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Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The Ingmar Bergman Archives

Like the crusader knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), we all eventually lose our chess game with Death. And that includes Bergman himself, who passed away only last year, leaving an immense cinematic void as he did so. He bequeathed us 62 films, a good proportion of which are among the greatest and most enigmatic art works of the 20th century.  We will, quite simply, never see their like again. Taschen’s immense book, The Ingmar Bergman Archives, feels, then, like something of a final eulogy to the man and his art. If so, what an elegant and loving one it is. Each of Bergman’s films receives due attention, with essays, still photographs and new material from the director’s own archives.

S E-G-Hopkin

Life among the dead

‘There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.’ The Graveyard Book has one of the most arresting opening sentences one could imagine. Fortunately, Neil Gaiman then leaves melodrama for something much more interesting and thoughtful. By chance, as a toddler, Bod, the central character of the story escapes the assassin who has killed his family, and wanders into a graveyard, where he is adopted by the ghosts. Gaiman observes one of the principal rules of fantasy, which is to have rules — nothing is duller than a dream-world where anything can happen. The ghosts of his world stay as they were at the moment of their deaths, and cannot usually leave the place where they were buried.

John De-Falbe

Hope and Glory

Home, by Marilynne Robinson Marilynne Robinson’s magnificent previous novel, Gilead, was structured as a letter by the elderly, ailing Reverend John Ames to his young son. A persistent theme was the fear that Jack Boughton, the black sheep son of his dearest friend, would exercise a malign influence on his wife and boy after his death. Home is a counterpart rather than a sequel: read independently, it would still be astounding. Narrated in the third person, the novel concerns the home of the widowed Reverend John Boughton, a former Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa.

Oliver Gilmour

Wit and brio

Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, by John Lucas Damn awful thing, what! [The Ring] — Barbarian load of Nazi thugs, aren’t they? ‘No one can honestly maintain that the lives of musicians make exciting reading’, claimed Beecham in his autobiography, A Mingled Chime. If you were to have a wager, you would put it on Tommy Beecham to defy the odds. He was kaleidoscopic. He described his own book as ‘demi-semi-autobiographical’, and said that ‘it’s mingled because it concerns everything under the sun’. He might have added that it is also mangled. Beecham was an embroiderer, ‘a natural dissembler’ in John Lucas’s phrase, and many familiar stories do not feature in this impeccably researched biography.

Michael Carlson

This is America

Homicide, by David Simon; Death Dyed Blonde, by Stanley Reynolds David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter who, having spent a Christmas Eve observing the city’s homicide squad, somehow got the department’s permission to spend an entire year with them as a ‘police intern’. The result, in 1991, was this stunning book, now published for the first time in this country, following the massive critical success of the television show Simon created, The Wire. The Wire may be the first programme praised in the media by more people, at least in this country, than have seen it on screen, which may define a cult classic.

Edward Norman

A dark and desolate world

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, by Rowan Williams While the Anglican communion has been disintegrating, its symbolical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been writing an analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels. This in itself presents a need for explanation: Dostoevsky has generally been assessed as an habitué of the territory between agnosticism and atheism, but Rowan Williams sees him as the author of ‘a Christocentric apologetic’. Yet the characters in Dostoevsky are miserable and dysfunctional obsessives in the main; neurotic and repulsive creations of a mind that many have judged intellectually and morally opaque. In the 19th century and throughout the Soviet era Dostoevsky’s critics considered his books unhealthy.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A world too wide

Every new biographer of Shakespeare walks splat into the same old problem. What to say? Since he can’t tell us anything we don’t know, he must either tell us things we do know or things we don’t need to know. Jonathan Bate’s ingot-heavy volume announces, in its lackadaisical title, an intention to take all possible routes and to examine not just Shakespeare’s ‘life’ but his ‘world’ and ‘mind’ too. Where Bate offers facts he is sound, but he tends to theorise excessively and he devotes whole chapters to stimulating irrelevances like Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech of 1588 and the Earl of Essex’s botched coup of 1601.

Philip Ziegler

The quarrels of brothers

Masters and Commanders, by Andrew Roberts; Behind Closed Doors, by Laurence Rees Andrew Roberts is one of the liveliest as well as the most considerable of contemporary historians. He is hard-working and exceptionally well-informed, lucid, highly intelligent, pugnacious, occasionally perverse (though much less often than he used to be), combining an impressive grasp of the overall picture with a fine eye for the illuminating detail. He also writes uncommonly well. The Masters are Churchill and Roosevelt: the first considering himself a master of high strategy and certainly with much experience in that field; the second without any pretensions to such expertise but still vested with enormous powers — far more absolute, indeed, than any that Churchill ever enjoyed.

Justin Cartwright

The coven reconvenes

The Widows of Eastwick, by John Updike The Witches of Eastwick was published in 1984; it was a retrospective cele- bration of the new sexual liberties and powers available to women in the 1960s. The book aroused interest both by its unexpected boldness of design and by its frankness and it became a successful movie. Three young women, all living in Eastwick, Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart and Sukie Rougemont, abandoned their husbands and neglected their children in favour of a more louche life with a charming scoundrel called Darryl Van Horne. In his house, the Lennox Mansion, Van Horne dabbled in magic and involved the women in his pot-smoking, hot-tub shenanigans, diabolism and sexual experimentation.

