More from Books

Wednesday

Francis King

A delicate talent

When, 15 years ago, Nicola Beauman embarked on this life of ‘the other Elizabeth Taylor’, the novelist and not the film star, she had been deprived of documents that would certainly have been of tremendous use to her. These were the letters that, over a period of some three decades, Taylor wrote regularly and at length to the novelist Robert Liddell, living in self-exile in Greece. Aware that she was terminally ill, she asked him to burn her side of their correspondence, and no less regrettably then destroyed his. Was he right to obey this injunction from a woman whom he himself described as the best letter-writer of the 20th century? I myself, as I told him at the time, thought not; but others, perhaps morally more scrupulous, approved.

Eric Anderson

Tales out of school

The Old Boys’ Network, by John Rae At Westminster School, under the shadow of Big Ben and at the very centre of national life, 600 of the brightest, quirkiest and most stimulating boys and girls in the country spar with teachers of similar character. Results are spectacular. The difficulty for the headmaster, however, is that by long tradition some of the governors and a great number of those who teach at Westminster have little time for headmasters. So he treads a thorny path, saying to himself, as John Rae confesses to his diary: ‘I am lucky to be here, but my days are numbered.’ Actually Rae survived in the job from 1970 to 1986. These extracts from his diaries, put together just before his death two years ago, remind us what a time of change it was.

Richard Shone

From worthless to priceless

A combination of art history ‘lite’ and the personal touch — a common yoking together these days, even in books supposedly of art history ‘full strength’ — makes for, in Philip Hook’s hands, an engaging read. As a dealer and auctioneer, and the author of several thrillers, he has advantages not given to the general run of such investigative writers. His subject is the rise of French Impressionist painting, after its initial years of critical contempt and commercial failure, to international mass appeal and soaring value. It’s a familiar story, frequently told, and a reader looking for new light on the fortunes of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley et al. will search in vain. Where Hook scores is in his practical experience.

Toby Young

Fame is still the spur

In The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy’s magisterial study of fame and its history, he identifies the principal allure of being a celebrity: ‘In the heart of the fan and the famous alike, fame is a quiet place where one is free to be what one really is, one’s true, unchanging essence.’ The belief that you can only become fully realised in the glare of the media spotlight is, of course, an illusion. In fact, the opposite is true. Far from enhancing the personality, fame corrodes it. Responsible adults are reduced to an infantile state in which the sole purpose of others is to satisfy their needs. As John Updike said, ‘Fame is a mask that eats into the face.

Tuesday

Robert Salisbury

Looking back without anger

Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers deservedly attracted the highest praise. It was illuminating and a compelling read. Equally, her Women of the Raj evoked the lost world of the memsahibs — courag- eous, often narrow and intolerant, but dauntless as they nearly always were. Now, from her eminence as Warden of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, she stands back a little and considers the uses and abuses of history. The result is not a long book — always an attractive characteristic — but it is a worthy one. It will certainly bring back memories for those who, in the mid 20th century, offered a special paper as part of their A-levels or who attempted the Modern History School at Oxford shortly afterwards. Why should we study history? Can we learn anything from it?

Sophie Ward

Puzzling out the past

How do you write an autobiography without referring to almost anyone else in your life? In The Pattern in the Carpet, Margaret Drabble has done just that, using her interest in jigsaw puzzles to create a ‘hybrid’ book, part memoir, part history. The device allows Drabble to reveal more about herself than any exposé or biographer’s dissection, whilst leading us through the museums and galleries of the world in the search for puzzle trivia. The mildest of pastimes is Drabble’s ostensible subject, but the book is lively with an anguish only partly alleviated by the correct placing of a cardboard shape. As a child, Margaret Drabble would lie on her back and contemplate infinity ‘quite faint with my own stupidity and desire’.

George Osborne

Lincoln’s legacy

Every so often American Presidents let people know that they are reading a book. When George W. Bush was seen clutching a copy of Andrew Roberts’s History of the English Speaking People, acres of newsprint appeared on this elegant apologia for neo-conservatism. Now his successor in the White House wants us to know that he has a well-thumbed copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals; and just in case you missed that, the publishers have helpfully emblazoned the front of the UK paperback edition with the headline ‘The Book that Inspired Barack Obama’. He could have done much worse. For Team of Rivals is one of the best biographical histories I have read in years.

Bevis Hillier

Shrine of a connoisseur

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian London. It is clearly the monument of someone both eccentric and egocentric. What saves it from being Hearst Castle, Liberace’s palace or Michael Jackson’s Neverland, is that its creator was a great architect — the Bank of England was his masterpiece. In the early 1790s Soane and his rich wife bought No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was rebuilt to Soane’s designs, and they moved there in 1794.

Jonathan Sumption

Doomed to despotism

Khomeini’s Ghost, by Con Coughlin The Life and Death of the Shah, by Gholam Reza Afkhami The fall of the Shah of Iran at the beginning of 1979 took the world by surprise. A self-confident autocrat, supported by a large, American trained and equipped army and a ubiquitous and powerful security service, he was driven from power in less than six months by a motley alliance of middle-class liberals, clerical fanatics and student demonstrators, without a blow being struck in his defence. The impression of sudden cataclysm was accentuated by the character of the Shah’s successor: a bearded Islamic ideologue, who flew in from Paris after 15 years in exile. All the signs are that the diplomatic and intelligence services of the West were as unprepared as every one else.

