More from Books

Wednesday

Bevis Hillier

A laughing cavalier

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley. What started me off were Leigh Fermor’s variations on William Blake’s couplet: A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage. Leigh Fermor’s first conceit made me cackle: Blackbirds fluttering from a pie Cause four-and-twenty cheers on high. His next: When a pig wanders from its pound The angels call for drinks all round.

Honor Clerk

Morality tale with a difference

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and culture, is at the core of John le Carré’s latest novel.

Robert Salisbury

A safe pair of hands

A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness, by Norman Fowler To write a political memoir is difficult. Too bland, too afraid to be rude about former colleagues, you risk boring the general reader while disappointing your publisher. Too critical, you lose the few friends among your former colleagues you have left, while appearing spiteful and embittered to the general reader. We can all think of examples of ex-ministers in both categories. Nigel Lawson is one of the few among late-20th-century politicians who have avoided both Pooh-traps and produced a memoir which is near to being required reading for the interested amateur. Norman Fowler is no Nigel Lawson.

Melissa Kite

Carrie on shopping

One Fifth Avenue, by Candace Bushnell One of life’s intriguing  mysteries was how Carrie Bradshaw managed to fund a rapacious Manolo Blahnik habit whilst spending her entire working life sitting in her knickers and vest in front of a laptop in her bedroom typing drivel about men. This was skilfully glossed over, and my enjoyment of the wondrous Sex and the City never suffered from it. Slowly, despite myself, I came to believe that there were female columnists in New York who wrote one loosely worded article a week and got paid so much for it that they could afford an apartment in the West Village and a hoard of designer frocks and shoes that would make Imelda Marcos blush.

Geordie Greig

Unruly children as parents

If as a child you found your parents embarrassing then this hiss-and-tell memoir will make you feel a lot better, as Cosmo Landesman had parents who were off the Richter scale of embarrassment. Jay and Fran were two wacky, middle-aged American egotists who arrived in ‘the land of the stiff upper lip’ and caused mayhem. Blind to their own blush-making toxicity, they were obsessed with being famous. Life at home was like a bad sitcom, as they canoodled with their respective lovers in front of their children’s schoolfriends and then, like some grotesque TV reality show, shamelessly paraded their open marriage to the media, the ultimate examples of the look-at-me-me-me generation. Poor little Cosmo blushed and cringed most days as they rode roughshod over his childhood.

Alan Watkins

The end of old Labour

Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there was a tide in politics which prime ministers were powerless to resist. Lord Donoughue’s Downing Street diaries came later. The first volume, on his days as a ‘special adviser’ to Harold Wilson, was dominated not so much by Wilson as by Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender. Indeed, ‘Marcia’s Tantrums’ would have served as a catchier subtitle than ‘With Harold Wilson in No. 10’.

Colin Amery

Back to simplicity

Mlinaric on Decorating, by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric I wish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with it at the dining-room table, where I discovered the rather encouraging information, as I looked at the paint peeling from my Doric columns, that he, the man I had always thought of as the great high priest of the perfect interior, was in fact the begetter of the decorating style known as ‘shabby-chic’.

M R-D-Foot

Stage-effects in earnest

Churchill’s Wizards, by Nicholas Rankin Deception plays a large part in war, just as feinting plays a large part in sport. The British excel at it, and used it with much success in both the 20th century’s world wars, particularly in the second. That war’s conspiracy theorists are fond of suggesting even more deceptions than did in fact take place; luckily, there are now two sound history books by which they can be confuted. If a wartime deception is not mentioned either in Michael Howard’s Strategic Deception of 1990 or in Thaddeus Holt’s The Deceivers of 2004, it is hardly likely that it happened: useful sticks with which to beat scaremongers.

Saturday

Simon Baker

A furious, frazzled youth

Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has recently suffered unrest. He spent his freshman year at college in his native Newark, which enabled him to live at home. It should have been ideal for a quiet boy such as Marcus, who wanted nothing more than to achieve good grades, but his normally easy-going father had a breakdown of sorts which made him irritable and intrusive to the point where Marcus could no longer live with him.

Judith Flanders

Out of the frying pan . . .

Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and Churchill, Rommel and Monty. Too few of these, however, give us authentic voices, telling their own stories. Further, most end with VE or VJ Day, with happy crowds dancing down the Mall. But what came after? How did families reconnect after six years of separation, privation, horror and fear?

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Getting even

Just Me, by Sheila Hancock My Word is My Bond, by Roger Moore Me Cheeta, by Cheeta Everyone knows what the Hollywood autobiography is like. It contains the assurance that the author has been made to feel exceptionally ‘humble’ exactly at those points where someone ordinary might expect to feel smug and triumphant — a knighthood, or an Oscar. (‘The citation specified it was for my work for charity, which was particularly humbling.’) It contains the parting expression that the hero or heroine is really overwhelmed by the feeling of good luck. (‘How blessed am I to have experienced such love … I am a very lucky, lucky woman.