D.J. Taylor

A master of drab grotesques

Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far into itself, and a writer feeding entirely off his own imagination rather than the world beyond it. Hamilton revivals, which come round every five years or so, usually concentrate on his London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (1929-34), or Hangover Square (1941), but it is nearly two decades since anyone has taken a punt on his second novel, Craven House (1926).

Patrick Marnham

They do things differently there

Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, by Richard Dowden Out of Africa always something new in armchair solutions, with the eternal certainty that none will work. Colonialism? Bad. Decolonisation? Disastrous. Neo-colonialism? Wicked. Bob Geldof? Er, no. So, leave the place alone and its bonjour Mugabe, or worse. For well-wishers from the north it has been a slow learning-curve. Colonialism was designed by Whitehall mandarins and old Wykhamists who knew what was best for the natives. Settlers were sent in to grow food and extract minerals and generally bring the place forward. The settlers managed to grow a vast amount of food, although they needed rather a lot of land to do so profitably, which left the natives feeling restless.

Alan Judd

A question of judgment

A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick This is the third of William Brodrick’s sensitively wrought novels featuring his contemplative monk, Anselm, an attractive and credible Every- man who has occasionally to leave his monastery to investigate ambiguous problems of evil, forgiveness and, in this case, sacrifice. Brodrick’s hero is aptly named since Saint Anselm, an 11th-12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, was a renowned scholastic who defended the faith by intellectual argument rather than by reference to scripture and other authorities. Broderick’s Anselm does much the same in his contemporary investigations, guided by moral reasoning and intuition rather than dogma.

Victoria Glendinning

Live and let die

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 5, 1922-1923, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott; Death & the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died and Was Remembered, by David Ellis The story of a life is also the story of a death, and one of the values of biography is that it enables us to die by proxy — a sort of rehearsal. Biographies of writers, says David Ellis in Death and the Author, are particularly apt, since writers often explore their feelings about dying and are people of ‘superactive consciousness’. As the author of Dying Game, the final volume of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence, Professor Ellis is an authority on Lawrence’s last years.

Jason Goodwin

In the footsteps of Herodotus

The Man who Invented History, by Justin Marozzi When Kristin Scott Thomas told a saucy tale out of Herodotus in the film of The English Patient, sales of The Histories shot up 450 per cent, according to Justin Marozzi, who has taken the seemingly inevitable step of travelling around the Herodotean world in the footsteps of the Father of History. Marozzi bubbles with enthusiasm for the man who was, he says, also the first travel writer, the first prose stylist, the first anthropologist, foreign correspondent, ‘an aspiring geographer, a budding moralist, a skilful dramatist, a high-spirited explorer and an inveterate storyteller’. It’s not an easy act to follow, but Marozzi writes with great vigour and his own observations are always sharp.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Hero to a continent

Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters. Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember the day his father took him to discover the ice.

Christopher Meyer

Only good news will do

There is a startling passage in this book. It recounts an intimate moment (among many, it should be said) between the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and his Secretary of State and long-time adviser, Condoleezza Rice. They are sitting on the porch of Bush’s Texas ranch. It is December 2006 and, after more than three years of war, the situation in Iraq is dire. Bush and Rice are debating the pros and cons of a ‘surge’ — the despatch of five extra brigades to pacify Baghdad. Condi has her doubts, Bush has none. She tells him that if he goes ahead, he has to get it right ‘because you are one of the four or five most consequential Presidents … maybe in our history’. She asks what will happen if the surge does not work.

Mary Keen

Ancient and modern unite

Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir. After ‘a whispering gallery of family meanings, lasting more than a century’, the son and grandson of those most written-about writers has spoken out loud, in a voice of truth and tenderness. When he was 12, his mother left his father, and ‘the warmth left Sissinghurst that day’.

Caroline Moore

Hungry for love

Love All, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Love All is a dreadful title — sounds like the memoirs of a lesbian tennis player — for an elegantly old-fashioned novel. It is set in the late 1960s; but there is little to anchor it to this period: the occasional references to the Beatles, or to Mary Quant, give a temporal specificity so at odds as to seem perversely anachronistic. This is not because Elizabeth Jane Howard’s settings lack physical specificity. Love All is set partly in Maida Vale (indeed, in the very house, with its marble-floored conservatory, where Howard lived with Kingsley Amis in the Sixties) and partly in a village in the West Country: details of interiors, landscapes, food, clothing, gardens, cats, are as ever evoked with intimate and loving detail.

Charlotte Moore

A mystic and an administrator

Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge No eminent Victorian has shaped our daily lives in more ways than Florence Nightingale. Her influence continued far beyond her 20 months of bloodsoaked toil in Scutari and the Crimea. Her vision of a public health-care system was the foundation of the National Health Service. Disassociating nursing from religious vocation and charity work, she initiated the systematic training of hospital nurses. We are rightly shocked when poor hospital hygiene causes preventable disease; it was Nightingale who taught us to be shocked. She reformed army conditions, overturning Wellington’s dictum that British private soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink’.

Caroline Moorehead

The yellow star of courage

Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos ‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the memory it contains.’ The need to see and understand and later to remember is the theme that runs through Berr’s remarkable diary of Jewish persecution in German-occupied Paris in the second world war. There were, she believed, two kinds of people in the world: those who recognised what was happening to the Jews, and who felt with them, and those who either could or would not see. And in the first and ‘preferred’ group were to be found surprisingly few friends, but a great many ‘ordinary people’.