More from Books

Friday

Selina Hastings

Friends and enemies

The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles and Reviews, by Diana Mitford, edited by Deborah Devonshire Nancy was the only one of the six Mitford sisters who, throughout her life, bitterly complained of the fact that she had not been sent to school. Her younger sister, Diana, on the other hand, dreaded the very thought of school, and when they were children it was one of Nancy’s favourite teases to pretend she had overheard their parents planning to pack Diana off. ‘I was talking about you to Muv and Farve,’ Nancy would begin, a wicked gleam in her eye. ‘We were saying how good it would be for you to go away to school.

Anita Brookner

A grand overview

This unassuming book is in fact a valuable addition to the Proust bibliography. The author, himself a painter, has had the apparently simple idea of extracting all references to works of art in the great novel in an attempt to demonstrate Proust’s knowledge of, and reliance on, paintings to give resonance to his characters and to present them to his readers in an indelible physical form. The exercise proves both seductive and enlightening. Proust was a translator of Ruskin, yet he rejected Ruskin’s message that art has a moral foundation. For Proust art was a self-explanatory and self-sustaining exercise which excluded praise and condemnation. His work is filled with characters who are undoubtedly venal.

William Leith

Beyond the wildest dreams

Collections of Nothing, by William Davies King At the start of this memoir, the author, a college professor in California, describes a scene from his divorce. He walks into the garage of his former family house, and looks at his possessions, which his wife has put there. He sees the stuff you’d expect — the shirts, the tools, the ‘bags of shoes’. And he also sees his collection. This is the subject of this book, and it’s pretty weird, because this guy is a ‘collector of nothing’. He’s an obsessive collector of junk. And when he looks at this junk, in this garage, he has a moment of clarity. He realises how weird he is. ‘These things looked like signs of hoarding,’ he says, ‘which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.

Pj Kavanagh

A balancing act

If anyone should wince at a hint of aggression in the title of this book — and some Catholics might — let him or her remember or read Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), in which every Spaniard is a sallow coward, every priest a slinking prevaricator and every Protestant Englishman an apple-cheeked exemplar of straightforwardness and truth. At least, that is how I remember it, with astonishment; a high point in 300 years of anti-Catholic propaganda. Tit for tat is never a good idea, but balance is, and this collection of 16 portrait-biographies by different hands can be thought of as a contribution towards fairness.

Patrick Marnham

Photopoetry

Photopoetry, by Manuel Alvarez Bravo Manuel Alvarez Bravo, born in 1902, lived to be 100 and worked as a photographer in Mexico for eight decades. He was destined to spend his life as a clerk in a provincial tax office but escaped with the help of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. This collection, which contains 370 of his images, confirms his versatility. His work included landscapes, portraits, reportage, nudes and occasional excursions into surrealism. It is frequently described as ‘mysterious’ by critics looking for context or commitment. But there is no mystery; it is just that Bravo was generally more interested in form than in argument. He was not concerned with telling a story, and the titles he felt compelled to add to his pictures are generally a distraction.

Simon Heffer

Unkind hearts and Jews

Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman It was the second or third time that I ever saw Kind Hearts and Coronets that I noticed in the opening credits: ‘Based on the novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman’. It prompted a ten-year search for the book in secondhand shops that finished in a dusty corner of a Suffolk village more than a quarter-of-a-century ago. I am not given to hyperventilation, but on that occasion came perilously close to it. I have never seen another copy, and a search on the internet returns only pleas by would-be readers to find them a copy. Mine is the 1948 reprint, with an introduction by Hugh Kingsmill. In its tatty but intact dust-wrapper, and with a scribble telling me I paid 60p for it in 1982, it is apparently now worth hundreds.

Fionn Morgan

Beautiful, dandified detachment

‘Christmas without Ian,’ wrote my mother, ‘was a bleak affair. He was always there at Christmas.’ My mother was Ann Fleming and Ian the man the centennial of whose birth we have so markedly been celebrating this past year. There was another man who was always there at Christmas: Peter Quennell, of whom Paul Johnson wrote in these pages, ‘There has never been another bruiser like Behan or writing toff like Quennell’ (‘And Another Thing’, 6 September 2008). Peter Quennell, or P. Q. as his fourth wife, Spider, called him, was not born a toff. (Spider was christened Sonia, but on account of the length of her elegant limbs Peter named her Spider Monkey; and so she remains.) P. Q.’s father had been an architect. His mother was an artist.

Justin Cartwright

Christmas Short Story

When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas by Justin Cartwright In 1920, at the age of 38, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father, Hermann, accusing him of ruining his life by his dictatorial and insensitive behaviour, which left him lacking in self-belief and unable to escape his father’s dominance. Kafka never sent this letter to his father, but instead showed it to friends. Justin Cartwright imagines the father’s reply. My dear Franz, Your letter to me, which I read with disgust and sorrow, is the product of your oversensitive imagination and your weak constitution, both of which are, alas, faults with which you were born.

Wednesday

Byron Rogers

Boldly for restoration

Wales, by Simon Jenkins Last year, having been to Scotland, I called on the mother of an old friend. Mrs Molly Jones of Carmarthen, I found to my great surprise, was very enthusiastic about Scotland. It was so unlike Wales, she said. All those castles . . . ‘But Mrs Jones, there are castles at six-mile intervals from where you’re sitting.’ ‘Yes, but they’re so . . . well . . . dilapidated.’ The first delightful thing about this gazeteer to what his publishers describe as ‘the best Welsh buildings’ is that Simon Jenkins is quietly, and sometimes not quietly at all, of her persuasion. This is Jenkins on Caernarfon, the best preserved (having had a 19th-century makeover) of all Welsh castles.

