More from Books

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

A poisonous legacy

A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, by Norman Rose Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948, by David Cesarani The second epigraph in Norman Rose’s eloquent, comprehensive and even-handed book, A Senseless, Squalid War, says it all, from Palestine in the late 19th century to Gaza right now. In 1891, the Zionist philosopher and poet Asher Zvi Ginsberg, wrote: From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys. But this is a big mistake. The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz-Israel.

Harriet Waugh

Mysteries of Paris

Fred Vargas — nom-de-plume of the French archaeologist and historian Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau — took to writing crime novels in 1991. Among the many unusual aspects of her books is the English take on the French titles. L’Homme à l’envers appears as Seeking Whom He May Devour, Pars vite et reviens tard as Have Mercy on Us All while Sous les vents de Neptune becomes Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. These English versions possess a sort of genius which I find irresistible. The novels have also been translated out of the order in which they were written.

Michael Beloff

Wit and wisdom | 14 March 2009

Judicial biography is out of fashion: Lord Chancellors apart, the lives of the bewigged great and good are confined within the narrow boundaries of the Dictionary of National Biography. Judicial autobiography is too often driven more by the self-esteem of the authors than the intrinsic interest of the subject. Anthony Lentin convincingly establishes his subject’s claim to resurrection. Born John Andrew Hamilton and of Mancunian middle-class origins, the future Viscount profited from an education at two great forcing houses of talent, Manchester Grammar School and Balliol. Called to the Bar by the Inner Temple, he was no instant success either in London or on the Northern Circuit. For many years he earned a living by his pen, not his tongue.

Craig Brown

Member of the In and Out

Most MPs who start writing diaries do so in order to prove to themselves how central they are to the political process. But by the time the diaries come to be published, they tend to prove the opposite. The effect is either comic or tragic, depending upon one’s point of view.     Who wrote this, for example? ‘I will have a crack at the leadership as soon as I can, partly because I am in touch with real people, partly because I can offer some leadership.’ The answer? Edwina Currie. It comes in her diary entry of 7 October 1988, when she was a parliamentary under-secretary. ‘I look at rivals like David Mellor’, she adds, ‘and I like me better.

Andrew McKie

The wide blue yonder

Toby Litt begins the titles of his books with consecutive letters of the alphabet and takes delight in shifting style and genre. He has now reached J, and science fiction. There has been a flurry recently of ‘literary’ writers trying their hands at SF. For the most part, the complaint raised against these efforts is that they may be better written than most of science fiction, but they aren’t much cop as science fiction. Anyway, science fiction need not be badly written: fans are fond of quoting Sturgeon’s Law (after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon) — ‘Ninety per cent of SF is crud, but then 90 per cent of everything is crud’. The corollary is that even the badly written stuff must offer something special to succeed.

Allan Massie

Sympathies and empathy

The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music. The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music. The consensus that, in his opinion, ‘tries to dismiss Burns’ royalist and Jacobite sympathies . . .

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Introducing the new Spectator Book Club

Peter Hoskin celebrates The Spectator’s rich literary tradition and welcomes bibliophiles across the world to a new online home The Spectator offices at 22 Old Queen Street are a bibliophile’s paradise. Books are, quite simply, everywhere: in bookcases; on top of filing cabinets; on the floor; and in the recesses where fireplaces should be. The piles grow daily, as publishers send books by the dozen to our literary editor, Mark Amory, and his deputy, Clare Asquith. Until at some point — usually when we fear a terrible literary avalanche — there’s A Great Clear Out, and the process starts all over again. Of course, the books aren’t there for show.

Patrick Marnham

Not for the faint-hearted

‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed a false identity in order to escape ‘the rope or Siberia’. As Berlin falls to the Red Army he slips out of the city and makes his way to Paris disguised as a returning French STO, an enlisted worker. But the war has reduced him to ‘an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame’. And so he decides to write his memoirs.

Sebastian Smee

The invisible man

Bleak, bleak, bleak. Anita Brookner’s new novel, Stran- gers, is unlikely to inspire resolutions to self-improvement or even cathartic tears. But its main character, a retired bank manager called Paul Sturgis, is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect. Sturgis, 72 years old, is in good health and financially well off. His trouble — and it is deep — is of another kind. He lives in a well-kept but dark and depressing flat in London. He has no children — only a distant female relative who lives on the other side of town and for whom he has no particular feeling.

Clementine Cecil

Red Star Over Russia

Winston Churchill’s cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, gazes up at her bust of Trotsky, made during a trip to Moscow in 1920. Her subjects were leading Bolsheviks including Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB, Lenin and Trotsky. While she worked, she asked Lenin, via a translator, if Churchill was the most hated man in Russia. ‘He is our greatest enemy because all the forces of capitalism are behind him,’ he replied. Sheridan’s mother wrote to her on her return: ‘I forgive you, darling, as I would even if you had committed a murder,’ but Churchill never spoke to his cousin again. Sheridan left England for New York, where her busts were exhibited.

