More from Books

Tuesday

Peregrine Worsthorne

Putting the Boot in

So much was written about Bill Deedes at the time of his death — not to mention his own two autobiographies and the mass of other doting media coverage in recent years — that readers might be forgiven for thinking that this intelligently probing and well-written authorised biography would have little fresh to say. Truth to tell, that is what this reviewer feared. My hopes for the book, however, were soon realised because early on Stephen Robinson, himself a veteran Telegraph man, tells us that Bill went to great lengths ‘to weed out all the disobliging references to himself in his voluminous filing cabinet’. Disobliging references? Shurely shome mistake. Why would anybody want to disoblige dear Bill?

Bevis Hillier

A Scottish master of caricature

If, in Victorian Britain, you did not fall in with the oppressive religiosity that prevailed, you were in danger of becoming a pariah, like Charles Bradlaugh in politics and T. H. Huxley in science. If, in 20th-century Britain, you did not subscribe to abstract expressionism, Dada urinals, Pop Art, Op Art, minimalism, ‘installations’ and every subsequent development (I am tempted to say imposture), you were likely to become a cultural pariah. The arts establishment was very like the Victorian religious establishment. It too had — and has — its high priests, with Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate as its Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury; its anathemas and excommunications.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The uneasy world between

Some roles in domestic service truly capture the imagination and have supplied English literature with several of its most enduring figures. There are the manservants from Sam Weller to Jeeves. There are butlers, including the terrifying one who receives the news of Merdle’s death in Little Dorrit with such equanimity, Henry Green’s Raunce, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s infinitive-splitting Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Surely, however, no domestic role has provided so many poignant inventions as that of the governess. From the moment the threat of the ‘governess-trade’ is made to hang over the head of Jane Fairfax in Emma, the 19th-century novel can hardly do without it.

Juliet Townsend

The county personified

One of the glories of British public life is the way in which ancient institutions, if left unmolested by officious politicians, can evolve over centuries to become something quite different from their original function, but just as valid. This is certainly the case with the office of Lord Lieutenant. Originally created in Tudor times to take on the military duties of the over-powerful High Sheriffs, the County Lieutenancy was first and foremost responsible for the defence of the realm at a time when the country had no standing army. Over the centuries, from the threat of the Armada to the Battle of Britain, the Lieutenants struggled with a succession of militias and volunteers which were often reluctant, ill-equipped and untrained.

Alexander Masters

The short life and hard times of a mathematical genius

Any proof pleases me: if I could prove by logic that you would be dead in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but the sorrow would be very much mitigated by my pleasure in the proof. G. H. Hardy, one of the finest mathematicians of the 20th century and author of the best popular book about mathematical life, A Mathematician’s Apology, was a wistful and ascetic don at Trinity College, Cambridge. His lifelong collaborator was J. E. Littlewood. Though their rooms were only a corridor apart, they communicated almost entirely by postcard. But it is Hardy’s association with Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian clerk of David Leavitt’s new novel, that has kept him famous.

David Crane

Always employ a slow bowler

It would be hard to imagine a worse title for a book, or one more likely to unite the sceptics of every camp. For those poor souls who think the Cheltenham Festival has something to do with books the idea will be ludicrous, and for the rest of us whose year begins with the Melbourne Test, and moves through the ‘Six Nations’, Champion Hurdle, Augusta, Aintree, Formula 1, the FA Cup Final, Epsom, Ascot, Wimbledon, and the Open back to the Charity Shield and another eight months’ dose of the Premiership, the notion that sport needs validation from ‘life’ or anywhere else is deeply offensive. I remember many years ago, playing in a ‘Sixes’ Hockey tournament sponsored by, I think, the Midland Bank.

Simon Baker

No getting away from it

Some non-fiction books seem inevitable before they are even written. Dawkins on atheism, Hitchens on contrarianism, Ackroyd on London: with such works, the author is allied so closely to the subject that it is a question of when, not if, their full-length treatment of it will appear. Julian Barnes on death must fall into that category. Barnes’s preoccupation with old age and extinction is noticeable all the way back in his first novel, Metroland (1980), which he published at 34; even in his physical prime he was looking ahead towards the decay of the body and the end. Nothing to Be Frightened Of, therefore, is the result of a lifetime’s thanatophobia.

Caroline Moorehead

Putting the jackboot in

He who holds Rome, Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin in November 1943, ‘holds the title deeds to Italy’. Two months earlier, immediately after the armistice and the surrender of the Italian forces, the main Allied invasion force had landed at Salerno, just south of Naples, and were now fighting their way north. It was, as James Holland writes, a long and bloody campaign and it would cause immense suffering, to the Allies, to the Germans, and to the hundreds of thousands of Italians caught between the two armies. Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-45, opens soon after a partisan attack on a group of German soldiers in Rome resulted in the reprisal massacre of 335 Italians, most of them civilians, in the Ardeatine caves.

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

Is it worth the worry?

I first met Simon Briscoe when, as a young MP enjoying a summer evening by the House of Commons terrace bar, I observed a youth in a Refreshment Department staff uniform pelting a group of Thames ducks with dry roasted peanuts. ‘Could you sink one?’ I asked. ‘Thanks,’ he said: ‘a pint of lager and a packet of crisps if you’d be so kind.’ We fell into conversation. Briscoe had recently landed a coveted position as a graduate trainee at the Treasury, but for light relief was moonlighting as a glass-clearer over the road at the Palace of Westminster. He went on later to an investment bank, and now writes on statistics for the Financial Times.

