More from Books

Wednesday

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’.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 22 October 2008

The Crows of Pearblossom is a rare children’s book by Aldous Huxley, written in 1944 and published posthumously. It originated as a present for his five-year-old niece Olivia de Haulleville, who often visited Huxley and his wife, Maria, at their ranch in Llano in the Mojave Desert (Olivia later moved to the Greek island of Hydra and became Mrs Yorgo Cassapidis). It was while living on the ranch that Huxley began experimenting seriously with psychotropic drugs such as mescaline and LSD. The story deals with two crows, the female of which wears an apron. Mrs Crow finds that her eggs are being eaten by a Rattlesnake, and after suffering 297 such thefts in a single year (she does not work on Sundays and public holidays) she begs Mr Crow to destroy it.

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

For old times’ sake

A hundred chorus girls sashaying through a Busby Berkeley musical. Bugs Bunny munching nonchalantly on a carrot. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Hollywood’s greatest swordfight (‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ or ‘Captain Blood’ — take your pick). Bette Davis pulling the trigger in ‘Deception’. James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into a moll’s face. Alex and his droogs in the Korova Milk Bar. Heath Ledger’s Joker hissing, ‘Do you know how I got these scars?’ The lilting music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Raoul Walsh. ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. Michael Curtiz. ‘Rio Bravo’. Sam Peckinpah. ‘Dirty Harry’. ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!

Allan Massie

Life & Letters

Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’. His confidence had been high when at work on the novel.

Wednesday

Ben Wilson

The romance of science

The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators,’ reported the geologist William Whewell. ‘But these days are past.’ The meeting was chaired by Coleridge, who vetoed the use of ‘philosopher’; ‘savants’ was instantly rejected as too French. But ‘some ingenious gentlemen’ (including Whewell himself) proposed ‘that, by analogy with “artist”, they might form “scientist” ’.

James Buchan

Great expectations dashed

Origins: A Memoir, by Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson The Lebanese Amin Maalouf is best known as a writer of historical novels in French, such as Le Rocher de Tanios, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1993. Yet before moving to Paris during the Lebanese civil war of the mid-1970s, Maalouf was a newspaper journalist in Beirut like his father before him. These two elements in his character, romancier and reporter, come together in this fine essay in family history. First published in French by Grasset as Origines in 2004, it is based on a trunk of family letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, receipts and title deeds preserved by the author’s mother in the family house in a part of Mount Lebanon known as the Northern Metn.

Anne Applebaum

The spectre of Spielberg

Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally Which would you rather read, The Great Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day-by-day account of the whisky he drank and the cigarettes he smoked while writing it? La Comédie humaine or a list of the cups of coffee Balzac downed, between midnight and sunrise, while putting all of those words down on paper? Barchester Towers or Trollope’s fond recollections of the time he spent in composition (wake up at 5:30, write until 8:30, leave for the post office, go home. Next day: wake up at 5:30, write until 8:30, leave for the post office, go home…) Descriptions of the process by which novelists come to create their works are invariably far less interesting than the works themselves.

Sarah Burton

First knight and his lady

A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, by Michael Holroyd It is rare today to come across a non-fiction book that does not include in its title or subtitle the assertion that the tale it tells is ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘fas- cinating’, publishers presumably having decided that we readers are unlikely to guess that a book might be interesting unless it says so on the cover. Inevitably, these claims have become devalued. Michael Holroyd, perhaps in ironic homage to this trend, puts no less than four appetite-whetting adjectives on his menu, with the original twist that the feast they advertise actually satisfies them all.

Bronwen Maddox

Faith in the Founding Fathers

The American Future, by Simon Schama This is the most exhilarating book that has been written about America for at least eight years, although it depends on the premise that the influence of George W. Bush is over and that Barack Obama will be the next president. Simon Schama is fortunate that this outcome looks more likely by the day. He has not been helped, on the other hand, by the suddenness of the financial drama which has overtaken the world’s most powerful economy, and which calls into question some of the American future he describes. All the same, this intricate and ambitious account of American inspiration and of the heartbeat of the national character is as good an answer to those doubts as anyone might give.

Saturday

Michael Heath

The Best of Punch Cartoons

In 1956 I joined other new kids on the block at Punch magazine: Quentin Blake, Ed McLachlan, Mike Williams, Honeysett, Ray Lowry, Ken Pyne, Bill Tidy, Pav, Petty, plus Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman who were going to blow the world apart with their blood-and-guts drawings. While Punch’s pages were curling at the edges, up popped Private Eye — naughty, rude, fearless and funny. Punch took a mortal blow from which it never recovered. People said that Punch had ceased to be funny, but this simply wasn’t true, as the cartoons collected here demonstrate. Cartoonists then had room to stretch themselves and put into their drawings details of the surroundings and attitudes of the period. Look at the amazing Pont (Graham Laidler) and see how he captured the Thirties.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

On stage from the start

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’ David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs.

Anthony Beachey

The man with the Midas touch

The perfect timing of this book rivals the brilliance of Warren Buffett’s many invest- ment coups. For years, this true ‘master of the universe’ has highlighted the dangers posed by derivatives — or ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ in Buffett-speak. Losses from these highly complex instruments, based on sub-prime US mortgage debt, precipitated the credit crunch and now threaten the entire global financial system. Presciently, Buffett warned in 2003 that derivatives could push companies into a ‘spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown’.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 8 October 2008

Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw George Pelecanos, The Turnaround Ian Rankin, Doors Open Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in his trademark period, Auden’s low, dishonest decade, and provides another monochrome glimpse of a continent sliding inexorably towards war. The dashing but damaged war hero, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, is France’s military attaché in Warsaw in 1937.