BREAKING

Farage: ‘People of Clacton should judge my actions’

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Saturday

Carole Angier

The unwilling executioner

Carole Angier reviews Imre Kertész’s new novel Fatelessness, Imre Kertész’s first novel, fitted one of the coolest accounts we have of Auschwitz into a mere 262 pages. Detective Story, his third, distills it still further into 113, each of them mercilessly sharp and clear. This time Kertész sets his story in an unnamed South American dictatorship; but there are several connections. Like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Colonel’s regime lasts only a few years; one of his torturers carries a book about Auschwitz; and their two main victims are Jewish. Like many of the Nazis’ victims, Federigo and Enrique Salinas are wealthy, educated and assimilated members of their society.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Genius under many guises

‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham,’ in an opinion Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) shared with one of his fictional characters, ‘to which the reader could regulate the degree of his credulity’. Furthermore, the inhabitants of novels should be allowed ‘a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living’. The distinction between reality and fantasy in the author’s life was nebulous. His own identity, by choice, was often unclear. One of 12 children, as an adult he preferred seclusion, hiding behind the interchangeable masks of a multiple persona.

M R-D-Foot

Our deadliest secret

This book shows how successive cabinets have handled the deadliest secret of modern times, what to do about nuclear bombs, since the first ones went off in 1945. As the subject was so secret, not much has ever been allowed out into the public domain; but Hennessy’s scholarly skills have been such that he has unearthed all of that, and here lays it out in scores of documents in facsimile. This gives the reader an engaging sense of being himself involved in actual research; and his commentaries illuminate each paper. He begins with the now famous memorandum by Frisch and Peierls, of March 1940, from which the whole ghastly project derived.

Tuesday

Jane Ridley

God and the GOM

Richard Shannon has been writing about Gladstone on and off for almost 50 years. His first book, a study of Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, was published in 1963. He is the author of a major biography of Gladstone in two exceptionally hefty volumes, which appeared to critical acclaim in 1982 and 1999. So why does he feel the need to hammer out another 200,000-odd words on the GOM? Well, the answer is really frustration. Shannon disarmingly admits that his two fat volumes of biography were ‘too dense for their own good’. Not enough people read them. Shannon had a view of Gladstone, but the message wasn’t getting across. The purpose of this (relatively) slim version is to drive home the Shannon thesis.

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

Daring to defy the myth

Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures. Actually, as Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers’ rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women. However, Weimar was, from the beginning, the target of the anti-democratic forces of the established Right — as Weitz describes the disparate forces which could be found in the nobility, the army, business, the churches and in the civil service.

Jonathan Keates

Spartans did it wearing cloaks

However loaded or coded, ‘Greek love’ is one of our more misleading cultural terms of convenience. It refers to an aspect of classical civilisation whose existence many people continue to find either embarrassing or reprehensible. Even now Hollywood chooses to present Achilles and Patroclus as best buddies US-Army style rather than as lovers unabashedly showing what Aeschylus, in a lost play about them both, calls ‘reverence for awesome thighs’ and is careful to excise all but the most oblique homosexual nuances from a screen portrayal of Alexander the Great.

S E-G-Hopkin

Pulp fiction for the intelligent

The late Alan Coren once called a collection of articles Golfing for Cats, in order, he claimed, to maximise his sales by tapping in to two profitable markets at once. Michael Moorcock has lavishly adopted this stratagem. The cataloguing data for this book defines it as: ‘1. Detective and mystery stories. 2. Fantasy fiction.’ The author himself claims it as a tribute to the Sexton Blake series (for which he wrote his first published novel), but there is hardly a tree in the orchard of pulp fiction from which he has not scrumped: the Western story, the gumshoe, the horror. For each he finds an answerable style, even to the occasional vulgarism and clumsy piece of exposition. The hero is allowed omniscience and his favourite brands of tobacco and alcohol.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

The vile behaviour of the press

This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. It is hypnotically readable, commands attention right to the end and has troubled me profoundly ever since. No journalist with any sense of decency can read this work without at times feeling anger and personal shame. I have worked for 25 years as a reporter and thought I understood the business fairly well. But again and again Davies provides fresh jaw-dropping evidence that journalism in Britain today is bent.

Jervoise Andreyev

A very vicious circle

This book is startling, original, enormously disturbing, horribly unscientific but compelling. Did you know that Dachau housed the world’s first and largest organic garden, established to produce various foods, including honey, for the German elite? Or that to find a ‘healthier cigarette’, 12 billion were manufactured using asbestos filters? Production stopped because the filters removed too much of the taste, not because of increased delivery of cancer-causing agents to the body. And who says history doesn’t repeat itself? In the UK, the care of the elderly infirm has long been dumped on local authorities and this government now plans to restrict specialist help for patients with chronic diseases.

Jane Rye

Champagne on dirty floorboards

Jane Rye on William Feaver's biography of Lucien Freud Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to the public gaze; but he does so on his own terms and is notoriously reluctant to let anyone else poke about in it. At the end of Lawrence Gowing’s 1982 monograph the author quotes Freud as saying ‘there is another reason for not writing about my life. IT IS STILL GOING ON’. William Feaver, it appears, is his licensed Boswell: recording conversations, taking photograhs of the reluctant artist, staying on for lunch.

Raymond Carr

A return to the grand themes

Between 1975 and today, under the direction of Professor Wm. Roger Louis, the British Studies Seminars of the University of Texas has organized 60 seminars on the modern history of Britain and has published a selection of the lectures in five volumes of which this is the most recent. It includes personal reminiscence. Graham Greene, the publisher not the novelist, relates his experiences in the book trade as modest English publishers are drawn into the financial arms of giant international corporations. There are scholarly specialist studies, one of which has 65 footnotes.

