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Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

A bland villain

I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage. I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage. Leaving aside the matter of moral conscience, a really smart fraudster has to combine the confidence of an actor with the sleight of hand of a magician and the technical skills of an accountant or a computer geek.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Impossible to dislike

In 1968, when he was still a student at Oxford, Gyles Brandreth was interviewed in the Sun. The headline was a quote from him: ‘I’d like to be a sort of Danny Kaye and then Home Secretary.’ It’s about bang on. He achieved the first, rather than the second, and the fact that it never occurred to him that he couldn’t do both is what’s great about him. He’s a very clever fellow and a colossal show-off. He is all over Isis, and the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Dramatic Society within weeks of starting university, not to mention selling fabricated diary stories about himself and arranging to be followed around by TV crews wherever he goes.

George Trefgarne

Even oilmen are human

Until the credit crunch sent bankers to the naughty step of capitalism, the spot was occupied by oilmen. The consequence is that an exciting tale of human endeavour — how the abundant resources of the earth have been harnessed to power an era of unimagined prosperity — is often obscured by hostile forces and, it has to be said, spectacular blunders by oilmen themselves. However, it is, if you think about it, remarkable that in the 150 years since it all began when one Colonel Drake first struck oil in Pennsylvania, a global market — designed by no one individual or authority — has grown up which keeps the energy flowing even through wars and natural disasters.

Tim Congdon

Rural romanticism

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith. The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith. When it was published in 1993, The Trap caused a bit of a stir because it challenged the consensus that free trade and globalisation were good for mankind. But it also contained a deeper theme, that the world had become falsely enamoured of the commercialisation of science and technology. Goldsmith père protested not just that economic orthodoxy was wrong, but that society had become too materialistic and complex, too far from nature. Since the early 1990s these anxieties have been given a new focus.

James Walton

The good old daze

I don’t imagine that Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll was a very hard sell to its publishers. I don’t imagine that Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll was a very hard sell to its publishers. John Harris has been writing about music for nearly 20 years, has an acclaimed book about Britpop to his name and is established enough in the wider media world to appear on Newsnight Review. Now, he’s had the bright idea of providing a kind of Schott’s Miscellany of mostly old pop, linked by a genial Stuart Maconie-style prose, and with a heavy dollop of Nick Hornby-style fandom mixed in. Surely, the result is bound to find its way onto the shelves — or at least into the loos — of middle-aged music obsessives everywhere.

Robert Carver

Waltzing with your aunt

‘It’s not what’s here — it’s what’s not here’ is the reason given by a voluntary exile in the Alaskan wilderness to the author’s question. ‘It’s not what’s here — it’s what’s not here’ is the reason given by a voluntary exile in the Alaskan wilderness to the author’s question. ‘What keeps you here?’ Space, lack of people, freedom, and personal indepen- dence compensate some for the cold, isolation and loneliness.

Interconnect

What lies beneath

Franz Kafka’s Poseidon Franz Kafka’s Poseidon sat at his desk doing the accounts. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted — and he did have very many — but since he took his job seriously, he would in the end go over all the figures and calculations himself, and so his assistants were of little help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him. But he did it, nonetheless, and with a kind of regularity and constancy which the CEO of any organisation would have appreciated. Sumatra, Tonga, the Samoas: only the latest entries in the Sea Director’s neat, double-columned book.

Jonathan Keates

Bach’s life examined

Music all too easily disarms our critical faculties. Composers need protection from those grovelling adorers who refuse to distinguish good from bad in their idol’s oeuvre or even to acknowledge his occasional lapses into doodling and bombast. The fawning which began during Wagner’s lifetime for example, scarcely discouraged by the cult object himself, has since become a veritable psychosis, divorced from any worthwhile musical or aesthetic criteria. Schubert has likewise suffered from the dim religious light cast over his achievement by drooling worshippers, too ready to ignore the inconsistencies of his wayward talent or its periodic lapses into twaddling prolixity.

Bevis Hillier

In the best possible taste

In 1968, aged 28, I wrote the first English book on art deco of the 1920s and 30s. Some people who had lived through that entre deux guerres period — in particular, the interior decorator Martin Battersby, who was girding his scrawny loins to write about it but was pipped at the post — resented my poaching on what they felt was their preserve. Just over 40 years on, I suppose I could feel the same way about this book on the 1970s by young art historians; but I don’t. They have given me insights into that fabled decade which escaped me as it swanned and swaggered by.

John De-Falbe

Far from idyllic

We’re Levantines … hold your head up high and say, ‘Yes, I am. What of it? Byzantine and Ottoman…’ We’re Levantines … hold your head up high and say, ‘Yes, I am. What of it? Byzantine and Ottoman…’ These are the words of Lev- ent effendi, a dignified out-of-work teacher, a ‘Turk’ who turns out to have been born to a Greek family in Smyrna in 1922, rescued and raised by Muslim foster parents. ‘Why are you filling his head with this nonsense? This is dangerous talk for a child,’ Kakmi’s mother observes with uncharacteristic restraint.

