More from Books

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 20 June 2009

Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Among them is Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction. Loy has many of the classic characteristics of the breed, including the tastes for hard liquor, lovely women and lost causes. But Hughes places his protagonist in a sharply observed contemporary Dublin; and his plots erupt from the city’s faultlines. In All The Dead Voices (John Murray, £16.

Wednesday

Lucy Beckett

Cardinal values

As Machiavelli knew well, nothing succeeds like success. ‘Good King Harry’; ‘Good Queen Bess’; ‘Bloody Mary’: until very recently the smoke from the burning of Protestants in Mary Tudor’s brief reign has coloured not only common tags but the vision of most Tudor historians, who have regarded her five years on the throne as a cruel, incompetent and futile attempt to halt the progress of England towards Elizabeth I’s Protestant nation-state. Eamon Duffy, particularly in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), has done more than anyone to dispel the conventional view of traditional Catholic life — better lost than saved — in England before the Reformation.

Andrew McKie

Unseeing is believing

The City & The City, by China Miéville China Miéville’s second book, Perdido Street Station, made his name by reimagining fantasy as thoroughly as had M. John Harrison’s Viriconium or Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. He followed it with two more novels set in the same world, and a children’s fantasy (Un Lun Dun) that was hailed as an instant classic and made the New York Times bestseller lists. The City & The City, however, has not a single monster, demon or alien. It is, at first glance, a straightforward police procedural.

Philip Ziegler

No room at the top | 17 June 2009

Political feuds have always been at the heart of politics. The most public of these have occurred when the adversaries were confronting each other across the floor of the House, leaders of different parties bound by their roles to oppose each other on every occasion even when they had scant belief in the superior merits of their cause. Quite as protracted and often still more embittered were the feuds between two politicians who were in theory colleagues but in practice were locked in ferocious rivalry. Campbell describes only two of the first category — Fox and Pitt and Gladstone and Disraeli — but six of the second — Castlereagh and Canning, Asquith and Lloyd George, Bevan and Gaitskell, Macmillan and Butler, Heath and Thatcher and Blair and Brown.

Jonathan Sumption

Pointless but necessary

For 20 years after the war, the Resistance was the presiding myth of French society. No one would say that now. A generation that never experienced occupation and respected no icons, began to ask awkward questions. The claim of the résistants to have made a serious contribution to the military balance was the first thing to go. The early demonstrations, minor explosions and assassinations of prominent Germans were mere fleabites on an enormous elephant. Only when it was clear that Germany would lose did the Resistance become a more significant force. Even then its achievements were modest: a handful of sabotage operations against war production facilities and a useful but minor contribution to the disruption of German communications during the D-Day landings.

Wednesday

Max Egremont

Outmoded elegance

Harold Macmillan seemed well prepared when he succeeded a sick and humiliated Anthony Eden as prime minister after the disaster of Suez in 1957. An intellectual who knew about economics, a tough debater, an advocate of closer relations with Europe, Macmillan had been a ministerial success at Housing, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. He was also a puritanical hard worker, determined and self-contained. His wife, Lady Dorothy, the cheerful and dowdy daughter of a Duke, pleased a still deferential Tory party; he even had an American mother when Anglo-American relations needed reviving. No wonder Eden’s cabinet, with only two exceptions, thought Macmillan the best candidate, far ahead of his rival, Butler. It is the shadows behind this that make him particularly intriguing.

Robert Stewart

Rebels with a cause

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a singular event in English history, not merely a food riot, but an organised outbreak of pure class warfare which, leaving aside John Ball’s rabble-rousing, Biblical egalitarianism, was untrammelled by constitutional quarrels or religious disputes. It was fomented by vicious class legislation — the Statute of Labourers of 1351 and three poll taxes levied between 1377 and 1380 — which was intended to prevent the common people from benefiting from increased wages as a result of the Black Death’s depletion of the labour supply. The government presented the poll taxes as a fair way of supplying the revenue needed to sustain a faltering and unpopular war against France.

Honor Clerk

The devil’s in the detail

The Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Standing behind the high altar in Prato Cathedral last week, binoculars trained on a fresco some 40 feet above, I found myself puzzling over a barely discernible detail in a scene of the nativity of St Stephen. At the foot of the new mother’s bed a winged figure, knees bent in a gesture of tender genuflection, cradles in his left arm a haloed baby. With his right he touches another baby, swaddled like the first, and lying on a crib. The angel — as he appears to be — has a sorrowful expression, and is an attractive dark green, like the patination of an ancient bronze. Slowly, other details emerge from the gloom to disturb the first engaging impression: he has no halo, his feet are clawed and he sports a tail.

Paul Johnson

The man who knew so much

Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Homes The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy Isaiah Berlin was the most popular don of his time. While Maurice Bowra boomed, and David Cecil giggled and Trevor-Roper intrigued, Berlin talked his way into the hearts of men — and women. If you were at a party and he entered the room, your spirits rose. If he chose to sit near you, it was bliss. Some found his delivery too rapid, and occasionally a lecture of his turned into an incomprehensible disaster. You had to get firmly on to his wavelength. Once there, the warm wave of talk enveloped you.