Digby Durrant

Love goes begging

I was astonished by the huge success of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin which I staggered through back in 1994. Many separate passages were colourfully and beguilingly written, but the book as a whole was confusing and over- written, as if the author couldn’t bear to stop. I haven’t read any others since, and didn’t relish reading his latest, though I was encouraged to find it a mere slip of a volume compared to Captain Correlli’s’ adventures — and Christian a very different kind of hero. A medical salesman, he believes that marriage turns wives into sisters and sex soon dies out, a painless castration.

Andro Linklater

Princes, patriots and party-givers

In the midst of a passage devoted to the transcendent qualities of Henry V — ‘a true hero [with] a strong claim to be rated the greatest of all English monarchs’ — Paul Johnson abruptly drops in an aside that begins: Once when I was giving a history lesson to the late Princess Diana, we discussed the predicament of a person born to be king. She said she had found [her husband] utterly selfish and self-centred because he had been spoiled from the cradle on. I pointed out that this was the common fate of heirs apparent. Having blithely swung an axe-blow to the character of the Prince of Wales, the institution of royalty, and his own pretensions to modesty, he lurches back to an extravagant encomium of Henry’s kingly virtues.

Christopher Ondaatje

Modern fusion architecture

Although there have been many architectural books featuring the works of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan born architect, most notably a first monograph authored by David Robson a year before Bawa died in 2003, a second book, Beyond Bawa, also by Robson, is a biographical and artistic revelation.

Anthony Daniels

Running for shelter

It is questionable whether psychiatry as a whole does, or has done throughout its history, more good than harm. Certainly there are some patients who benefit from its ministrations; but there are many others who have been harmed by the wrongful administration of noxious drugs or other therapies. A less tangible, but nevertheless potentially serious, harm is that it persuades people with the difficulties in living that are inseparable from human existence that they are ill, and therefore disguises from them that the best remedy, if one there be, lies in their own hands. Indeed, psychiatry seems to have persuaded whole societies that all forms of mental distress are illnesses, for which there is a technical medical solution.

Rosemary Hill

For the greater glory of God and man

It was the achievement of Sir Robert Shirley ‘to have done the best things in ye worst times And hoped them in the most callamitous.’ So at least reads the inscription over the west door of Holy Trinity, the chapel he founded at Staunton Harold in Leicestershire. The most notable things Shirley did were to build his chapel in an elaborate Gothic style during the Commonwealth and to conspire on behalf of the exiled Charles II. He died in the Tower for his pains. Holy Trinity, so evocative of the Catholic Middle Ages, was as damning a statement of his sympathies as the weapons he was caught stockpiling for the Royalist cause.

Frederic Raphael

And the Oscar goes to . . .

The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that ‘… a fight that began as a contest for a few small patches of Hollywood turf ended as the first shot in a revolution’. The loud implication is that the time taken to make the announcement ‘And the Oscar goes to …’ were ten seconds that shook the world. Mark Harris believes that at least three of the movies were radical departures, in conception and style, from all that had gone before.

Saturday

Noble Frankland

Keeping the bear at bay

Who would think that a battle as decisive as Marathon or Waterloo took place at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? Such is the question that Adam Zamoyski poses at the beginning of his account of the war between Lenin’s Soviet Russia and Pilsudski’s Catholic Poland, fought in the twilight between the first and second world wars. The author gives us the clue to the answer, not in the main title of his book, Warsaw 1920, but in its subtitle, ‘Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe’. Certain it is that Lenin saw his invasion of the recently re-created Poland as the gateway to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and eventually, perhaps, Italy.

Caroline Moore

More down than up

In one of the stories in this collection, a woman whose sister has died of anorexia remembers ‘an incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve’ when the little girls encountered a flasher: . . . it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At the time it looked like giblets, the same colour of subdued blood, dark and cooked, like that piece of the turkey our parents liked and called ‘the pope’s nose’. Is this a reminiscence, conscious or otherwise, of the metaphor in The Bell Jar, when the boyfriend of Sylvia Plath’s heroine offers to let her ‘see’ him? Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him.

Ferdinand Mount

The downfall of a pessimist

In some moods, I would rather read George Gissing than any other 19th-century English novelist. In the 1890s he was ranked with Hardy and Meredith, at a time when they had finished writing novels and he was only just getting into his tortured stride. Orwell called The Odd Women ‘one of the best novels in English’. But somehow Gissing has fallen off the shelves, not out of print but of public regard, fatally obscured by a reputation for gloom and pessimism. Gissing — the very word is like a South London street on a wet Monday. He himself rather revelled in that reputation. When he discovered that the next tenant in his old lodgings in Brixton had killed himself, he noted in his diary: ‘The atmosphere I left behind me, some would say, killed the poor man.

Alan Judd

A tough assignment

Albania is small and little known, its history sufficiently confusing and its names sufficiently unpronounceable for us to be funny about it or, worse, to romanticise it. But humour and romance were in short supply for Albanians during the second world war (and after), and there wasn’t much left over for those sent to help them. There was, however, no shortage of intensity. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) first deployed there in 1941. Albania had been occupied by the Italians in 1939, an annexation recognised by the Chamberlain government.

Pj Kavanagh

Hazy like foothills

As life-expectancy seems to grow longer by the minute, as it were — at least in our part of the globe — it was predictable that some writers would retain their marbles long enough to report ruefully back from the ageing-battlefield. At least two poets have done so very well: Roy Fuller and D. J. Enright; here is another, who, remarkably, kept on sending despatches almost to the end. He did so in a particular way; this collection is called, correctly, Last Poems, but they are in no sense a summing-up of his career. His enjoyable Collected Poems (Sinclair-Stevenson) was published in 1994. The poems here, ‘short, intelligible, witty’ in the words of the Oldie editor Richard Ingrams, were commissioned once a month from 1999 for that magazine.