More from Books

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Distinctions and likenesses

The last time all five James children were in the same room was at their mother’s funeral, in 1882. It must have been a strange gathering. Even by then, their lives had followed such extraordinarily different paths that, to the reader of their collective biography, they seem to have become randomly assembled strangers. Henry James, the novelist, is always going to be the one with the greatest interest and appeal, but his cosmopolitan elegance sits oddly next to William, the solid thinker and analyst of mysticism, Alice, the wry solipsistic invalid, or, especially, the rackety and sad lives of Wilkie and Bob. The story’s been told before, of course; but that’s because it’s a tantalisingly odd story.

Leanda De-Lisle

A keen sense of duty

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a spin doctor whose fictions retain, after 400 years, a powerful hold on the culture of the English-speaking world. ‘Terrifying’ is an adjective Stephen Alford deploys on more than one occasion to describe Cecil, and with reason. Cecil began his political career in the household of the future Protector Somerset, surviving his master’s fall to become Secretary of State to the boy King, Edward VI.

Byron Rogers

All you need to know about Wales

There is a moment in the introduction to this book, when, after the grand statement of its aim ‘to encapsulate a country’s material, natural and cultural essence’, you come on this, amongst the usual thanks being extended to archivists and professors: ‘To Roy Morgan of Mertec Evesham Ltd., Swansea, who kindly loaned the project a laptop computer.’ Just that, but from then on you suspect that this is going to be an encapsulation of a country’s material, natural and cultural essence unlike any other you have ever read. For there in a single sentence you have the Welsh, a people little given to airs (their most popular jibe being ‘Who does he think he is?’, one directed at R. S.

Carey Schofield

Getting to know the General | 5 July 2008

On 29 May 1989 Brigadier Tariq Mehmood, formerly head of Pakistan’s Special Forces, was taking part in a freefall demonstration in Gujranwala. His parachute failed and he crashed to his death in front of a large crowd that included his wife. TM (as he was always known) was the arche- typal Special Forces officer, almost recklessly courageous, colourful, bound very closely to his men, whatever their rank. The tragedy shook the Pakistan army. This grim event is wantonly exploited by Mohammed Hanif in his comedy, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The author has clearly had fun walking famous people — presidents, politicians, operators — through this re-imagining of events leading to the death of General Zia ul-Haq in August 1988.

Saturday

Douglas Hurd

Overstretched and over there

Douglas Hurd on James Fergusson’s new book Des Browne, our Defence Secretary, has recently returned from another visit to the British Army in Afghanistan. Once again he issued an optimistic statement on military progress. He should read the devastating account in James Fergusson’s book of his previous visits. The purpose of this excellently written book is to illustrate the gap between the public perception of the war in Afghanistan and the reality of what our servicemen have been enduring on the ground. We were surprised when the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, warned us ‘we can’t be here for ever at this level . . .

Charlotte Hobson

Variations on an enigma

You may have caught Jonathan Dimbleby on television recently travelling across Russia, picking potatoes with doughty Russian women, baring all for a steam bath in Moscow, looking alarmed as a white witch from Karelia promised to heal his bad back with a breadknife, etc. Here is the book of the series, in which Dimbleby, drawing on Churchill, plans to ‘reveal the enigma, unwrap the mystery and solve the riddle’ that is Russia. What is it about Russia that inspires this desire, again and again, in Western Europeans? Why does it matter to us?

Frederic Raphael

Mudslinging in the groves of academe

Mary Lefkowitz is a distinguished (i.e. no longer young) classicist who taught for over 30 years at Wellesley College. She has been particularly bold and articulate in promoting the role of women in antiquity. Married to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, a famously rigorous ex-Regius Professor of Greek, she can be presumed not to advance lazy arguments or to abuse her sources. Classicists do, of course, get involved in sometimes furious controversy but, in most cases, odium academicum is expressed with barbed courtesy. Civility is part of scholarship. So too, it is nice to imagine, is what one scholar calls ‘decency in proof’. Education is a common pursuit: even great scientists confess to standing on giants’ shoulders.

Jane Ridley

Truth is stranger than fiction

Jane Ridley on a history and a fiction of Leningrad  The siege of Leningrad is the ultimate nightmare: what happens when you push humanity to its utmost limits. The German armies advanced on Leningrad and besieged it in September, 1941. The siege lasted for almost 900 days, but the first winter was the worst. Bread, water, power, fuel all ran out. As the icy winter temperatures fell below minus 30 Celsius, people died of starvation at a rate of 20,000 a day. The streets were piled high with corpses: people were too weak to move their dead, and the ground was too frozen to bury them. Michael Jones, in his historical account of the siege, explores the moment when humanity changed. At first, the Leningraders were altruistic and tried to help each other.

Caroline Moorehead

A futile solution

In 1939, the six-year-old Eva Figes escaped Nazi Berlin for London. Her family were secular Jews and her father, who had been arrested after Kristallnacht, had spent some months in Dachau. Left behind were grandparents and two maids, Edith and Schwester Eva, both Jewish: by 1939, it was forbidden for Jews to employ Aryans. Schwester Eva died of typhus in a concentration camp, but Edith turned up in London 10 years later. It is her story that Eva Figes tells in Journey to Nowhere. The by now adolescent Figes did not learn it all at once. But over cups of tea in their kitchen in Hendon, having seen the newsreels of the liberation of Belsen, she slowly drew it out.

Ben Wilson

Giacomo of all trades

One evening in November 1763 the splendidly named Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar passed a middle-aged Venetian man on Westminster Bridge who, he thought, looked a little glum. Sir Wellbore knew what the stranger needed: ‘a drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding’. And so he took the 38-year old Casanova to a tavern on Cockspur Street which supplied all these delights of British life. A band of blind musicians was rustled up, so that the orgy would be spared an audience. Casanova found he could only manage the drink; he was fastidious about his food at the best of times, but to his mortification he was too depressed even to enjoy the French dancing girls. Casanova’s visit to London was disastrous, and his humiliation that night crowned a miserable few months.

Francis King

Tangerine dreams

In 1926, Tessa Codrington’s maternal grandfather, Jack Sinclair, once British Resident in Zanzibar, decided to buy for his wife a house on the ‘New Mountain’ in Tangier. One of Muriel Sinclair’s many eccentricities was that she had no wish to see her grandchildren. In consequence it was not until the old woman’s death that Tessa Codrington, then nine, first visited the house. Subsequently her mother was to give her a smaller house, built by Jack Sinclair, originally an architect, in the spacious grounds of the main one. An eager amateur photographer from her earliest years, Codrington is now a professionally accomplished one. As one turns the pages of this photograph album, one is repeatedly arrested by some striking image.

Allan Massie

Life and Letters | 28 June 2008

Callimachus (fl. 4th century BC), admired by Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, was the author of some 800 books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the Greek writers whose works were to be found in the famous library of Alexandria. Of his own work, only six hymns, 64 epigrams, the fragment of an epic, and a description of the method he employed to compile his catalogue, survive today. Harvey’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature also tells us that ‘his is the proverbial saying, “mega biblion, mega kakon” ’, which means, if my rusty Greek has not seized up completely, ‘big book, big bad’, a sentiment to which reviewers, confronted by an 800-page biography, may often give wholehearted assent.

Digby Durrant

Not for insomniacs

In Sybille Bedford’s book, Jigsaw, a woman who is suffering from insomnia asks for books. ‘Oh, not real books, I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only.’ So Sayers’ Wimseyland and Christie’s Poirot are required. How would she get on today? Ruth Rendell and P. D James would do excellently but none of these books would do at all: they are all thrillers, packed with blood, murder and mayhem, a nightmare diet. No time for quiet little grey cells to be working away here. Charles Maclean’s Home Before Dark is a particularly disturbing example of the genre.

Mary Kenny

Too close for comfort

It was the late Lord Deedes who once succinctly explained to me what it was like to live through the second world war. I had said to him, ‘Those Battle of Britain boys were so brave’.And he had replied, almost impatiently, ‘No, it wasn’t bravery we felt. It was a strange, deep, primitive compulsion that we were up against it. We had our backs to the wall. It was us or them.’ To any defender of Irish neutrality during the second world war — among whom I would count myself — the Deedes doctrine explains everything. It particularly illuminates Winston Churchill’s leadership.

Sarah Bradford

A true Renaissance man

Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli.

Wednesday

Victoria Glendinning

Selective breeding

The ‘entirely fresh view’ of childhood in England presented by Anthony Fletcher in 414 pages of text and apparatus may come to some as a bit of an anti-climax. Although material conditions changed enormously, and children by the end of his period had more toys and books and birthday presents, his 12 years of research have ‘not revealed any grounds for supposing that anything of fundamental importance changed, between 1600 and 1914, in the dynamic of the relationships between English parents and their children’. Not so much ‘entirely fresh’, then, as deep-frozen. He may well be right, at least in relation to his samples, which are made up entirely of families from the landed gentry and the upper professional classes.

Saturday

David Crane

A genius but not a hero

If anyone ever wondered why Marlborough has so seldom enjoyed the reputation his abilities warrant he could do a lot worse than start with Richard Holmes’s new biography. England’s Fragile Genius is probably as comprehensive an account of Marlborough as a single volume can hope to be, and yet at the end of 500-odd closely argued and sympathetic pages he remains so completely the creature of his age in all its factionalism, double dealing and venality, that it is hard to see him ever comfortably fitting the popular notion of the British hero. Even those who dislike Wellington’s politics can hardly deny the consistency or integrity of the man, but Marlborough presents a different range of difficulties.

Adam Zamoyski

Obsessed by Ukraine

This is the story of a very unusual man. ‘Wilhelm von Habsburg,’ Timothy Snyder tells us, ‘wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a sabre, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure. He spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land he wished to rule himself.

Caroline Moore

The irritation of Jean

The title of Isabel Fonseca’s first novel is promisingly witty: an ‘attachment’ is both a supplement to an e-mail, and a bond of human intimacy; and the main plot of the novel revolves around how the first may destroy the second. Jean Hubbard is a freelance health correspondent, living on a tropical island, from which she files 1,150 words every other Wednesday. Her husband, Mark, runs ‘one of the most innovative ad agencies in London’ (he is certainly innovative in doing so from St Jacques without a computer in the house).

Wednesday

Jonathan Sumption

Ruthless but ineffective

Gideon may or may not have overcome the Midianites by superior intelligence. The Book of Judges is a little obscure about that. But there is still something in the old adage that espionage is the second oldest profession. The rules of the game were set out more than six centuries ago in the advice given by one of his councillors to a king of France. Pay your spies well. Never let one of them know about the others. And don’t believe everything that they tell you. It is a good starting point, even today. Yet the profession is dying, progressively bypassed by electronic eavesdropping and satellite photography, and super- seded by computerised analysis. The trend is very ancient.