullin

Keeping the lid on

For all of the nine years that he worked, first as official spokesman for Tony Blair and then as Director of Communications for the government, Alastair Campbell was obliged to defend a huge lie: that all was well at the heart of the New Labour project when, manifestly, it was not. Gradually, as the years passed, the tensions surfaced and whispers that something was amiss reached the outside world, but by and large — and in no small measure due to the extraordinary resilience of Blair and Campbell — the lid was kept on. Until now. The fault lines are apparent from the outset. This volume covers the three years from the day of John Smith’s death on 12 May 1994 to the triumphal progress to Downing Street on 1 May 1997.

Colin Amery

Flights of futuristic fantasy

The Great Court of the British Museum is a good place to start. Norman Foster brought light into the wonderfully elegant and inspiring glazed space at the heart of the museum where there had been nothing but greyness around the domed Reading Room. It also put Lord Foster of Thames Bank OM at the heart of the British cultural establishment. Why don’t we know more about him? His creative achievement is enormous. He is 75 this year and his firm grows, employing over 1,000 people in 25 offices around the world. His clients include rulers of Middle Eastern oil rich states; the President of Kazakhstan; Commander Chen, responsible for all the new airports in China; Swiss banks and Russian oligarchs.

Dan Jones

A rather orthodox doxy

‘His cursed concubine.’ That was the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys’ judgment on Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. ‘His cursed concubine.’ That was the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys’ judgment on Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. And that was mild. The abbot of Whitby called Anne a ‘common stud whore’. The judge Sir John Spelman noted during her trial that ‘there never was such a whore in the realm’. And, of course, Henry VIII beheaded her. Anne, rather like our own Diana, caught some heavy flak for having a sexy reputation.

Oliver Marre

Whither America?

At the beginning of The Ask, Horace sits with Burke and proclaims that America is a ‘run down and demented pimp’. At the beginning of The Ask, Horace sits with Burke and proclaims that America is a ‘run down and demented pimp’. Horace is not Quintus Horatius Flac- cus; and Burke is not Edmund Burke. The two men are employees of the fundraising department of a mediocre university in New York, whose job is to approach the rich families of former students and solicit donations. This is, of course, a peculiarly American job, where the super-rich are relied upon to finance academe in exchange for favours bestowed on their offspring. At least, that’s the version of private college funding put across by Sam Lipsyte.

Cressida Connolly

Out for blood

Unless you have spent the last couple of years packed in soil on a boat bound for Whitby, you will have noticed that vampires are back in fashion. It’s an international craze, with Japanese and Swedish films (notably the marvellously quirky Let the Right One In, now being remade in Hollywood) contributing fresh interpretations. The queen of the vampire scene was, until lately, the darkly baroque Anne Rice, author of Interview With a Vampire. Now her crown has gone to Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series, about teen vampires, have sold more than 100 million copies throughout the globe, as well as being made into hugely popular films.

Saturday

Sam Leith

The inconstant gardener

In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. A whiskery Prussian princeling with a heavily indebted estate and a passion for landscape gardening, Pückler had come to England determined to find a wife. This was not a romantic project, however. English women were celebrated on the continent not only for their beauty — the perpetual damp was said to do wonders for their skin — but for their prosperity.

Caroline Moore

Stuff and nonsense

Yann Martel’s second novel, The Life of Pi, a fable with animals, won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was translated into 38 languages. Yann Martel’s second novel, The Life of Pi, a fable with animals, won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was translated into 38 languages. The narrator of Beatrice and Virgil, who lives, like Martel, in Canada, hit the literary jackpot with his second novel, a fable with animals. A self-referential layer can be assumed. Since his success, the narrator, Henry, has tried to write a ‘flip book’ about the Holocaust: two back-to-back books in one volume, which can be read either from the front or the back, part fiction and part an historical essay.

A.N. Wilson

Sun Myung Moon among the stars

Where would the popes, presidents and princesses of the world be without Paul Johnson, the former editor of the New Statesman, and much loved columnist in this and other periodicals? As his latest book shows, he is an all but indispensable asset, a social equivalent of the Admirable Crichton. Take Kenneth Kaunda, for example, President of what was Northern Rhodesia. Paul writes: ‘I came across [him] at Salisbury Airport, where he was in difficulties with the authorities. I managed to extricate him and we flew to Lusaka together’. Phew! Stephen Spender was distressed by some remarks made about him in an American publication: I wrote a piece in The Spectator, expressing the book’s faults, and as a result the plan for an English edition was dropped.

Allan Massie

In the house of Hanover

Either Lucy Worsley or, more probably, her publisher has given her book the subtitle ‘The Secret History of Kensington Palace.’ This is enticing, or intended to be so; it is also misleading. Either Lucy Worsley or, more probably, her publisher has given her book the subtitle ‘The Secret History of Kensington Palace.’ This is enticing, or intended to be so; it is also misleading. There is no secret history, and the subject of this well researched and entertaining book is life at the court of the first two Georges, life which went on also at St James’s Palace and indeed Leicester House, where George II lived as Prince of Wales, as did his son Frederick later.

Kate Grimond

Turning up trumps

If you think that a room full of solemn people in groups of four play- ing duplicate bridge is deeply depressing, then this young-adult novel is not for you. If, on the other hand, that array of concentrated brows fills you with an urge to compete, then you may derive some pleasure from it. And if you are a keen player unable to convince your teenage children of the merit of the game, then you might consider this a useful present. Lester Trapp, a brilliant bridge-player, now blind, requires a cardturner to speak out the cards for him at his bridge club. He asks his nephew, Alton, a high-school boy looking for a summer job. This being America, the nephew has a licence and a car and, in a laid back way, is content to drive his elderly uncle to his club and help him out.

Peter Jay

Athene ruled the waves

One thing is certain: George W. Bush was no Pericles. For which reason it is a pity that John Hale’s new history of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is launched with a rhetoric more Texan than Attic. The ancient Greeks knew that building a navy was an undertaking with clear-cut political consequences. A naval tradition that depended on the muscles and sweat of the masses led inevitably to democracy: from sea power to democratic power. Athens was exhibit A in this argument, and radical democracy would indeed be the Athenian navy’s greatest legacy.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Not every aspect pleases

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it. Since then, landscape history has become a major subject. So has media and political interest in what we are doing to it. In addition, another subject has come up in the shape of ‘man-made climate change’.

Christopher Howse

Fathoming the wine-dark sea

Gladstone found something very strange indeed in Homer, but the world was treating the future prime minister warily when he published his findings. It was 1858, the year he sailed off to the Ionian Islands as ruling commissioner, to address his puzzled Italian-speaking subjects in classical Greek. But even if Gladstone really was mad, as his political opponents said, he was undeniably right in noting that Homer’s use of colour was deeply odd. It wasn’t just the ‘wine-dark sea’. That epithet oinops, ‘wine-looking’ (the version ‘wine-dark’ came from Andrew Lang’s later translation) was applied both to the sea and to oxen, and it was accompanied by other colours just as nonsensical.

Edward Norman

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Two hundred years ago Jeremy Bentham wrote a tract which purported to demonstrate that the Christian religion was in effect manufactured by St Paul and not by Jesus. This was actually quite a common ploy at the time: a means by which freethinkers could assail Christian tenets without being prosecuted. And because St Paul’s writings occupy such prominence in the New Testament, and are plainly a major authority for so much Christian theology and understanding, there was reason well in excess of mere subterfuge to justify the procedure. In his restrained and in many ways compelling Introduction to his translations of the New Testament Rabbi Brichto (who died last year) adds a distinctive voice to what is therefore a fairly established debate about the place of Pauline theology.

Alexander Waugh

Insufficiently honoured here

‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. ‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. His jaunty remark was overheard by a little old lady standing next to me on the platform. ‘Gentlemen, honestly!’ she said, reaching for the train door. But it was locked. Hitchens stuck his torso out of the window and called to the platform manager to let her in. ‘Too late’, said the uniformed attendant in a flat voice.

A.N. Wilson

Mystery of the empty tomb

John Henry Newman was an electrifying personality who has attracted numerous biographers and commentators. John Cornwell, in his excellent guided tour around this well-ploughed field, recalls the young woman in Oxford in the 1830s who ‘wept with emotion’ at Newman’s very appearance. W. G. Ward recalls the awe which fell upon him and his undergraduate friends if Newman so much as passed them in the street. And figures such as Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude and Matthew Arnold, none of them followers of the Newman cult in grown-up life, recollected similar feelings in their youth. When the mature George Eliot read Newman’s spiritual autobiography, she said it ‘breathed much life into me’.