Saturday

Interconnect

The best possible ragbag

I love books like this. A writer writing about what he knows and what he loves and things he has done, with absolutely no thought as to the marketability of the book when it comes out. This very slight lack of focus has already been reflected in a couple of reviews. What is it, fish or fowl? The publishers, probably scratching their heads and wondering which shelf it’ll be put on, will no doubt classify it as ‘music’ or maybe ‘autobiography’, as all the chain bookshops like their non-fiction easily categorisable. I love books like this. A writer writing about what he knows and what he loves and things he has done, with absolutely no thought as to the marketability of the book when it comes out.

Alan Judd

Dangers of the group mentality

Alan Judd on Marc Sageman's latest book  Marc Sageman is deservedly one of the best-known academics working on terrorism. A clinical psychologist and former CIA officer, in 2004 he published Understanding Terror Networks, a book which enlarged the way the subject was seen. Hitherto, most researchers and governments had located the ‘root causes’ of terrorism either in religion (Islam) or in social and economic conditions. A third approach, the biographical, offered fascinating case-histories of terrorists thought to be mad or incomprehensibly evil and who generally turned out to be rather more commonplace. Sageman’s achievement was to start with evidence, not theory.

Matthew Dancona

Let Joy be unconfined

Matthew d'Ancona on Paul Morley's latest book In 1980, the Manchester pop impresario, Tony Wilson, showed Paul Morley the dead body of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who had hanged himself. Wilson hoped that Morley would one day write the definitive account of the band and Curtis’s martyrdom. He also knew that Morley’s father had committed suicide, and that, alone with the body in a room in Macclesfield, the young journalist would be confronting much more than the earthly remains of his favourite singer. Another book about Joy Division? No, the book.

Judith Flanders

When pink was far from rosy

J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, remembered that when he saw the first mushroom cloud rise in its terrifying beauty above the test site in New Mexico, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita came into his head: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ According to a colleague, however, what he actually said was, ‘Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.’ Oppenheimer the legend vs. Oppenheimer the man. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in this magisterial reconstruction of the rise and fall of America’s first great theoretical physicist, are careful to give both sides, the Sanskrit-reading mystic and the down-to-earth pragmatist.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

A great writer and drinker

When Edgar Allan Poe bumped into a friend in New York in 1845, according to Peter Ackroyd’s brisk new life, the following exchange took place. ‘Wallace,’ said Poe, ‘I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.’ ‘Have you?’ said Wallace. ‘That is a fine achievement.’ ‘Would you like to hear it?’ said Poe. ‘Most certainly,’ said Wallace. Thereupon Poe recited the verses of ‘The Raven’. This lovely little cameo — halfway to being a sketch from The Fast Show — is all the funnier for the fact that the joke is not entirely on Poe. Though maybe not the greatest poem ever written, ‘The Raven’ really was pretty spectacular. Poe knew it.

George Osborne

A stately progress

The bookshelves of any self-respecting library used to be weighed down with the monographs of the titans of 19th-century politics. The three volumes of John Morley’s masterly Life of Gladstone would jostle for space as each new volume of Moneypenny and Buckle’s six-volume Life of Benjamin Disrael was published. Yet one Victorian politician would have been conspicuous by his absence on the bookshelves. Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was hardly a bit-player in mid-Victorian politics. He was involved in the great battles over reform that dominated the period, both as leader of his party for 22 years and leader of his country. Yet the very title of this first ever full biography — The Forgotten Prime Minister — says it all.

John Martin-Robinson

The new arbiters of taste

Both these books are dominated by the American connection, over half of each being devoted to transatlantic collecting in the 20th century. James Stourton’s theme is post-war art collecting, and his US section is headed ‘America Triumphant’. He describes the 60 years when the USA dominated the international art market through sheer buying power but also because of the vitality and originality of the contemporary American art scene in New York. John Harris, by contrast, paints a hilarious picture of the earlier 20th-century trade in historic interiors and architectural bric-a-brac when ‘period rooms’ were a must-have in American houses and art museums, though most of the latter have now been de-accessioned as fake.

John De-Falbe

Love among the journalists

At the centre of James Meek’s new novel — a fine successor to The People’s Act of Love — there is a brilliant scene in which Adam Kellas, a war correspondent, is watching two Taliban lorries driving along a ridge. In the no-man’s-land between is an ancient Soviet tank occupied by Astrid, an American correspondent with whom Kellas has just spent the night, and an Afghan. She is not concerned with the lorries: she has just challenged the man to hit a tree stump in the distance. Kellas asks the Afghan commander beside him, who is infuriated by the tomfoolery, why he doesn’t instruct the tank to fire at the lorries. The commander replies that he doesn’t want to risk his men ‘when the Americans are going to win the war for us anyway’.

A.N. Wilson

Remembering Hugh Massingberd

A. N. Wilson commemorates the life of the great journalist Hugh Massingberd  The following is the address given at his funeral at Kensal Green Crematorium on 2 January We were all so lucky to bask in Hugh’s generous friendship. He included in this friendship his family, his children, Harriet and Luke, Gareth, the father of Hugh’s grandson Jack, whose arrival on this planet caused him such immense joy, Christine and of course Ripples, his wife, friend for life and ministering angel, as well as dozens of happy men and women, boys and girls, all of them cheered up by his mere appearance, or by one of his frequent, semi-legible post-cards written in thick felt-tip pen. In his own phrase — ‘Nothing better!’ There was nothing better than his friendship.