Raymond Carr

Heroes and villains

This book falls into two distinct parts. The first is the author’s account of his own life until he left Oxford in disgrace. John Joll- iffe, the son of Lord Hylton, passed his childhood and youth at Mells, in Somerset, the home of the Asquith family, and at neighbouring Ammerdown, the seat of the Hyltons. Children in large houses were shoved upstairs to the nursery. In his father’s world, Jolliffe writes, the gap between generations ‘was deep in a way that would be unthinkable today, where parents and children live at such close quarters from the start’. This may have been a sea-change in the mores of the upper class, but the less privileged have lived at such close quarters for centuries.

Colin Amery

Architect of his own misfortune

Tom Coraghessan Boyle, in some 20 books, has energetically demon- strated his enthusiasm for turning the bio- graphies of figures from early 20th-century American life into quasi-historical fiction. After writing the story of the sex-obsessed researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey and the rare tale of the inventor of the cornflake, Will Keith Kellogg and his health farm, perhaps it was inevitable that the roaring private life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright would be a natural sequel. The Women is certainly not a novel about architecture, although the narrator of the story, Tadashi Sato, is a young Japanese architectural student who is drawn to the studio/commune run by Wright at Taliesin in Wisconsin.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

More gossip with less art?

To say that this first volume of Samuel Beckett’s collected letters is a puzzle and a disappointment is to suggest that one might have had specific expectations of it. Where did this cryptic and poetic writer come from? What did so very affectless an author sound like when he was talking in his own voice to his intimates? And, considering the remote relationship most of his writing bears to the world, how did he look at it? Added to this specific anticipation is the knowledge that Beckett, in tthe Thirties, had an exceptionally interesting life. He was an intimate of the Joyce household, trusted by all members of it. He played an important role in the composition and development of Finnegans Wake.

Anita Brookner

Pure, but never simple

Here at last is a novel informed by exceptional intelligence. The blurb states that the author, Simon Mawer, was born in England, but it seems likely that his ancestry was Czech, since he is acquainted with the language and the customs of pre-war Czechoslovakia and has learned of its travails during the German and Russian occupations. And it is clear from his narrative that the country was both sophisticated and cultivated in its manifestations, influenced perhaps by its position at the heart of Europe and subject to both the best and the worst of its fashions. This alone would mark it as unusual: the clarity with which it is written is almost unfamiliar and certainly to be admired.

William Brett

Loved and lost

Iain Sinclair is as dark as London scribes come. Engaged in a lifelong literary project, he records his own psychic and physical travels around the city, identifying what he calls ‘disappear- ances’ — people, buildings, spaces that no longer exist, but that haunt the present. While Peter Ackroyd is in thrall to London, revelling in its labyrinthine past and bounding enthusiastically over its landscape, Sinclair instead seems tortured by the place, lost in an infinity of connections and coincidences, and made paranoid by the ghosts that he unearths. Nowhere, it seems, is this paranoia more intense than in Hackney, his home borough for the last 40 years.

Linda Kelly

From palace to cowshed

Madame de la Tour du Pin’s Journal d’une Femme de Cinquante Ans, with its vivid descriptions of her experiences during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, is one of the most enthralling memoirs of the age: a hard act, one would think, for a biographer to follow. Caroline Moorehead succeeds in doing so triumphantly in a rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of her story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life. Born in 1770 into the highest reaches of the French nobility, Lucie-Henriette Dillon spent a lonely and unhappy childhood, brought up by a tyrannical grandmother after her mother’s death when she was 12.

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

How different from us?

The Ends of Life: Roads to Human Fulfilment in Early Modern England, by Keith Thomas The English past is not what it was, for professional historians anyway. The rest of us still talk about the Tudors and the Stuarts, about Renaissance and Reformation and the Augustan Age. But within the academy all these dynasties and eras are now bundled up into what is called the Early Modern period. The inhabitants of this huge stretch of time can only be made sense of, it seems, if we think of them as a rough, awkward prelude to Us. It is startling how rapidly Early Mod has flattened the competition, and flattened our island story into a tale with only two parts, Before and After Modernisation. For it is a quite recent coining.

Simon Baker

Dark fantasies

Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only as ‘the Author’, who spins fiction from his surroundings to pass the time. The Author is a famous middle-aged novelist, who happens also to be an accountant — a contrast suggesting that his artistic life is an intensely private matter which he deliberately keeps hidden beyond a functional day-to-day persona. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, he is not looking forward to the evening ahead, since he is to deliver a talk at a nearby community centre, and expects to be assailed with the usual questions about his writing habits and what he considers to be the meaning of his work.

Elisa Segrave

No pains spared

Matthew, the author’s son, and the subject of this memoir, had Downs Syndrome, but I should state at once that the book is much more than a guide for parents, or carers, of such children. It stands on its own as a work of literature and should win the PEN/Ackerley prize for memoir and autobiography. The author, in her poised, sometimes old-fashioned prose, beguiles the reader. As a little girl, she befriended a neighbour’s child whom she first saw through the hedge: Large and silent … she wore a bow in her hair and usually carried a doll in her arms. Her smile melted my heart, and though I could not understand the reason for this, it sometimes brought tears to my eyes.

Jonathan Mirsky

Heartbreak hotel

Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart. Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better.