More from Books

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Irate men

‘No English monarch until Victoria — that is, long after monarchy had become the “dignified”, rather than the “efficient” part of the constitution — remained free from challenge, and three lost their thrones to rebellions.’ David Horspool’s new book is a detailed survey of the English men, women and mobs who have been prepared to risk life and property to rise up against power. It starts in the time of the Norman yoke and ends with the Poll Tax riots in the time of the Norman Tebbit. It is, to adapt Carlyle, a ‘history of irate men’. There’s an awful lot of ground to cover and Horspool goes over it at a hell of a scamper.

Jonathan Sumption

The human element

Writing in 1792, in the aftermath of the French revolution, Jeremy Bentham famously dismissed all talk of the rights of man as mere rhetoric. Justice, he said, was concerned with rights and duties, and they were the creatures of law. There could be no rights without law to express them, he said, no justice without courts to enforce it. Yet generations of political philosophers have speculated about rights in terms which have very little to do with law. The mathematician and economist Amartya Sen is contemptuous of Bentham’s dictum. He is concerned with the ethical claims which men may be said to have against one another, claims which are thought to have some moral basis, but need not necessarily have a legal one. What place should personal liberty have in a just society?

Michael Carlson

Lost in the fog

Thomas Pynchon’s reputation has risen and fallen over the past five decades; one of his conspiracy-chasing characters might note a pattern of inverse relation to rises and falls in the world’s financial markets. Gravity’s Rain- bow, 36 years ago, confirmed Pynchon as America’s new great reclusive genius; since then battalions of academics have made careers reinforcing his reputation for obscurantism, while sharp-jawed reviewers have leapt upon each perceived failure to top that book with the excitement of jackals scenting a dying lion. Inherent Vice may generate huge sighs of relief from both sides; it’s a third the length of Pynchon’s previous novel, Against the Day, and it’s structured as a detective story.

Wednesday

Magnus Linklater

Challenging perceptions

Mrs Noyce kept on being prosecuted, appearing immaculately clad on her many court appearances. But she carried on, keeping her thoughts to herself. She probably echoed the complaint of another madam, Margaret Sempill, in the 19th Century: when she was accused by the Kirk of keeping prostitutes — in particular the very pretty Katherine Lenton, who slept with the French Amabassador — she commented: ‘I get the name, but others the profit.’ She was whipped for her cheek. The French Ambassador was not troubled. Over recent years, Fry’s series of Scottish histories have built a splendid track record of overturning cherished myths. Edinburgh’s fabled respectability is just one of them.

Anthony Howard

Mischief and mayhem

Henry Fairlie was the journalistic idol of my youth. I met him, I think, first in 1955 when he had just started writing his Political Commentary in The Spectator — and it was on the mischievous appeal of those early columns that we had invited him to come and address the Oxford University Labour Club. Certainly at the time he represented a total breath of fresh air in the then somewhat musty world of political journalism. In the Observer the part-time novelist Hugh Massingham may have blazed a new narrative trail, with his ability weekly to follow E.M. Forster’s advice and tell a story; but it was Fairlie, with his buccaneering streak and instinct for irreverence, who completed the revolution in the coverage of British politics.

Byron Rogers

Horror in the Arctic

Around the middle of the 19th century a new image of horror appeared in Victorian art. In 1864 Edwin Landseer exhibited something the like of which he had never painted before and never would again. In ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, the man who had painted ‘Dignity and Impudence’ shows two polar bears, one howling above a human rib-cage, the other tearing at the sails of a ship crushed in the ice, all this in the bleak half light of what passes for a day in the Arctic. The picture is so terrifying that, hanging in the Great Hall of the Royal Holloway College, it is even now covered over when students take their exams.

M R-D-Foot

An unlikely hero

This sparkling biography of a small-part actor who did two missions into Nazi-occupied France as a radio operator for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) begins with a rather iffy 60 pages on his identity and pre-war stage career; much of what the agent said about himself was contradictory, much was exaggerated, and little of it was reliable. Almost everybody who met him agreed that he was tremendous fun to be with; anyone who knew him at all well realised that he was homosexual — in an age when homosexuality was illegal. Who his father was remains in some doubt; his mother was an opera singer, under the stage name of Emma Luart.

