More from Books

Wednesday

Sarah Burton

The net result

Vermeer’s Hat turns on its head the conventional relationship between a history book and its illustrations. The seven paintings and one plate reproduced here are not intended to give us clues as to what the period and people in the narrative looked like, but are themselves the starting points for the web of narratives that Timothy Brook has woven on the subject of early global trade and the international exchange of ideas and practices. The eight works (five of which are paintings by Johannes Vermeer) were all made in Delft between 1630 and the end of the century and all depict objects which Brook recruits as portals not just to 17th-century Holland but to the 17th-century world as it became increasingly joined up through international commerce.

Saturday

James Robertson

A monkey business

‘To philosophise,’ Montaigne once wrote, ‘is to learn to die.’ He was paraphrasing Cicero and making an ancient point — only by leading examined lives can we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of our deaths. The legendary sanguinity of philosophers such as Socrates and Epicurus on their deathbeds seems to bear witness to the truth of the aphorism. In Mortal Coil, however, David Boyd Haycock has written a compelling history of man’s scientific search for longer life, one that reminds us of the many enlightened minds who wanted more than the consolations of philosophy.

Molly Guinness

Hope born of fantasy

Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a self-obsessed harridan in an anger management class and suddenly finds her lifelong rage melting in the same woman’s arms. In ‘Germans’, there is sustained psychological accuracy; Alice has come to heal a 40-year rift with her aunt Patricia which developed when Alice married a German.

Pj Kavanagh

The pity of it

This book opens with a bang; things are suggested rather than described, in short paragraphs, mostly dialogue; the impression is of a (very English) Hemingway. A party of six inmates, two orderlies and a newly arrived doctor, Irvine, are being taken on a bus from Dartford Asylum to view a whale beached on the Thames estuary. Dartford Asylum is a real place, containing for the most part men mentally damaged by the war, and the event is carefully dated, Spring 1923. The other passengers shy away from the silent inmates, sometimes even crossing themselves as though from fear of contagion; the bus driver is deliberately unhelpful and the orderlies are insolent to the new doctor. (Did people cross themselves in England in the 1920s?

Allan Massie

The death of the novel

Charles II apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’, and, if it could speak, the novel might do the same. Its death has been so often decreed. More than sixty years ago J B Priestley called it ‘a decaying literary form’ which ‘no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time’. Does this mean that in continuing to try to write novels one is either a decadent, or engaged in energetically flogging a dead horse? Should the novelist apply to himself these lines from one of Pound’s ‘Cantos’: ‘Yuan Yin sat by the roadside pretending to receive wisdom/ And Kung said/ “You old fool, come out of it,/ Get up and do something useful”.

Wednesday

Anne Applebaum

Deluded and abandoned

Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small piece of the gulag where the prisoners had been British. Or so the story went. Allegedly, a railwayman had once found the remnants of a British uniform on the site of the former barracks there, but no one was quite sure what had happened to it. Supposedly, some of the locals had once heard the prisoners singing English songs. Later, in Moscow, I tried to find a mention of the ‘English colony’, or something like it, in the Russian archives, but I could not.

Christopher Ondaatje

The stuff of legends

There have been many biographies of Sir Richard Burton, the renowned and enigmatic Victorian explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, author, translator, and one of the greatest linguists of his era. Curiously, however, there have been no major novels based on Burton’s extraordinary life. Iliya Troyanov, in a remarkable German novel Der Weltensammler, has corrected this omission. The English translation of his work, The Collector of Worlds, has created a sensual adventure, and an exploration of Burton’s behaviour. Burton was a brilliantly charismatic scholar and adventurer. Even from an early age he set out to learn all he could about swords and guns.

Michael Beloff

They are made a spectacle unto the world

In four years London will host its third Olympic Games. It is the first time it will have done so as the winner of a competition between bidding cities as fierce – and some say as suspect – as any that take place in the stadium. Before that London was volunteered as a stage only by default. In 1908 Italian civic rivalry and the eruption of Vesuvius subverted the chance of Rome. In 1948 the ravages of war postponed the choice of Helsinki. 2012 is the natural date for comparative studies of past London Games; but four writers have chosen to jump the literary gun. Three concentrate on the Games of 1908.

Saturday

Dinah Roe

Flowers of Scotland

The Lost Leader is Mick Imlah’s first collection in 20 years, following Birthmarks in 1988, and it is well worth the wait. It takes in everyone from Saint Columba to John Knox, with appearances from William Wallace, medieval alchemist Michael Scot, Bonnie Prince Charlie and rugby hero Gordon Brown. But this is no dewy-eyed tribute to national glories past. Like Browning’s poem ‘The Lost Leader’, which lamented the political conservatism of the aging Wordsworth, Imlah’s verse is in no mood for po-faced reverence. Wallace, for example, is drawn and quartered in four lines: This done, the moon went overhead; The bell of Mary Magdalen Struck one; and smartly off he sped In several directions.

Andrew Roberts

Short and sweet | 19 July 2008

What do you make of this texting business? It took me on a surprisingly complex journey. First I felt revulsion, then doubt set in, then I sensed a developing acceptance and finally I embraced it with utilitarian enthusiasm. At one point I was even touched by a Shavian zeal that texting might usher in a new universal shorthand which would simplify and accelerate communication. Not that I wanted conventional spellings eradicated. A word’s spelling is an encryption of its history. But I was tempted by the prospect of an alternative orthography so we cd typ thgs lke ths 2 ch othr. It’s doubtful this will ever happen as David Crystal’s entertaining book argues. The emergence of texting was greeted by hysteria in the press. ‘Bleak bald bad shorthand.

