More from Books

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Goats and donkeys

The Goat, they called him; and goatish he certainly was. He was stubborn, self-willed, exceptionally adept at climbing upward over rocky ground — and then there was the other thing, the thing that gives rise to this book. If there was a single force in his life to rival David Lloyd George’s ambition it was his sex drive. From the very outset of his political career, and from the very outset of his marriage, the former was the hostage of the latter. (How little, Spectator readers, things change!) Yet, miraculously, the roof never came down. After his second marriage to his mistress of three decades was saluted in the press, his principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester recorded in his diary: ‘He has lived a life of duplicity. He has got clean away with it.

Caroline Moorehead

Less mighty than the sword

Caroline Moorehead on Daoud Hari's memoir of Darfur When Daoud Hari was a boy, the villages of northern Darfur were peaceful places. He had a camel called Kelgi, to which he was much attached, and a vast clan of Zaghawa traditional tribal herdsmen as cousins. Sent away to school in El Fasher, he developed a taste for Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens and as a young man he left home to travel in Chad and Libya. It is what he saw when he returned that forms the heart of his remarkable memoir, The Translator. It was 2003. Crossing back into Darfur from Chad, he found the border full of frantic people, fleeing the violence that had broken out between rebel groups and the Sudanese army, helped by the Janjaweed raiders they support.

Jason Goodwin

A long and happy life

Jason Goowin reviews the memoirs of John Julius Norwich In 1957 John Julius Cooper (later Norwich) was keeping open house in Beirut, ‘the Clapham Junction of the world’s air routes’.Guests were given dinner on the terrace, where the Coopers liked to watch their faces ‘as, promptly at ten minutes past nine, an immense, luminous grapefruit appeared from behind Sannine and climbed slowly up into the eastern sky’. JJ’s passions — for history, for Venice, for music — have always been enlivened by a sense of theatre: his books are erudite and entertaining.

Margaret Macmillan

God bless America

The Most Noble Adventure contains a striking pair of photographs of the business district in Hamburg. The first, taken in 1945, shows shattered buildings, clouds of smoke and a virtually empty street. Five years later, the same scene is transformed. The damage has largely been repaired and the sidewalks are filled with well-dressed pedestrians. Was this extraordinary recovery, representative of what was happening all over Western Europe, a result of the Marshall Plan which pumped billions of dollars of American aid into a war-torn Europe? Or was it bound to happen sooner or later, once Europeans recovered their nerve and their will?

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The autobiography of a fig leaf

There are going to be plenty more of these, no doubt, even though the Blair administration doesn’t strike one as having been a government full of natural diary- keepers or memoir writers. Still, the incentive of publishers’ lucre presses strongly on those recently deprived of office — John Prescott, in this memoir, remarks guilelessly that he had no idea, until he stood down, quite how expensive London property was. Mrs Blair and now John Prescott have probably been wise to dash into print with books, however atrocious in execution and deplorable in intention, before too much time elapses.

Liz Anderson

Drawing a blank

I can’t remember. How many times have we all made a similar response and thought no more about it? But what if those three words start to recur rather more often? Panic. And what if you are under 60 years of age and you know that a family member has already been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s (EOA)? Total panic. The Story of Forgetting is surprisingly upbeat considering that dementia — and the early-onset type, too — is at the heart of the story.

Patrick Skene-Catling

The decline of the West

‘This is a work of non-fiction,’ Alexandra Fuller writes. ‘But I have taken narrative liberties with the text.’ She presents a fictionalised account of the life and early death of one man to personify the tragedy of a whole generation in the modern American West, which is no place for John Wayne heroics. With the force of an emotional novel, this dramatised biography is a polemic against the energy industry’s spoliation of the high plains of Wyoming and the dangerous exploitation of the men who drill there for oil and gas. The book is a panegyric to an austerely beautiful land and a lament for the pioneer cowboys’ descendants, now economically compelled to risk their lives as roughnecks on the oil rigs. Fuller was born in England in 1969.