Christian House

A choice of first novels | 22 July 2009

This year’s summer flurry of debut novels appears to tick all the booksellers’ boxes. This year’s summer flurry of debut novels appears to tick all the booksellers’ boxes. There’s the headline grabber, the European bestseller, the wartime melodrama and the quirky romancer. Publishers recognise a good thing when they see it. 60 Years Later is a case in point, having already hit the news pages and caused a buzz of expectation (Windupbird Publishing, £7.99). Flirtatiously spun as a sequel to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, its author has unsurprisingly opted for a reclusive nom de plume. The jacket announces the arrival of one John David California. The defendant’s name on the lawsuit swiftly dispatched by the real J. D.

Wednesday

Bevis Hillier

Fine feathers

This is a glorious book with one crippling flaw. Let's put the ecstasy before the agony. Faber and Faber, founded in 1929, commissioned some of the best book jackets of all time; Private Eye, retracting its claws for once, called the firm Fabber and Fabber — of course that applied to the authors as well as the designs. A few of the designs seem dated in a bad sense, but most of them are joyfully, exhilaratingly redolent of their time — especially the art deco and ‘Contemp’ry’ ones. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — an update on ‘Fine feathers don’t make fine birds’ — but you can judge a lot of these books by their jackets.

Michela Wrong

Black humour

‘The trouble with most people,’ a reporter friend of mine once remarked, ‘is they just don’t grasp the funny side of genocide.’ He was a rather eccentric friend, possessed of a none-too-healthy fascination with guns and violent death, but he had a point. As any soldier knows, horror lends itself to black humour. An uncontrollable fit of the giggles is often a spontaneous reaction to the utterly grotesque. Gripped by post-colonial guilt, few Westerners have the nerve to admit this when it comes to Africa, which does a strong line in genocide, and the continent’s non-fiction suffers from the kind of po-faced earnestness that would make a missionary yawn. Jane Bussmann is a gloriously irreverent, genitally-fixated exception to the rule.

Justin Marozzi

Lust for life

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, by Patrick Hennessey Patrick Hennessey was one of the British army’s self-proclaimed Bright Young Things, an Oxford graduate with a lust for combat and a literary bent. Born in 1982, he belongs to a generation of uniformed men and women who would, as he puts it, ‘do more and see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster’. Hard on the older generation, perhaps, but such have been the opportunities afforded by the War on Terror.

Lee Langley

Beyond the guidebook

Between the Assassinations is to summer reading what Slum-dog Millionaire was to feelgood movies: the book, like the film, beneath a deceptively beguiling surface, is a Dickensian-dark view of child labour, corruption, poverty, and ruthless privilege in modern India. Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker prize with his first novel, The White Tiger, a savage picture of modern India seen through the eyes of a murderous entrepreneur hell-bent on power and success. Between the Assassinations sometimes reads like a prelude to that book: from the variously hopeless lives we encounter in these stories could have emerged the appalling yet dazzling anti-hero of Tiger.

James Walton

Inconvenient truths

People who’ve read Justin Cartwright’s previous novels possibly won’t be too startled at what they find in his new one. The main character is a clever, well-read media man of about Cartwright’s age, who lives in London but ends up feeling the tug of a more primal culture — in this case by clearing off to the Kalahari for six months. His thoughts are conveyed in a quietly glittering, often aphoristic prose. The book ponders the big questions of love, religion and the nature of the self, while also scrutinising such less abstract social phenomena as rap videos and lobster sandwiches. When the novel opens, David Cross, a former TV anchor and foreign correspondent in his early sixties, is adjusting to life as a widower.