William Leith

Dark and creepy

The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. Eccentrics and attention-seekers, I’d always assumed. And here, I saw that they refer to themselves, rather grandly, as ‘anti-Stratfordians’. So, why do these people think that the man named William Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1516, and who died there in 1564, did not write the plays and the sonnets, then? Well, say the anti-Stratfordians, Brenda James and William D.

Andro Linklater

The devil’s work

Timing is all. In 1969 Margaret Atwood’s An Edible Woman was published, and its iconic portrayal of women moulded into objects for male consumption caught the crest of the feminist wave and surfed into the shelves of required reading. Almost four decades on, Payback, her meditation on the nature of debt, appears just as the world is freefalling into an economic trough. Has she given voice to the zeitgeist again? If so, we are entering a world of stern reciprocity — as you sow so shall you reap — in place of the pickpocket exuberance of free-market economics. The debt on Atwood’s mind is always double-headed.

Hugh Cecil

Memoirs of the Great War

Survivors of a Kind, by Brian Bond In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of the military memoirs of the first world war, bearing all the authority of a life- time’s work on the British Army. With some of the 20-odd names in this book the reader will be familiar: Siegfried Sassoon’s and Robert Graves’ sworks have stayed in print, and it is fair to say that most British people’s views of the Great War today are largely shaped by Goodbye to All That and, if not by Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man or Siegfried’s Journey, at least by poems like ‘Base Details’.

Saturday

Jason Goodwin

At Home in Turkey

If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin Torolsan’s informative text explores the inspiration behind such gems as a classical wooden yali on the Bosphorus; a rustic chalet in the mountains; a tea-planters mansion on the Black Sea; a Cappadocian cave-dwelling, with beautifully hewn piers and arches.

Colin Amery

Differences and similarities

West Workroom towards a new sobriety in architecture theory + practice, by Paolo Conrad-Bercah+w office (including contributions from Daniel Sherer, Pierluigi Panza and George Baird) ‘This is not a book….’ These are the opening words of this initially unfathomable paperback volume of architectural ramblings. It has been assembled as an account of the work of a Milan-based architecture practice, West Workroom. The firm designs commercial, residential and institutional buildings, with a special emphasis on functional offices and other workplaces.

Wednesday

Michael Cockerell

The view from the middle lane

The Hugo Young Papers: Thirty Years of British Politics — Off the Record, by Hugo Young, edited by Ion Trewin The late Hugo Young was the political columnist of the chattering classes. This book, rather more grandly, describes him as the ‘the Pope of the liberal left’. A lifelong Cath- olic, educated by Ampleforth monks and Balliol dons, in his twice weekly Guardian columns he combined moral authority with shrewd insights into the ways of political man. His mission was to promote liberal democracy and a united Europe. He quotes the left-wing Tony Benn in 1986 ‘chiding me for my centrist views, saying that my position was that of giving my Episcopal benediction to all shifts to the centre’.

Jonathan Keates

Living the legend

My Judy Garland Life, by Susie Boyt The story of Judy Garland is a magnificent example of the truth that life imitates art. Things would surely have been different had she stuck to being Frances Ethel Gumm of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. As it was, the trajectory of her life under the stage name she assumed at the age of 12, as part of a travelling vaudeville act, had a blighted glamour more appropriate to verismo opera than to the cinema screen. Complete with an abusive father and drunken mother, five marriages, abortion and attempted suicide, the entire scenario transcended the wildest aspirations of melodrama. The irony of a drug overdose carrying off The Wizard of Oz’s cute little Dorothy, mascot of can-do America, offered a final ghastly flourish to the story.

Elfreda Pownall

Saints and sinners

With the publication of their Christmas cookery books, Nigella, Jamie, Delia and Gordon all have a brand image, or a halo, to polish. Nigella’s brand is greedy, kitsch, sexy and celebratory, and in Nigella Christmas (Chatto & Windus, £25) she has found her perfect subject. The book is fun, but it is also very thorough: it is the best book on cooking Christmas lunch, ever. Her ‘superjuicy’ turkey is exactly that, but there are good recipes for five other Christmas lunches and good innovative ‘trimmings’. Sadly the book is hideous to look at.

Justin Marozzi

Dirty diggers

The Buddha & Dr Fuhrer, by Charles Allen Charles Allen’s latest book on India has a suitably exotic, occasionally improb- able, cast of characters. Centre stage is Dr Anton Führer, an unscrupulous German archaeologist hell-bent on discovering the legendary — and legendarily elusive — city of Kapilavastu, where the Buddha grew into manhood as Prince Siddhartha. Then there is the thoroughly decent British landowner, William Claxton Peppé, who in 1898 made an astonishing find: a reliquary casket, surrounded by a dazzling collection of jewels and gold, purporting to contain the ashes of the Buddha.

Barry Unsworth

A rose-tinted view of the bay

The Ancient Shore, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller Variety of impression, diversity of atmosphere and mood, incongruities of many kinds, these are only to be expected in books on travel, and perhaps particularly in one concerning Naples. But The Ancient Shore is by two hands, and there is a radical difference in style and method that makes it virtually impossible to discuss the book as if it were of a piece.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 December 2008

‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’ Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is full of delights. A submarine has stalled on the ocean floor, and Willy and his teddy bear, Randolph, set out on the back of the Rightwayup Bird to save it from Konrad the Killer Kipper. On the way they are helped by Sybil the Seagull, an aspiring author and correspondent for the Bird Times who talks loftily about how humans are always plagiarising her articles.