More from Books

Monday

A.N. Wilson

Unhappy in her own way

It is a cruel fact, but unhappy marriages, unless they are your own, are always comic. Hence the popularity of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Hence the universal applicability of the Victorian joke about the Carlyle marriage: that it showed the kindness of God — making two people unhappy instead of four. The marriage of Tolstoy and Sofia Behrs, neither of whom had an ounce of humour in their bodies, certainly partakes of this grand old slapstick tradition. Sofia’s diary entry for 26 August 1882 runs: It was 20 years ago, when I was young and happy, that I started writing the story of my love for Lyovochka in these diaries: there is virtually nothing but love in them in fact. Twenty years later, here I am sitting up all night on my own reading and mourning its loss.

Giles Foden

Sideshow on the lake

During the night of 9 February 1916, two men were sitting on opposing shores of Lake Tanganyika. The longest lake in the world, it at that time divided German East Africa from the Belgian Congo. One of the men was Herr Kapitänleutnant Gustav von Zimmer, the other was an eccentric British navy officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson. The following morning, Zimmer would launch the Graf von Götzen, a large vessel which floats to this day on the waters of the lake. Spicer-Simson takes a starring role in my narrative non-fiction book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (2004).

Michael Heath

Magic

Are you staggered and amazed by today’s sleight-of-hand merchants? Are you staggered and amazed by today’s sleight-of-hand merchants? Perhaps David Blaine surviving in a block of solid ice for months leaves you cold? Or Darren Brown knowing your credit card number has you stifling a yawn? If something is missing from today’s masters of magic it’s not their fault; it’s our assumption that they can get away with anything on television, and that it’s all a con. Well, to put the magic back into your cynical soul, just look at this amazing collection of photographs and posters from the past. It will revive that tingling feeling that you just can’t figure out how they did it.

Jonathan Cecil

Squeaks and squawks

How often, when listening to announcers or weather forecasters or politicians on the radio, do I think, ‘That’s an ugly voice’! This seldom applies to speakers with educated regional accents, such as Scottish, Irish or Yorkshire, but all too often to those from London or the Midlands where good standard English is becoming a rarity. This is not a matter of class; ‘Sloane’ voices are as unappealing as ‘Estuary’ ones; indeed the two sometimes hideously cross-fertilise. Good speech is a matter of clarity and the unselfconscious enjoyment of the spoken language. It was an unexpected and nostalgic pleasure to listen to old recordings of or about the Bloomsbury Group.

Lucinda Lambton

Parsons’ displeasure

Despite its prosaic title, this is a humdinging page-turner of a book, revealing in livid detail the scandal of how the Church of England jettisoned onto the market what the author describes as ‘perhaps the most admirable, desirable and ascetic body of domestic buildings ever built’. Despite its prosaic title, this is a humdinging page-turner of a book, revealing in livid detail the scandal of how the Church of England jettisoned onto the market what the author describes as ‘perhaps the most admirable, desirable and ascetic body of domestic buildings ever built’.

Patrick Marnham

Disastrous twilight

With the opening paragraph of The Dogs and the Wolves (first serialised in France in 1939 and never previously translated) Irène Némirovsky takes us to the heart of her story: the complexities of Jewish life in eastern Europe and France in the first part of the 20th century. The Ukrainian city in which generations of the Sinner family had been born was, in the eyes of the Jews who lived there, made up of three distinct regions. It was like a medieval painting: the damned were at the bottom, trapped among the shadows and flames of Hell; the mortals were in the middle, lit by a faint, peaceful light; and at the top was the realm of the blessed.

Beryl Bainbridge

Enjoyer and endurer

I approached the late David Nokes’s scholarly book with some trepidation, having heard that it had been criticised for its apparent dismissal of James Boswell. I approached the late David Nokes’s scholarly book with some trepidation, having heard that it had been criticised for its apparent dismissal of James Boswell. As I had gained all my previous knowledge of the great Sam from Boswell’s magnificent biography I did not expect to enjoy this new exploration. But I did, very much indeed. Nowhere does he accuse Boswell of falsely creating the character of Johnson; indeed he acknowledges that he portrayed an irritable but very human subject.

Susan Hill

Avoiding the Wide World

The clue comes early on in the book. ‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat, ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter either to you or me. I’ve never been there and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again please.’ In 1903, a shocking incident took place at the Bank of England, where the soon-to-be author of one of the most magical of all children’s books was then Secretary. A man had walked in from the street asking to see the Governor but had to settle for Grahame. He held out a roll of paper with two ribbons tied round it, one black, one white, and asked Grahame to pull either one.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 14 December 2009

Here are two Alternative Reading Christmas gift ideas: books respectively by Gordon Brown and David Cameron. The Gordonian offering is by an ordained minister who wants to help you with your finances. ‘Gordon Brown’s message is very clear,’ the back cover says. The Cameronian offering is by a poet from Brooklyn, whose poems are ‘false translations’ of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. This he achieves by taking the original French verse and then transmuting it into English via a sort of wilful mishearing: ‘Tout Entière’, for example, becomes ‘Two Ton Chair’, and its first line, ‘Le Démon, dans ma chambre haute…’ becomes ‘Lime demons are out dancing.

Saturday

Alex Massie

Jane Austen’s pompous heroes

Jane Austen has become the most revered and probably the most popular of the great English novelists. Not even the vulgarisation of her novels by those who have adapted them for television has impaired the esteem in which she is held. She is not only deemed amusing, which she is, but a wonderfully fair and judicious moralist. Walter Scott praised her ‘exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace  things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment’; and this judgment is probably one with which we may all agree. Many of course go further and come close to canonising her.     There have always been a few dissenters, Charlotte Bronte for instance, and J. M.

