More from Books

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

The origin of the theory

Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel In 1858, on the brink of publishing his theory of evolution, which I discussed here three weeks ago, Charles Darwin took a hydropathic rest cure at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. While walking on the sandy heath, he caught a glimpse of ‘the rare Slave-making Ant & saw the little black niggers in their Master’s nests’. A certain species of red ant kidnaps the young of a smaller black ant and rears them as unwitting slave workers in the service of the red queen. Darwin had heard about this phenomenon but had not till then seen it. Darwin’s upbringing had been steeped in the anti-slavery movement.

Christopher Booker

Mind over matter

Why Us?, by James Le Fanu The past half-century has seen the most astonishing concentration of scientific discoveries in history. In physical terms, from the Big Bang to the Double Helix, our understanding of the universe, of life and ourselves has been extended with an intensity and on a scale that may never be repeated. And in terms of cracking the riddle of what allows ourselves and all other species to function, no discoveries held more promise than the unravelling of the genetic code which drives all life and of those workings of the human brain uncovered by neuroscience. But in each case, as Dr James Le Fanu shows in his enthralling book, these have brought us up against a dead end.

Raymond Carr

Behind the fighting lines

M. R. D. Foot confesses that he has always endeavoured to follow Whistler’s counsel, ‘Not a day without a line’. His written output is impressive and his judgments severe on those who do not come up to his standards. Heinz Koeppler, his boss at a Foreign Office study centre, with his fawning on his superiors and bullying of his staff, turned out not to be a gentleman. Foot makes clear in his first chapter that he himself comes of gentleman stock and is proud of it. True, his father married a Gaiety Theatre chorus girl; but his grandfather had married an heiress, retired as a general from the army to set up as a country gentleman.

Andro Linklater

The Natures of Maps

Is this map of birds’ migratory routes informative or deceptive? Does it create the impression that nature is flourishing when it is really in decay? In today’s golden age of cartography, when technology has lifted mapmaking to an unprecedented level of sophistication, The Natures of Maps wants to be a party-pooper. Maps, it declares, pretend to be objective when their information is really political and selective. It seems a rather obvious message. The prejudices of mapmakers have been apparent at least since the 14th century when the monkish creators of the Mappa Mundi placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world. This book is, however, aimed at geography students, and assumes a degree of gullibility not to be found among Spectator readers.

John De-Falbe

One-man triumph

The Companion to British History (Third Edition), by Charles Arnold Baker Readers familiar with the first edition of The Companion to British History (Loncross, 1997) will already know that its value as a reference work proceeds from an inclusive attitude towards its subject. Besides providing the rudiments — monarchs, battles etc — the CBH was particularly strong on the constitution, law, local history, the Empire, anecdote, circumstance, and much else. It was also a useful stand-in for The Dictionary of National Biography. This third edition comes again with the glorious yellow jacket (which Routledge’s second edition discarded), but it has many more entries. We can read, for example, a crisp two-page summary of the Blair and Brown Government.

Marcus Berkmann

Perfectly unreliable

Memoirs? No one writes them any more. If you wish to distinguish yourself from the sweaty masses, you are far better off publishing a diary, or notebook, call it what you will (Frederic Raphael naturally calls it a cahier). To publish one, of course, you need to have written one, ideally some years ago, full of gossip and spleen and brutal judgments on your contemporaries, some of whom are now dead, and the rest of whom soon will be when they read it. It may not have the form or the contrivance of a memoir — it may, in truth, ramble a bit — but we will forgive this because, its writer will assure us, it was never written for publication.

Philip Ziegler

Challenging Zeus

Senior civil servants are generally expected to be shadowy figures, influential rather than powerful, discreet rather than flamboyant, probably — in Gladwyn’s generation at any rate — educated at Winchester. To describe such a being as a Titan might seem an oxymoron. The Titans, it will be remembered, were a family of giants who had the temerity to challenge Zeus and duly got their comeuppance. In this well-researched and thoughtful book Sean Greenwood convinces one that in the case of Lord Gladwyn — not least in the ill-judged challenge to the superiority of Zeus — this far-fetched analogy is amply justified.

Wednesday

Andro Linklater

Freedom and houghmagandie

The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, by Robert Crawford Robert Burns: A Biography, by Patrick Scott Hogg How to account for the phenomenon of Robert Burns? Not the man or his poetry, but the national icon, a Caledonian amalgam of Alexander Pushkin and Bob Marley? The process of idolisation began with the instant acclaim that greeted the publication of Burns’ first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786. That it continues today in this the 250th anniversary of his birth is demonstrated by the publication of two new biographies. But to explain why is harder than it might seem. Logically Scotland and Burns should have been incompatible.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 21 January 2009

Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops — and above all about its inhabitants. Her latest novel, Portobello (Hutchinson, £18.99), is almost incidentally a crime story. The road of the title provides the spine of a narrative that shifts expertly between groups of characters in widely disparate social settings. An art dealer tries to conceal his pathetically plausible guilty secret from his GP fiancée.