Victor Sebestyen

The revolutionary, the president, the playwright

Victor Sebestyen reviews Václav Havel's new book A troika of heroic Slavic statesmen played the key roles in the last great drama of European history — the collapse of Soviet Communism. They were Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa and Václav Havel. All are still feted in Western capitals and can command high fees on the international lecture circuit. All are treated with disdain bordering on contempt in their own countries, where nowadays they can barely get themselves interviewed on local TV. Of the three, Havel, naturally, is the best able to write about how all political careers end in failure, however many magnificent and unexpected victories there may be along the way. Havel describes To the Castle and Back as ‘this strange little book of mine’.

Wednesday

Charles Cumming

All the best tunes

On a damp spring evening in 1955, Ian Fleming returned home to find his wife, Ann, hosting a salon at their house in Victoria Square. Raucous laughter was emanating from the drawing-room downstairs. One by one, the cream of London’s literati — Cyril Connolly among them — were reading aloud passages from the Bond novels and collapsing in fits of giggles. As humiliations go, this is hard to top. Fleming may have been modest about his abilities as a writer (in a letter to Sir Winston Churchill he described Live and Let Die as ‘an unashamed thriller’ whose ‘only merit is that it makes no demands on the mind of the reader’), but that modesty was entirely false.

Jonathan Beckman

The intelligentsia head south

Adam Thorpe set his previous novel, Between Each Breath, in Hampstead. He moves in his latest to the liberal intelligentsia’s summer hunting ground, the south of France. Nick and Sarah Mallinson, two not quite successful enough Cambridge historians, decamp on their sabbatical to Languedoc with their three young daughters. Their house is rented from the Sandlers, a mercenary pair of art dealers; the husband, Alan, took advantage of the invasion of Iraq to bag a number of archaeological artefacts by dubious means. Intent on completing neglected books and home-educating their children, the Mallinsons’ time dissipates into distraction and peacekeeping between warring kids.

Raymond Carr

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

In exile on St Helena, Napoleon brooded on the cause of the failure of his bid for the mastery of Europe. He confessed that ‘accursed Spain was the primary cause of my misfortunes’. Ronald Fraser’s book of over 500 pages may be seen as a commentary on this confession. Fraser made his name as the oral historian of Francoism and its opponents. Without the voices of the living, for his description of Spain from 1808 to 1814 Fraser has ransacked the archival sources and contemporary accounts. It is a fine example of what he calls history as seen from below. Whereas after Austerlitz the Austrian state survived defeat, and resistance in the Tyrol and in Naples were ‘minor surmountable regional affairs’, Spain was an exception.

William Leith

Trouble and strife | 4 June 2008

William Leith on Dietmar Rothermund's account of India If anybody knows about modern India, it’s Dietmar Rothermund. He’s the Professor Emeritus of South Asian history at the University of Heidelberg. He is, as he puts it himself, ‘a witness who has watched India for nearly half a century’. He first visited the place in 1960, and managed to interview Jalaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, twice. ‘I am convinced that India has a great future,’ he says. I’ll get back to that in a minute. In contrast to Rothermund, I knew virtually nothing about modern India until I opened his book. I’d seen the Attenborough film, with Ben Kingsley as Gandhi.

Charlotte Moore

Getting to the heart of the matter

Andrew Taylor’s latest thriller is set in London in 1934, when Mosley and his Blackshirts were beginning to capitalise on the miseries of economic depression while idealistic young Communists pounced with glee on evidence that the old class hierarchies were cracking. Taylor’s London is a murky, monochrome place of fog and cigarettes, stewed tea and bread and margarine. Older men still shake from the trauma of the trenches; younger ones scan the ‘Situations Vacant’ columns, desperate for anything that will earn them a shilling to feed the gas meter.