Caroline Moorehead

Light thoughts in a dark time

Ruth Maier’s Diary, edited by Jan Erik Vold, translated by Jamie Bulloch ‘Why shouldn’t we suffer when there is so much suffering?’ wrote Ruth Maier to her friend the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo in a letter smuggled from the ship deporting her from Oslo to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Ruth was then 21, a thoughtful, talented young woman just beginning to make her mark with her poems and water-colours. She had a thin, lively face and had started to model for an artist. Ruth left behind her with Hofmo over 1,100 pages of diary. In the late 1990s, a Norwegian editor, Jan Erik Vold, visited Ruth’s sister, who had taken refuge in Britain in 1939, and gathered together the many letters written by Ruth from Norway.

Peter Hoskin

A kind tyrant | 10 June 2009

‘Ajuxtaposition of incompatible elements.’ So Chris Fujiwara describes one of Otto Preminger’s more obscure films in his critical biography of the Hollywood director. But the phrase so encapsulates what I had come to think about Preminger’s entire output that I underlined it, underlined it again, and made a mental note to quote it at the beginning of this review. You see, from urbane noir flicks to period romps to weighty historical dramas, his work seems to differ in tone and content almost as much as it does in quality. Incompatible elements, indeed.

Andrew Lambirth

Leith: Scotland’s Independent Art School

Leith: Scotland’s Independent Art School, by George Ramsden Founded in 1988 in a former church for Norwegian seamen by the inspirational teachers Mark and Lottie Cheverton, Leith Art School comes of age this year. This book tells the story of its founders and recounts how the school survived their tragic early deaths (aged 39 and 31 respectively) in a road accident. Mark was a printmaker and Lottie a painter, both very talented, and with a vocation to raise a Christian voice in the arts. The text is a patchwork of reminiscences from friends and family held together by the narrative of a successful teaching project. That such small independent schools can still thrive in today’s increasingly regulated society is a blessing.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Getting into character

Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’. Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’. One, for example, turned down a novel of mine because she ‘felt the lack of any character with whom the reader could identify’. This was irritating rather than soothing. It’s natural for a child to identify with a fictional character. At the age of seven or eight I desperately wanted to be the American boy Kit in my favourite Enid Blyton novel, The Boy Next Door. He dressed up as a Red Indian and hid from the villains in a houseboat moored up a backwater: enchanting. Later I graduated to D’Artagnan and Alan Breck.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Intimations of mortality

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Two years ago, lest we forget, Cultural Amnesia came out — all 900-odd pages of it. Now here’s Clive with another fat wedge of ‘essays’, some of which are essays, and some of which are more recognisable as old book reviews and feature pieces for newspapers. In the section marked ‘Handbills’ he reproduces pieces he’s written to promote his stage shows; in ‘Absent Friends’, addenda to obituaries.

Dan Jones

Free for all

I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. It clogs up your mind with someone else’s prejudices and wrong opinions,where- as in fact you are being paid to bang on about your own. This week I broke my rule and read the Guardian review of Ben Wilson’s new book. It was by some sort of lawyer chap and it was very serious. It made me remember why I gave up the Guardian, which is a news- paper for quinoa-eaters and Arsenal fans. But I digress. I read their review because I had heard a disturbing rumour that the reviewer had accused Wilson of touting in his book for a job as David Cameron’s next speechwriter.

Katherine Ashenburg

Vale of tears

‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. ‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. This book is full of sorrowful people and places. Some of the places, the villages sacrificed to create the Aswan Dam and Canada’s St Lawrence Seaway, are literally drowned, leaving thousands homeless, while Warsaw, ruined in the second world war and rebuilt to a Disneyesque twin of its past self, is also submerged in loss.

Caroline Moorehead

Poule de luxe

‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was pleasure’. Metternich was not quite fair. Pauline, as sculpted in Canova’s famous statue of the barely clad reclining princess, was indeed extremely beautiful. But along with her undisputed love of herself, she was also devoted to her brother Napoleon, delighting in his victories, and fretting over his defeats.

Charles Cumming

Strength in numbers | 3 June 2009

Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers? Answer: they have all suffered, at one time or another, from anterograde amnesia, an unusual form of memory loss which can follow a traumatic brain injury. To their number may now be added the central character of Yoko Ogawa’s new novel, a professor of advanced mathematics whose memory ‘stopped’ in 1975 when he was involved in a car accident.

Jane Ridley

The champagne Marxist

Marx is back in fashion. For decades Marxists have been an endangered species, but now the collapse of capitalism has caused a revival in their stock and Das Kapital tops the German bestseller lists. Tristram Hunt’s biography of Karl Marx’s shadowy collaborator Friedrich Engels could hardly be more timely. ‘Marx was a genius,’ declared Engels, ‘we others were at best talented.’ Engels was a socialist hack who had the nous to attach himself to the genius Marx. It was his friendship with Marx that differentiated him from the other would-be revolutionaries, now long forgotten, who sat up drinking and arguing until 3 a.m. in the bars of Brussels in the 1840s. But as Tristram Hunt makes clear, Engels was not just Marx’s stooge.

Francis King

Quite contrary

Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to Angier’s work as Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Both Pizzichini’s and Bainbridge’s books rely for their potent fascination not on extensive research but, to a remarkable degree, on empathy and imagination.