Chris Skidmore

Pawns in the royal game

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle Only recently a portrait minature by Lavina Teerlinc was identified as being of Lady Jane Grey. Her diminutive size, coiffed red hair and crimson lips had suggested that it might be her — except that the eyes are blue, while Jane’s were known to be brown; but Teerlinc was accustomed to giving all her subjects blue eyes. It is all we have; no other portrait of Jane is known to exist. The absence of a recognisable image reflects the problem facing any historian wishing to study her. The evidence is simply not there to form a credible description, let alone a biography, of England’s shortest reigning monarch.

Lee Langley

Troubled waters

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history. Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have the conquest of Sindh, the botched finale of the British Raj, Independence, and the horrors of Partition.

Christopher Ondaatje

The life of the heart

Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from the Love Affair of a Lifetime edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Roberts It is probable that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a virgin ten years after her marriage to Alan Cameron, the retired Secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting at the BBC. Victoria Glendinning tells us that ‘their alliance was always close — but companionable, not sexual.

Alberto Manguel

No longer at home

The Writer as Migrant, by Ha Jin Three quest-ions, labelled as ‘Aristot- elian’ by the author, begin the Rice University Campbell Lectures delivered by Ha Jin in 2007: to whom, as whom, and in whose interest does a writer write? To which the reader might respond: can any writer truthfully answer any of these questions? The identity of a writer and of his readers is a matter debated long before Aristotle and well into the groves of post-modernist academe. From Homer blindly taking dictation from his muse to Joyce sweating away in the smithy of his soul, the writer has been perceived by himself and by his audience as innumerable things, none truer than another. Ha Jin’s own experience exemplifies these changes of identity.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

An unlikely bestseller

2666, by Roberto Bolaño Not every writer would write a novel in the form of a completely invented encyclopaedia of imaginary writers and call the result Nazi Literature in the Americas. Not everyone, either, would write a novel in two paragraphs, the second less than 12 words long, or produce a novel about a torturer-poet who writes his work in jet-trails in the sky. As soon as Roberto Bolaño came to the attention of the world, it was clear that, however extraordinary his work seemed in formal design and subject, he might have something even more extraordinary under wraps. After his death in 2003, word emerged from the Spanish-speaking world of a gigantic novel called 2666.

Raymond Carr

Horses decline, dogs advance

The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, by Tamsin Pickeral Dogs: History, Myth, Art, by Catherine Johns The Horse: A Celebration of Horses in Art, by Rachel and Simon Barnes These three books are concerned with the representation in art of man’s most successfully domesticated wild animals,: the dog and the horse. Dogs, as carnivores, domesticated themselves as early as 14000 BC, picking up scraps of meat left lying around by our prehistoric ancestors. Horses, as herbivores, were not attracted to such scraps. They were captured in the wild and broken in. Dogs were Jacks-of-all-trades.

Theodore Dalrymple

The unselfish gene

On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor Whenever I say to someone that I do not believe that there is a universal human right to healthcare, that person always asks whether, then, I want to see people dying in the street from treatable disease. I in turn ask that person whether he can think of any reason for not allowing people to die in the street other than that they have a right to treatment. The fact that, as often as not, the person has great difficulty with this question suggests not only that our state, but our minds and moral imaginations have become highly bureaucratised. There is no doubt, I think, that we have difficulty with the notion of kindness nowadays.

Ian Thomson

On the run in the Rockies

The Outlander, by Gil Adamson The Outlander, a strikingly good first novel by the Canadian poet Gil Adamson, is a drama of extremity and isolation set in the Rocky Mountains of Canada in the early 1900s. Much of it reads like a pastiche Western with elements of supernatural grotesquerie out of Stephen King or even The X-Files. Turn-of-the-century Alberta is portrayed as a menacing backwater, where settlers are in danger of being scalped by Crow Indians and fur-trappers disembowelled. Into this pioneer territory comes Mary Boulton, a 19-year-old housewife who has just murdered her husband. In physical and emotional disarray, she is on the run from her brothers-in-law, who want her blood in return for the crime committed.

Anne Applebaum

Arthur at Camelot

Journals: 1952-2000, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger Before sitting down with this hefty doorstopper of a diary, first ask yourself whether you agree — or can imagine yourself agreeing — with the entry Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made on 27 March 1950: ‘I adore sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen exchanging gossip over drinks.’ If you do, or can, then you will enjoy this book, for it largely consists of a half-century’s worth of gossip, most of it obtained by sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen over drinks.

David Crane

His own best biographer

Byron in Love, by Edna O’Brien ‘We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem,’ wrote Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, when the young Byron was unwise enough to expose his first, dismal book of juvenilia to the gaze of ‘Citizen Mob’, ‘and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers or differently expressed’. It is as well for a lot of us that there seem to be different standards for biographers ,because there can be even less to be said for a new book about Byron than there is for most literary retreads.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Getting the detail right

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’ Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses.