More from Books

Saturday

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?

Simon Baker

Another tragic Russian heroine

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first as biographers, second as novelists. Having written a book about Stalin’s court, and then a biography of Stalin himself, Simon Montefiore now publishes Sashenka, a novel about the horrors visited by Stalin on one family. Stalin appears here as an unsettling combination of rustic, avuncular warmth (‘his feline, almost oriental face smiling and flushed and still singing a Georgian song’) and ice-cold lunacy. The novel is divided into three parts.

Victor Sebestyen

How many Russians does it take to change a lightbulb?

In 1969, the Slovak writer Jan Kalina published 1001 Jokes, a collection of (mainly) anti-Communist stories which sold out within a couple of days. This was during the permafrost that descended on Czechoslovakia following the Russian suppression a year earlier of the Prague Spring. The ruling regime’s retribution was predictable. Listening devices were placed in his flat so the authorities could find out who passed the jokes on to him, and after a year of this surveillance Kalina was charged with slandering the state. He was jailed for a couple of years. During his trial the prosecution claimed, hilariously, that the bugging equipment in his home had been placed there by Western secret agents. ‘I never told that joke,’ Kalina said in response.

Molly Guinness

Gilding the lily

Molly Guinness on Allan Mallinson’s latest novel Allan Mallinson’s hero, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey, returns in Warrior with his usual mixture of courage and kindness, his talent for friendship and a military instinct that is second to none. The first scene shows us, with some high quality gore, that there is trouble in the Cape Colony: ‘He fired the carbine point-blank, taking off the top of the spearman’s head like a badly sliced egg.’ We are then transported to London, where Hervey is tied up for a few days with some complex administrative tasks; he has to organise a funeral, have conversations with a nun, his wife, a bishop, his former lover and various important figures in his regiment.

S E-G-Hopkin

Magic and laundry

Magic and fantasy seem to occupy an odd tract of land in the world of the novel. Despite an honourable lineage that includes William Morris, Lord Dunsany and J. R. R. Tolkien, there persists a feeling that fantasy is really for children and geeks; it is not a serious art. Perhaps this is why publishers put out editions of Terry Pratchett and J. K. Rowling with more sophisticated cover art, so that their readers will not be embarrassed on trains. Diana Wynne Jones was at Oxford in the days of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and learnt a great deal from them about the power and durability of myth (though not their Christian agenda — she is also free of Philip Pullman’s soapbox atheism).

Michael Bourdeaux

Through a chink in the Iron Curtain

Michael Bourdeaux on  Owen Matthews’s family biography. Reconstruction of one’s parents’ love story is a rare enough undertaking; success to this extent puts Owen Matthews’s family biography into a special category. Mervyn Matthews and Lyudmila Bibikova fell in love in Moscow in 1963, when he was studying there and she was a brilliant graduate of Moscow State University, then working at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. They were prevented from marrying the next year when Lyudmila was already in her wedding dress; Mervyn was deported. Their painful attempts, eventually successful, over the next six years to obtain an exit visa for her became one of the causes célèbres in Anglo-Soviet relations of the 1960s.

Wednesday

Raymond Carr

The sins of the son

In the spring of 1865 Washington was celebrating victory in a bitterly fought civil war. It had begun in 1861 when six southern states had seceded from the Union, setting up the separate Confederate state with its capital in Richmond. For Southerners, the Union threatened to abolish the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery without which, they held, the whole agrarian society of the south would collapse in ruins. They were fighting for survival. On 9 April 1865 the main army of the Confederates surrendered. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, was seen by Confederates as the political architect and living symbol of their defeat.

Olivia Cole

Dancing through danger

Olivia Cole on Victoria Hislop’s second novel Married to a permanently well-lunched Englishman, Sonia Cameron, the half-Spanish heroine of Victoria Hislop’s second novel The Return, seeks escapism — first in a local dance class (to which she becomes unexpectedly addicted) and, more compellingly, in a chapter of her family history by which she becomes distracted whilst in Granada improving her salsa.

Saturday

D.J. Taylor

Waves of geniality

No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man at Hodder Headline who declared that if the public wanted cookery and celebrity memoirs then that is what he would publish for them, yet still, apparently, there is a market for garrulous book-world memoirs fanatically absorbed in what the literary editor of the New Statesman said to his assistant around the time that Hillary climbed Everest. This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.

Justin Cartwright

Mad, bad and incompetent

As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind. Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of the late 19th century, to Bismarck’s Slavic preoccupation, to a long history of racial and mythical obsessions with Deutschtum or German-ness, and on into Weimar with its manifold resentments. We also know that the myth of efficiency and single-mindedness was an illusion: the Third Reich was a shambles, both organisationally and ideologically. Much of the policy was made on the hoof, with the SS, the Gauleiters, the Army and the Civil Service in competition for power, and for Hitler’s attention.

William Skidelsky

Wit and wisdom

‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the entirety of his work. Auden wrote a lot of poetry; but he wrote an awful lot of other stuff as well. That other stuff included plays (with Christopher Isherwood), opera librettos (with long-term partner Chester Kallman), song lyrics, lectures, radio broadcasts, record-sleeve notes, introductions to other writers’ work, essays, theological tracts and reams of journalism.