Wednesday

Richard Shone

The optimism of a suicide

A postal strike would have been a disaster for Van Gogh. Letters were his lifeline and consolation. Not only did he receive through the mail his regular allowance from his brother Theo but, in letter after letter in return, he poured out his thoughts and feelings, recorded his work in progress and conveyed his impressions of books, people and places. In his often solitary existence, he was an avid recipient and kept in touch with a variety of correspondents, especially when he was in the South of France during the last two years of his life. The glory must be shared, however, with Theo, in that he kept Vincent’s letters, many of which contained drawings, either appended or on the sheet itself, surrounded by his tumble of words.

Simon Hoggart

Savouring the mystique

I have never met Roger Scruton, though I would like to; wine fans are slightly obsessional and enjoy clustering together, like trainspotters, though tasting rooms are more welcoming than the end of a platform at Crewe. We’re also very different. Shortly after I, working for the left-of-centre Guardian, became the wine writer for this conservative magazine, Scruton, a right-wing philosopher, took the same job at the New Statesman. Given the rivalry between these two organs, I took a keen interest in what he wrote. For instance, round about the same time that he pointed out that ‘it is almost impossible to find a decent Burgundy these days for less than £30’ we were selling El Vino’s own-brand Velvin for £3.95.

Marcus Berkmann

Quirky books for Christmas

After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. In practice, quirky books aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for the whole year round. But try telling a publisher that. Thousands of them have been pouring out this autumn, and in the pre-Christmas jungle good books will surely be lost, consumed by larger and nastier predators in a single contemptuous gulp. In Ghoul Britannia (Short Books, £12.99), Andrew Martin muses on ‘a nation primed for ghostliness’.

Christopher Howse

The unknown and the famous

In 1950, Irving Penn, working for Vogue in Paris, set himself up in a glass-roofed attic and, between fashion assignments, began a series of full-length portraits of tradesmen, inspired by the street portraits of Eugène Atget 50 years before. Later that year he continued the project in a painter’s studio in Chelsea. Penn found that the working people of London responded to his invitation to be photographed differently from those in Paris. ‘In general, the Parisians doubted that we were doing exactly what we said we were doing. They felt there was something fishy going on, but they came to the studio more or less as directed — for the fee involved,’ he remembered. ‘But the Londoners were quite different from the French.

Juliet Townsend

Recent books for children

One thing which struck me immediately on surveying the books on offer for children this Christmas is the large number which are really toys, with only a minor bookish element. Walker Books have produced several of these this year. Cars by Robert Crowther (£12.99) boasts moveable pop-ups of cars ancient and modern, with realistic detail and turning wheels, from the Mini to the Bluebird, culminating in a full fold-out model of a Formula 1 racetrack. There is an informative text, but it is definitely subordinate to the models. The same is true of Gladiators by Toby Forward, illustrated by Steve Noon, (£16.99). This includes a book about the Roman games, but the main attraction is the spectacular pop-up model of the Colosseum.

Gilbert Adair

Repeat that, repeat

When the Louvre invited me to organise for the whole of November 2009 a series of conferences, exhibitions, public readings, concerts, film projections and the like on the subject of my choice, I did not hesitate for a second and proposed the list. Thus Umberto Eco on the genesis of this book, published simultaneously in Italian, French and English. Considering those parallel manifestations of the project, it was perhaps to be expected that this, its sole printed version, would be situated at the more ingratiatingly ludic end of the Eco spectrum. The Infinity of Lists is a work less of theory than of taxonomy.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Debt and addiction

I knew that I was onto a good thing with this book before the page numbers were even out of roman numerals. Describing the wealth of new material that has come to light in the three decades or so since the last biography of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison men- tions the areas in which it has enriched our understanding: . . . his enduring sorrow over the loss of his sister Elizabeth, his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of, and subsequent alienation from, Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol . . . his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh gaols . . . This was a lively life, and this is a lively Life.

Raymond Carr

Looking back in anger

Portugal has given the world two distinguished novelists. Eça de Queiros, is the Proust of Portugal. His masterpiece, The Maias, describes the decline of an aristocratic family in the late 19th century. Whereas Eça was a member of the Portuguese intellectual elite, José Saramago was born in a wretched shack in the the rural hamlet of Azinhaga. When he was two, his family moved to a series of two-roomed flats in the poorest quarters of Lisbon. I cannot think of any writer of consequence who endured such grinding poverty in his childhood and youth. His grandfather was a foundling and both he and his wife illiterate peasants. In an early essay I compared Saramago to Thomas Hardy, as a village boy who had made a career as a writer. This was a grave mistake.

Christian House

Novelty value

Auction house catalogues are multi-faceted publications. Primarily, of course, they’re sales tools, reassuring buyers that something is what it says it is, that it can legally be bought and where to do just that. Yet, they’re so much more. They can be a simple full stop to one of life’s chapters or, alternatively, a celebratory exclamation mark. An anonymous 1895 house-contents catalogue (of which there are only four known surviving copies) for a Chelsea abode on Tite Street bears secret testament, through a haphazard compilation of loose-lotting, to the Icarus fall of one Mr Oscar Wilde.

Victor Sebestyen

Before and after the Fall

No one here (I mean in Britain, not perhaps in the columns of The Spectator) likes to read anything nice about the Germans. So I shall warn you that there will be some praise for Germany in this review, mixed with the usual level of bashing. If the very thought of this shocks or appals you, I’ll do that rare thing for any journalist and suggest you turn the page and move on to something more comforting. In the last few weeks there has been one principal story told in several new books, most of the press and broadcast coverage, and even the material on the Tweets that have marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is that after all the euphoria and the street parties of 9 November 1989, something has gone badly wrong with the re-marriage of the Germanys.