Olivia Glazebrook

A lost painting in a crumbling mansion

This is a curious book: not exactly likeable, but certainly intriguing, and definitely accomplished. It is a debut novel, but doesn’t feel like one at all. It is smart, bold and surprising, with nothing of the crowd-pleaser about it; in fact it might irritate, or disgust, just as easily as it amuses. A disgraced professor of art history, Thomas Lynch, believes that there exists an uncatalogued painting by Giovanni Bellini, of the Madonna, and that it is hidden somewhere in a dilapidated English country house named Mawle, a house owned for generations by the Roper family.

Alberto Manguel

No denying it

Montaigne wished for a library of deathbed chronicles. ‘If I were a maker of books,’ he wrote, ‘I would assemble an annotated registry of various kinds of dying.’ Such a collection exists. Its ancestors are the ars moriendi of the Middle Ages and its modern manifestations bear uplifting titles such as The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion or Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes. Part chronicles of a leavetaking, part philosophical handbooks, part cautionary tales and part memoirs, these books belong to a necessary genre that functions as a mirror for us to see the skull as our common face. At their best, they make for joyful reading. Helen Garner’s The Spare Room is the latest addition to Montaigne’s library.

Jonathan Keates

A hostage to fortune

Mugging, according to a popular theory, is a consensual act. Split seconds before the assault takes place victims supposedly establish some sort of complicity with their attackers, thus turning the robbery into a contractual arrangement. The same principle is just as easily applied to political assassination. Along the lines traced by Hardy’s famous poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, which suggests that the Titanic and the iceberg had actually been waiting to bump into each other, the hated tyrant seeks some kind of consummation in the thrust of a dagger or the discharge of a bullet.

Wednesday

William Leith

Through the keyhole

Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less, that if you look at people’s stuff in the right way, you can find out what makes them tick. Miller, on the other hand, is more tentative. He doesn’t want to generalise. But then, the people he studies seem much weirder than the people Gosling studies. Or maybe Miller is weirder than Gosling. As with all anthropological matters, it’s hard to know for sure.

Andrew Roberts

The Pope was wrong

In his Christmas broadcast for 1942, Pope Pius XII spoke of the ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have been killed or condemned to a slow extinction only because of their race’. As part of a wider denunciation of the Holocaust this would have been brave and useful, but in fact it was to be his only public wartime mention of it, and he did not even identify Hitler, the Nazis or the Jews by name. This failure publicly to denounce the greatest single crime in the history of mankind has unsurprisingly led to a major debate on the wartime role of the Pontiff, of which this well-researched, very well written, sane and thoughtful book is the latest and one of the most distinguished contributions.

James Fergusson

The house that Jock built

When John Murray was sold in 2002 it was billed by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the oldest independent book publisher in the world’. The firm had been in the same family since the first John Murray began selling books in Fleet Street in 1768. It was also, reported the Telegraph, ‘the last of London’s “gentlemen publishing houses” ’. But when were publishers ever gentlemen? The poet Byron wrote of his publisher in 1816, ‘I believe Murray to be a good man with a personal regard for me. But a bargain is in its very essence a hostile transaction . . . Do not all men try to abate the price of all they buy? — I contend that a bargain even between brethren — is a declaration of war.

Francis King

A Soho stalwart

Like Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross immediately grabbed the attention of Forties reviewers and readers with a series of short stories at once ruthlessly observant and irresistibly entertaining. However, unlike Wilson, admirably self-disciplined in the organisation of a career that eventually carried him to the centre of the literary establishment, Maclaren-Ross, alcoholic and wasteful of his gifts, soon drifted to its periphery. It is only recently that he has come once more to be recognised as a writer of the stature of Saki or Firbank, minor certainly but no less certainly a cherishable joy. It is clear from this selection that the people who kept his letters were rarely those who, their lives as itinerant as his, were closest to him.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Last tales from the West

BEEN SICK IN BED FOUR MONTHS AND WRITTEN AMONG OTHER THINGS TWO GOOD SHORT STORIES ONE 2300 WORDS AND 1800 BOTH TYPED AND READY FOR AIR MAIL STOP WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU FIRST LOOK AND AT SAME TIME TOUCH YOU FOR 100 WIRED TO BANK OF AMERICA CULVER CITY CALIFORNIA STOP EVEN IF ONLY ONE SUITED YOU I WOULD STILL BE FINANCIALLY ADVANCED IN YOUR BOOKS PLEASE WIRE IMMEDIATELY 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE ENCINO CALIFORNIA AS AM RETURNING STUDIO MONDAY MORNING THAT GHOST SCOTT FITZGERALD Scott Fitzgerald sent this cable to Arnold Gingrich on 17th July 1939. He was re-establishing contact. Gingrich was the founding editor of Esquire, the men’s magazine which had published several of Fitzgerald’s essays and short stories over the preceding few years.

Andro Linklater

A little goes a long way

No book can be entirely bad that tells you a zebra is basically black with up to 250 white stripes, that Princess Diana’s colonic irrigation treatment required ten gallons of water or that the height of the Eiffel Tower grows seven inches during a normal summer (although in this one it has probably shrunk). So many of life’s minor pleasures are contained in the ivvy words — frivolity, privies, rivers, trivets, vivacity, privilege, to name an immediate few — it is no surprise to find an entire book devoted to triviality. A shelf might seem about right for such a subject.

Jonathan Mirsky

Cheap and deadly

Think about your knickers. Your bra, shoes, socks, running shoes, anorak, television, towels, light bulbs, computer, and, sooner rather than later, your car or its parts. If they were made here they would be far more expensive. But they’re made in China, so that’s all right then. OK, workers here lose their jobs, but that’s globalisation for you, and anyway there is still plenty of work for people willing to do it. So that China price is really worth it, right? But what if the China price includes Chinese workers living in dark Satanic conditions and hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives lost every year?