Charlotte Moore

A literate despair

This large and ambitious novel is timely, given the apparent rise in popularity of extremist political parties throughout Europe. Lucy Beckett sets her story in inter-war Germany. She shows, painstakingly, how Nazism spread its poisonous roots in the fertile soil of a disrupted, demoralised and divided country, and how those who refused to accept its doctrine were turned into aliens within their own homeland. In 1961, Max Hofmann, a violin teacher, is dying in London, where he has lived in safe but empty exile. He was once Max von Hofmannswaldau, a Prussian aristocrat and an intellectual lawyer. On his deathbed he charges his favourite pupil, a girl of 17, to uncover his story and that of his friends. He gives her a postcard with seven names on it, the last name his own.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Reaching for the moon

Some writers spend their careers happily producing variations on the same book. Others seem to rethink the sort of book they would like to write with each new work. Only a very few, however, have a career which looks like a planned trajectory into something completely new; you would not predict Tolstoy’s late fables from his first autobiographical sketches, or the opaque fantasy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from the dogged realism of Dubliners. And yet all the steps in between are carefully considered, and the career makes perfect sense. Italo Calvino was very much one of those writers.

John De-Falbe

The lure of the gypsies

William Blacker ‘set off to explore the newly “liberated” countries of Central Europe immediately after Christmas 1989’. From Berlin he went to Prague, where he wondered, ‘Should I continue eastwards, even as far as Romania? In the end it was old architecture which persuaded me. I had heard of the famous painted monasteries of northern Moldavia.’ Entranced by ‘the Eastern Europe of wooden peasant cottages on the edge of forests inhabited by wolves and bears, of snow and sledges and sheepskin coats, and of country people in embroidered smocks and headscarves,’ he returned the following year and walked among the Saxon villages.

Lewis Jones

The Old Red Lion and Dragon

In the 1970s, when Byron Rogers was appointed speechwriter to the Prince of Wales, the Daily Telegraph, where he was for many years a prolific contributor, report- ed the story in a one-sentence paragraph: ‘The Prince of Wales has appointed as speechwriter Mr Byron Rogers, a colourful Welshman.’ Nearly 40 years on, he still resents that announcement — ‘as though being a colourful Welshman was a job,’ he complains, ‘like a bus driver.’ To judge from Me: The Authorised Biography, though, the Telegraph’s subs had it right — being a colourful Welshman is Byron Rogers’ job, and he is extremely good at it. He was born in monoglot Carmarthen- shire, an only child, ‘amongst people who heard a different drum’.

Francis King

Home thoughts from abroad | 8 July 2009

The subtitle, ‘The Anglo-American Gardens of Florence’, of this engaging and elegantly produced book, is misleading. The reclusive and narcissistic chatelaine of the Villa Gamberai in the days of its glory, Princess Catherine Jeanne Keshko Ghika, was not an Anglo-American but a Romanian. Similarly, Lady Paget, indefatigable not merely as a custodian of her superb garden at Torre di Bellosguardo but also as a lady scribbler, was born a Saxon princess, Walburga (‘Wally’ to her friends) Helena de Hohenthal. Katie Campbell also from time to time strays beyond her geographical parameters.

John McEwen

The Oaks of Cheyithorne Barton

Michael Heathcoat Amory inherited Chevithorne Barton in Devon from his grandmother. She had experienced the unimaginable loss of her husband in the First War and their three sons in the Second, including the author’s father. Creating a garden at Chevithorne was a consoling distraction. Michael Heathcoat Amory has done her and his family proud, transforming Chevithorne over a mere 25 years into one of the world’s great arboretums. His passion is the oak. He now has 282 of the 500 extant species, of which 190 are catalogued in this handsome book. His model introduction is supplemented by three specialist essays. The photographic illustrations reveal that many oaks are unrecognisable as relatives of our emblematic tree, Quercus robur.

Anne Chisholm

Raising the last glass

My Father’s Tears, by John Updike Although an air of valediction inevitably hovers over this collection of short stories, the last of John Updike’s more than 60 books and published in the wake of his death, it is in no way a depressing read. On the contrary: there is something exhilarating about finding him maintaining to the very end not just his brilliance of observation and narrative but his passionate appreciation of life. Updike’s writing has often been unapologetically autobiographical; his biographer will not have to decode the life from the work.