Paula Byrne

A house and its history

The new Brideshead Revisited film, out in September, was, like the 1981 television version, filmed at Castle Howard. For Jane Mulvagh, however, the ‘real’ Brideshead was Madresfield Court near Malvern in Worcestershire, a lovely moated house that has been in the Lygon family, headed by successive Earls Beauchamp, for nearly 1,000 years. This new book is a lovingly descriptive account of the house and the family history. The architecture of Brideshead — which does not have a moat — draws on Castle Howard, but Waugh’s famous description of the art nouveau chapel is based precisely on the one designed for Madresfield by the great Arts and Crafts artist, C. R.

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

Nothing ever new out of Africa

When I was a young doctor working in what was still Rhodesia, I read a book by a nun who was also a political economist. She demonstrated that land reform was not only a requirement of social justice but would lead to greatly increased agricultural output, since African peasant farmers cultivated their land more intensively than commercial farmers. Her argument was positively Euclidean in its precision and I accepted it in its entirety. The only thing that she omitted to mention, and that did not occur to me at the time, was that the land reform would have to be carried out by men; and not just men in general, but by particular men, with all their passions, weaknesses and prejudices. Political geometry is non-Euclidean.

Robert Stewart

Might is always right

Since the first political trial in modern history — that of Charles I in 1649 — not a single one has ended in the aquittal of the accused. That tells us everything. In no other category of trial would a perfect record for the prosecution be conceivable. In this important, timely, and cogently argued book John Laughland lays bare the truth that political trials, by which he means trials of heads of state or government ministers for acts of state, not for personal trangressions of the law, have never been properly constituted nor properly conducted judicial proceedings. They are staged events, intended as theatre, whose purpose is to legitimise the new regime, or ‘new world order’, brought about by the fall of the old.

William Brett

Giving the boy a bad review

William Brett reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel Do we carry the sins of our fathers? This sentiment may seem archaic — reminiscent, for instance, of the revenge cycles that play out in Greek tragedy. But in the Colombia of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers, the notion of generational retribution is all too contemporary. In cultures riven by catastrophe and personal loss, where revenge and despair are rife, it seems natural for people to bear responsibility for their predecessors’ actions. Look at post-war Germans, who for decades (and still now, some might say) carried the shame of their Nazi past. Colombia certainly qualifies as a country riven by catastrophe.

Philip Ziegler

Triumph of the polymaths

Books about London tend to be macrocosmic or microscopic in approach. The macrocosmic or Ackroydian study is vast, discursive and, in the case of Peter Ackroyd at least, jubilantly idiosyncratic. The micro- scopic concentrates on one small aspect of the whole — medieval drainage or Cheapside brothels in the time of Hogarth. James Hamilton and Leo Hollis, in these two curiously similar books, steer a course between the two which is sometimes uneasy but generally successful. Each author takes a period of London’s history: Hollis between the Restoration and the accession of Queen Anne, Hamilton from 1805 to the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Honor Clerk

The circle of a lonely psychiatrist

Honor Clerk on Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel Born into a second generation Norwegian immigrant family, Erik Davidsen is a divorced New York psychoanalyst with his fair share of sorrows and with a close circle of relations and acquaintances who in turn have their sorrows too. He is a compassionate and sensitive man and the troubles of his family and of his patients are central to his thoughts. He is also lonely, and finds himself involuntarily saying so, out loud. His father has just died, his sister is recently widowed and her famous husband’s life is the subject of intrusive press speculation. Her daughter’s double bereavement is compounded by having witnessed events at the Twin Towers.

Judith Flanders

A dying fall

Judith Flanders reviews Stephen Galloway's novel about the siege of Sarajevo  Many novels about war deal with the horrors of the front line, of the terrors of battle. Steven Galloway, in this accomplished, gripping book, instead explores what happens to people who are caught up between warring factions. What happens when you wake up one morning and find that everything in your safe, ordinary, middle-class life has just vanished without warning. A small, true incident during the siege of Sarajevo is his starting point. In a day of death and horror like any other, a mortar shell fell on a group of men and women waiting outside a bakery — a bakery without bread but where the hope of bread was enough to draw a crowd. Twenty-two were killed and many dozens more wounded.