Graham Stewart

That worthless piece of paper

Munich, by David Faber David Faber’s account of the Munich crisis has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the four-power conference that made appeasement a dirty word.  But it is timely as well as commemorative.  True, the recent comparisons drawn between Hitler and Putin are dangerously misplaced. Nonetheless, Western politicians are finding themselves debating the same sort of issues over Georgia — with Ukraine and the Baltic States to follow — that divided their forebears over Hitler’s Czechoslovakian demands in 1938. Are national boundaries inviolate or subject to revision along ethnic grounds? Would offering guarantees to small countries protect them or make confrontation from their big neighbour more certain?

Charlotte Moore

Meet the disposable family

The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon ‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on the run from her older, widowed husband, Gavin, thrusts a bag bulging with diaries and fictionalised autobiography into Emily’s hand. ‘Please don’t read them’, says Sappho. Of course I meant to read them, Emily silently tells the reader. I am a mother, and have my daughter’s best interests at heart.

Jerome De-Groot

A jealous addiction

The Act of Love, by Howard Jacobson From ‘Readers’ Wives’ to Molly Bloom, the idea of a man somehow sharing his loved one sexually is a common and complex one. ‘No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else’, asserts Felix Quinn, the pompous narrator of Howard Jacobson’s latest taboo-breaker. As he recounts the story of his seduction-by-proxy of his own wife, he runs through the canon of voyeuristic wife-pimping from Herodotus’s account of Candaules and Gyges through Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’ to Pierre Klosowski by way, repeatedly, of Othello. Quinn’s rather twisted, masochistic point is that jealous love fears loss; better to have a hand in the process.

Lucy Hugheshallett

Slippery slopes

Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing up plans to transport forces to Germany, a nation he assumed would be his ally. Nine months later, after protracted secret negotiations with both groups of combatants, Italy switched allegiance and entered the war on the side of France and Britain. Foreign observers concluded that the Italians were, in Asquith’s words, ‘voracious, slippery and perfidious’.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 24 September 2008

Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1979), by Philip Pullman Before Lyra, before polar bears and His Dark Materials, and before his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, in 1982, Philip Pullman was a lowly drudge in the very humblest halls of lexicography. Pullman in fact spent his earliest career in teaching, working at various Oxford middle schools before moving in 1986 to Westminster College, where he taught B. Ed. students. In 1979 he did some jobbing work for Oxford University Press and produced the booklet at hand, Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (his name appears only on the inside cover, though he is the sole author).

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Out of the West

No life of quiet desperation for Ansel Adams (1902-84). He was at his happiest tramping around the sublime countryside of the American West, with a camera and tripod strapped to his back, taking photographs of the mountains, canyons, rivers, forests and clouds he met along the way. And what photographs they are! Their warmth and fine detail are testament to Adams’ unique methods, as well as to his ability to look beyond the surface of things and offer up new visions of old subjects. Much like Walt Whitman’s poetry, they sing: this is America, it is electric. 120 of Adams’ finest works are collated in Quercus’ handsome new volume.

Allan Massie

Loving or hating your subject

Allan Massie on Life & Letters ‘Reviewing two books about Hemingway in The Spectator (19 August 2006) Caroline Moorehead asked: ‘How far is it right for biographers to write about subjects they so patently dislike? Hemingway is portrayed as bullying, narcissistic, foul-tempered, slovenly and miserly.’ No doubt he was all these things, some of the time anyway, but the question remains a fair one. In his defence, the author of the book in which Hemingway is so portrayed, Stephen Koch, might argue that all these epithets might also be applied to the Hemingway depicted by his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, and by his admiring friend or, in some people’s opinion, sidekick, A. E. Hotchner.

Philip Hoare

Out of depth

Leviathan or, The Whale, by Philip Hoare On the beautiful jacket of this book, a whale disappears from view. Its blue flukes are all that are left behind as its body slips away unseen. That tail-only view has become what we know of the whale. It is the picture of our ignorance. We don’t know how long whales live. We don’t really know how many there are. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know what their clicks and creaks mean. Nor what damage the three or four centuries of hunting has done to their social networks, or to their understanding of their oceanic world. We know next to nothing about them. Philip Hoare’s new and voluminous book about them is, in that way, a long exploration of an absence. That isn’t how it was. Whales used to be to hand.

Wednesday

Caroline Moorehead

A war of words

Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost all normal rights to speak out, each was forced to question every thought and ask himself: ‘Rather than death...?’ In practice, most of the writers and academics who remained in France after 1940 simply kept their heads down and went on with their own work. Sartre himself had several of his plays staged. There was, however, a number of these men and women for whom collaboration of any kind was immediately intolerable. One of these was a 46-year-old art historian and ethnographer, divorced mother of two adult sons, called Agnès Humbert.