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Wednesday

Sarah Burton

His island story

‘If you don’t come to terms with the ghost of your father, it will never let you be your own man.’ Here Christopher Ondaatje (brother of novelist Michael) combines his voyage of filial discovery with another quest: to pursue his obsession with a story he heard at his father’s knee, of a man-eating leopard. ‘If you don’t come to terms with the ghost of your father, it will never let you be your own man.’ Here Christopher Ondaatje (brother of novelist Michael) combines his voyage of filial discovery with another quest: to pursue his obsession with a story he heard at his father’s knee, of a man-eating leopard.

S E-G-Hopkin

Cheering satanism

‘For my generation of Essex teenagers, Dennis Wheatley’s novels represented the essential primer in diabolism,’ Ronald Hutton, the historian and expert on paganism, recalls. ‘For my generation of Essex teenagers, Dennis Wheatley’s novels represented the essential primer in diabolism,’ Ronald Hutton, the historian and expert on paganism, recalls. It wasn’t peculiar to Essex. In the Sixties, reading Dennis Wheatley was something one did to prove one’s daring — and to get the atmosphere right for spooky parties.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A literary gypsy

When Lavinia Greacen undertook her magisterial yet intimately sympathetic biography of James Gordon Farrell, she gained access to his diaries and many of his letters, especially love letters and letters to his literary agents, editors and publishers about his professional desires and requirements. In this supplementary volume, a selection of her prime sources is presented in their full extent, amounting to a warts-and-all self-portrait of the novelist. It might well serve as an inspiration or a warning. Even with his fecund talent, ardent ambition, sound education (Rossall and Brasenose), eagerness to work and sufficient charm for social survival (English father, Irish mother), writing novels for a living proved intellectually arduous, financially precarious and often desperately lonely.

Anne Applebaum

Skeletons in the cupboard

Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. That generation formed an important part of the intellectual and mercantile elite of Europe, but not the political elite — which is partly why some of them wound up in the radical communist anti-elite instead. In some families, various members dabbled in all of these worlds.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 4 November 2009

William Tell Told Again was published by A & C Black in 1904 (‘Black’s Beautiful Books for Boys and Girls’), and is now extremely rare. William Tell Told Again was published by A & C Black in 1904 (‘Black’s Beautiful Books for Boys and Girls’), and is now extremely rare. In substance it is a reworking of the Swiss tale from a humorous angle. This was long before Jeeves and Bertie, Lord Emsworth, Mr Mulliner and Ukridge, and before even most of the school stories (Mike only appeared in 1909, five years after William Tell). Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1941: ‘Collectors prize as bibliographical rarities such early works as William Tell Told Again and Swoop, but it is impossible to discern in them any promise of what was to come.

Michael Henderson

Fun and games

Sport, say those who write about it, is only the toy department of daily journalism. They don’t really mean it. Some of the finest wordsmiths in what may still be called Fleet Street earn a crust by writing about games, and the people who play them. In some cases — the late Ian Wooldridge comes to mind — they transcend their specialism. People bought the Daily Mail to read Wooldridge, just as they buy it now to read Quentin Letts. In recent years sports journalism has been invaded by outsiders who, to borrow a phrase from Paul Hayward, one of its finest practitioners, display nothing more than ‘strident ignorance’. They don’t attend events, or know very much about the performers, yet hand out opinions like parking tickets.

Michael Carlson

Engrossing obsessions

With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It’s been eight years since the second volume, The Cold Six Thousand, written in a staccato shorthand prose that seemed always about to veer out of control, marked the apotheosis of Ellroy’s feverish and frenetic style. Something had to give, and at first it was Ellroy himself, who suffered a breakdown and eventually quit Middle America to return to his spiritual home of Los Angeles.

John McEwen

Romantic approaches

Spectator readers will know that Andrew Lambirth is a romantic, a force for the literary and poetic approach to art criticism, so he is an admirably empathetic guide to Hoyland: In England the subversive underground Romantic spirit has never run dry, it consistently nourishes art in this country and erupts forth in strange and unexpected ways. The late work of John Hoyland is one such unpredictable manifestation. Mel Gooding’s standard monograph covers Hoyland’s career to 2006, but such is the artist’s productivity that, despite serious heart surgery last year, many of the excellent colour plates — the majority in the case of the 46 full-page illustrations — are of new paintings.

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.