Cressida Connolly

A thoroughly good egg

A friend who belongs to an old-fashioned London club tells me that all anecdotes related within its walls are met with one of only three accepted responses: Great Fun, Rather Fun and Shame. Stanley I Presume is rather fun. It would have been great fun if the author was less discreet and less loyal and less scrupulous, because his life story — the first 40 years of which makes up the present volume — has been crammed with incident. Stanley Johnson has worked as a spy, a pioneering environmentalist and a Member of the European Parliament. As a youth he rode from London to Afghanistan on a motorcycle, hitch-hiked across South America and won a prestigious poetry prize.

Alberto Manguel

Reading between the lines

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. If the promoters of the e-book have their way, personal libraries of the future will consist of intricate cyber-memories holding thousands of volumes conjured up at the touch of a finger, while the reader, bounded in an electronic nutshell, will count himself a king of infinite space. Gone will be the pleasures of sitting in a book-lined room watched by the ghosts of the garrulous dead, gone the unique feeling of companionship and awe that the accumulation of books over a lifetime can inspire. Gone too the harmless and prurient delight of peering through someone else’s shelves in order to catch a glimpse of his secrets and foibles.

Hugh Cecil

In a class of his own

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. As Fellow and then Warden of Wadham College from 1922 to 1970 and successively Professor of Poetry, Vice Chancellor of the University and President of the British Academy, this short, powerfully built, unbeautiful, but magnetic man for years gave the tone to the university. He was a brilliant wit and a challenging and imaginative college tutor. Late in his career, he fought an intelligent rearguard defence of the University’s independence. His biographer, Leslie Mitchell, well-known for his works on Whig history, has drawn on years of local Oxford knowledge and unpublished manuscript material for this penetrating portrait.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Now universally acknowledged

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, by Claire Harman What does Mr Darcy look like? Anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice will be able to give an answer. I believe that he is tall, square-jawed, beetle-browed, slightly weather-beaten and dark-haired. Is any of that at all controversial? But on returning to the novel, we find a strange thing. The one feature in that list which I would have thought beyond dispute is that he has dark hair. This, however, is what Jane Austen has to say about his personal appearance. On his first entry, he is said to have a fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien …The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr Bingley.

Lee Langley

On the waterfront | 4 April 2009

Geoff Dyer is the least categorisable of writers. Give him a genre and he’ll bend it; pigeonhole him and he’ll break out. Clever, funny, an intellectual with a resolutely bloke-ish stance; irreverent and incorrigibly subversive, this is the man who set off to write a study of D. H. Lawrence and came up with Out of Sheer Rage, a rant against academia in which Lawrence figured as a spear-carrier. His book about jazz, But Beautiful, started life as a critical study, and in its final form combined laconic history with poignant vignettes; short stories that uncovered the heart and soul of the music. Fiction as truth.

Maggie Fergusson

The world of big brother

If the past is a foreign country, who governs it? Who has the right, particularly in dealing with his parents and siblings, to patent very private memories, and sell them to the public? These are questions that generally nag at the readers of family memoirs, and it is a measure of the quality of The Music Room that it does not provoke them. William Fiennes is driven neither by self-indulgence nor a desire to rub salt into old wounds, but by an urge to comprehend and dignify the past, in its joys and its sorrows; to give it shape and meaning. This is, essentially, a prequel to The Snow Geese, Fiennes’s highly-acclaimed, prize-winning first book in which he recorded a journey, both physical and spiritual, undertaken in his late twenties.

Francis King

Opposites attracted

Privately printed books are now all too often castigated as ‘vanity publishing.’ But at a time when publishers pay vast advances for the ghosted memoirs of people ‘celebrated’ for kicking balls around or howling into microphones but refuse to take a minuscule financial risk on one as elegantly written and entertaining as this one, that old pejorative must surely be abandoned. Lord (Anthony) Quinton is a distinguished academic, the breadth of whose interests is indicated by the title of a previous book of his, From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein. His American wife Marcelle is a talented painter.

Jonathan Keates

Darwin — from worms to collops

By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations. By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations. An avalanche of major exhibitions, international conferences, TV and radio series — everything, indeed, short of a movie starring Brad and Angelina — is accompanied by a perfect tsunami of books made saleable by association with the bald, bearded sage of Down House.

Allan Massie

Passionate friendships

Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Nevertheless, writing of the relationship between the two young men who share most of the narrative in Redgauntlet, Professor David Hewitt, editor of the splendid Edinburgh Edition, declares ‘Alan and Darsie are in love with each other. There is absolutely no suggestion of their relationship being physical, but the love is overt.

Saturday

Sam Leith

All in good faith

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, by Andrew Lih Who would have known that mixed into the aggregate at the foundations of what by now must be the most consulted encyclopedia in the history of the world would be Ayn Rand, options-pricing theory, Kropotkin, table napkins, soft porn and a Hawaiian airport shuttle-bus? This being the internet, you might have guessed at soft porn — a sometime minor business interest of its founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales. But the rest? These are interesting times for the culture of knowledge, and the story of the evolution of Wikipedia, with its utopian belief in collective good faith, its roots in hacker culture and its history of ingenious bricolage, is at the centre of them.

Adam Zamoyski

The end of the affair | 28 March 2009

Given the anti-Americanism displayed on every possible occasion by the French since the days of De Gaulle, and the crudely expressed contempt with which Americans have responded, particularly over the past decade, it is easy to forget that the two nations once enjoyed a relationship even more ‘special’ than the supposedly exclusive one between Britain and the United States. That relationship, which began with Benjamin Franklin’s seduction of French society and Lafayette’s participation in the American revolution, blossomed into a love affair in the two decades following the Great War. Many Americans who had fought in it stayed behind. The comparatively low cost of living permitted penniless writers and artists, as well as society ladies, to congregate in Paris.