Gilbert Adair

The usual detectives

That very title prompted in me a little Proustian epiphany. I was abruptly transported back to the mid-Fifties when, a swotty little creep, I would stow away my completed homework, switch on what we called the wireless and tune in to the Third Programme. For readers too young to have known that august institution, a typical evening’s edification might consist of, precisely, an illustrated lecture on detective fiction (although not, of course, by P. D. James — Jacques Barzun, perhaps, or Ronald Knox), sandwiched between a performance of Christopher Fry’s The Dark is Light Enough and a concert of Schütz motets. And nothing changed when I opened the book.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Tracks through the wasteland

Sex, and plenty of it. That’s certainly what Bunny Munro — the titular protagonist of Nick Cave’s second novel — wants. And, in a roundabout way, he gets it. In the very first chapter, he’s cheating on his wife with a prostitute; in the second, it’s a hotel waitress; in the third, he’s given to fantasies about Kylie Minogue; in the fourth … well, you get the picture. Throw in the fact that Bunny is a travelling cosmetics salesman in Brighton, and it starts to sound like one of those dreadful Robin Askwith comedies from the 1970s — you know, Confessions of a Window Cleaner. But The Death of Bunny Munro isn’t actually a mindless, priapic romp. Far from it.

Jonathan Mirsky

Unamazing insights

Four years ago, we learn from this book’s jack- et, Malcolm Glad- well ‘was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People’. Four years ago, we learn from this book’s jacket, Malcolm Gladwell ‘was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People’. As Gladwell himself might ask, ‘Is what Time says really significant? And what is significant?’ Gladwell is significant, all right. Not only is he a staff writer on the New Yorker but he wrote the bestsellers Blink and The Tipping Point that made him millions and — here is more significance — put him number one on the New York Times’ bestseller lists. What is Gladwell’s secret?

Saul David

Model of resilience

At a time when the British Army is going through something of a crisis — plucked from the frying pan of Iraq only to be plunged into the fire of Afghanistan, with inadequate equipment, a lack of clear objectives, mounting casualties and dwindling public support — it might not appear to be the best moment to publish a history of the Second Service’s achievements since the days of Cromwell.

Anne Somerset

A conflict of wills

It might seem odd that Eric Ives, the acclaimed biographer of Anne Boleyn, should turn his attention to another executed Tudor queen, Lady Jane Grey. As he points out, in the past six years alone, seven biographical studies of Lady Jane have appeared, and while this could be said to demonstrate the perennial fascination exerted by Jane’s short life and grim fate, the question inevitably arises as to whether even a scholar of Ives’s standing will be able to add much to what has been written. Yet it soon emerges that Ives is not primarily concerned with Lady Jane’s personal tragedy. Instead he focusses on the events that led to her being placed on the throne in July 1553, and the collapse of the regime 13 days later.

Jane Ridley

From Madrid with love

In June 1943 the film star Leslie Howard was mysteriously killed when his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe on a return flight from Spain. This was an unprovoked attack on a commercial airliner, and there seemed to be no motive for it. British intelligence circulated rumours that the Germans had hoped to kill Churchill, whom they mistakenly thought was travelling on the plane. In fact, it now seems that the Germans’ target was Leslie Howard himself. He was returning from a celebrity tour of Spain, following the success of Gone with the Wind, in which he starred as Ashley Wilkes. Howard had been sent to Spain as part of a propaganda campaign to win Spanish support for the British.

John Preston

‘I never drink . . . wine’

Although almost every country in the world has some vampire element in its folklore, it still comes as a surprise to learn that Wales was once home to something called a Vampire Chair which bit anyone who sat in it. The Bulgarian vampire, however, is much easier to recognise, being possessed of only one nostril and given to emitting sparks at night. But if you should ever find yourself nostril to nostril with a vampire, there’s a lot to be said for hoping it hails from Germany. As this handbook rather touchingly informs us, the German vampire clutches one of its thumbs while lying in its coffin. It can also be killed by the comparatively simple method of sticking an apple in its mouth.

Philip Ziegler

Changed utterly

Some years ago Juliet Nicolson wrote an evocative and enjoyable study of the summer of 1911. She was far too intelligent to be taken in by the vision of unruffled and sunlit splendour propagated by those who wallow in nostalgia, but the picture that emerged was still one of self-confidence, complacency and a conviction that, for better or worse, nothing much was likely to change in the state of Britain. This earlier book is worth revisiting before reading The Great Silence: it helps one comprehend the effect on the national psyche of the cataclysmic horrors which afflicted Europe during and after the first world war. This book is about grief — ‘an iceberg of a word’, writes Nicolson.

D.J. Taylor

Rural flotsam

Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy. Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 21 October 2009

Love Letters of a Japanese begins: ‘These letters are real. Love Letters of a Japanese begins: ‘These letters are real. And like all real things they have a quality which no artificial counterpart can attain.’ They were pseudonymously published by Marie Stopes, the birth control reformer, under the editorship of ‘G. N. Mortlake’, and document a love affair between ‘Mertyl Meredith’ and ‘Kenrio Watanabe’. ‘G. N. Mortlake’ was an invention; Marie herself was ‘Mertyl’; and a married Japanese botanist, Kenjiro Fujii, was the model for ‘Kenrio’. Marie had had a disastrous love affair with him, and Love Letters of a Japanese, in edited form, are their billets-doux.