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Saturday

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A Christmas Song

A Christmas Song Why is the baby crying On this, his special day, When we have brought him lovely gifts And laid them on the hay? He’s crying for the people Who greet this day with dread Because somebody dear to them Is far away or dead, For all the men and women Whose love affairs went wrong, Who try their best at merriment When Christmas comes along, For separated parents Whose turn it is to grieve While children hang their stockings up Elsewhere on Christmas Eve, For everyone whose burden Carried through the year, Is heavier at Christmastime, The season of good cheer. That’s why the baby’s crying There in the cattle stall: He’s crying for those people. He’s crying for them all.

Margaret Macmillan

When the sun finally set

I first read the Raj Quartet in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott’s decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past. Who wanted to know the names of the long gone empire builders whose statues dotted cities and towns? Only a few students wanted to study imperial history. (I was one, perhaps because Canadians were acutely aware of how being part of a great empire had shaped them.) The empire to most people in Britain was an embarrassment, a joke, and a bore. It must have been galling to Scott that critical recognition of what is an extraordinary contribution to English literature was so slow in coming.

Kit Wright

Metal

Metal A steelmill town, a ridge of pine, The taste of snow upon the tongue, Meant all the world was black and white At Christmastime when he was young. In softened angle, muted line, The harshnesses became oblique. The keening lathes were pacified: All quiet on the frozen creek. And it was Christmas when he died Far off, no place on earth to go, But fresh as in his childhood came The scent of metal and of snow.

John Gross

From Charles Lamb to ‘netiquette’

A few years ago the American author Anne Fadiman scored a hit with Ex Libris, an amiable miscellany of book-talk touching lightly on such topics as the quirks of proof-reading and the vicissitudes of plagiarism. The subject matter of her new book, At Large and At Small, is much more varied, but the flavour is scarcely less literary. It is a collection of essays, designed to illustrate the continuing possibilities of what used to be known as the familiar essay — the bundle of personal reflections of which the most famous exponent was Charles Lamb. Familiar essays, cherished in their heyday by belletrists and inflicted on generations of schoolchildren, have long since lost favour as a literary form. But Fadiman isn’t afraid of being thought old-fashioned.

Victoria Glendinning

More marks on paper

Life is not fair. Talents are not distributed equitably. The likelihood is that if you are good at one thing, you will be good at other things too. But there is a twist in the tail. The more things you are good at, the less you will be perceived as pre-eminent in any of them. The American Paul Horgan, for example — singer, actor, set-designer, painter, poet, writer of stories, essays, novels, plays and libretti — is quoted in The Writer’s Brush as deploring his ‘accursed versatility’, and the truth is that I, unlike my better-informed readers, am unfamiliar with his oeuvre. A few of the writer-artists featured in this hefty book are first-class at neither authorship nor art, and most are much better writers than they are artists, or vice versa.

Vernon Scannell

A Yorkshire Christmas Eve

A Yorkshire Christmas Eve His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might impress late shoppers on this final trading-night, persuading them to spend their all before indifferent time slammed shut the last shop door. He heard hyena voices and he saw splashed vomit on the pavement as he left saddened by this evidence of more contempt of what was once the numinous. He headed for the moors and his small house. Later on, as he prepared for bed, he could not rid himself of melancholy: the world had changed, Christmas seemed stone-dead or turned into a tasteless parody of what was thrilling once, yet innocent.

Greta Stoddart

A Puzzle in Four Seasons

A Puzzle in Four Seasons Look at us. It must be Christmas. Our heads are bowed, the lamp close. We could be cracking a code or a body, so intent are we tonight on Spring, whose large foreground of wild daffodils could take us all winter. We check the lid from time to time like artists more absorbed in what they’re doing than what’s there: a village coming into itself all at once, in all weathers; yielding itself to nothing more than the hours of its own slow resurrection. It’s not often we come together like this. Nor do we believe for one minute in this village or its charmed stoicism. We attend to it quietly, with quick fingers.

Roger Lewis

Perfecting the art of rudeness

Everyone will have met Basil and Sybil Fawlty in real life — the would-be genteel types who, in running a provincial hotel, have condemned themselves to quite the wrong vocation, who are convinced their clientele are riff-raff and by whom the most modest request is interpreted as an unforgivable imposition. I encountered a classic couple only the other day — the virago muttering behind the desk, pen poised, and her lanky, put-upon husband sighing to me as he emerged from the cellar and lifted (quite violently) the grille at the bar, ‘Has the Gestapo given you the wine list?’ Such people loathe the idea of service — like those antique dealers and gallery owners who’ll kill you if they get mistaken for shopkeepers.

Rachel Johnson

Sunlight on stucco

This affordably handsome book confirms in my own partisan mind what a rich subject the area of Notting Hill in London is, and I can’t help approving of it for that reason alone. Like it or not, Notting Hill exerts a peculiar fascination over many who don’t live there as well as all who do, but it is the latter who will fall on this book with cries of pleasure. It is a solid rebuff to those who prefer to think that Notting Hill is not so much a place of bricks and mortar, but an annoying media construct instead.

David Ekserdjian

A choice of art books

First, and by no means simply by virtue of its weight, is Judy Egerton’s George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné (Yale, £95), which effortlessly combines awesome scholarly authority with what in academic circles is, alas, a far rarer commodity — wit. Seen whole and supported by such eloquent advocacy, Stubbs emerges as a truly great artist, who has been held back by his Britishness and his subject matter. As Judy Egerton rightly observes, it was the subject of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Gimcrack’ — a racehorse with jockey up — ‘whose seeming triviality had long caused more nervous art historians to twitch their petticoats’.

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 15 December 2007

Part of the charm of giving books to children at Christmas is that they are so easy to wrap. After an evening spent wrestling with a variety of soft toys with elongated limbs and tails, a large combine harvester, an assortment of weapons and a pogo stick, it is a relief to settle down to all those nice regular rectangles. Christmas is also the only time that many children get given hardbacks, and the opportunity to enjoy a book as an object, not simply for its contents. One agreeable object is the latest edition of Clement Moore’s well known poem The Night Before Christmas, with beautiful black- and-white cut-paper illustrations by Niroot Puttapipat (Walker Books, £12.99.

Patrick Marnham

A gathering of ghosts

Fire in the Blood is the second recently discovered and hitherto unpublished novel by the author of Suite Française, the two-volume work that was written shortly before French police arrested Irène Némirovsky in July 1942 and deported her to Auschwitz. The story of the discovery of Suite Française, the child running from the gendarmes who had just arrested her mother and grabbing a briefcase that contained the manuscript of a posthumous masterpiece, has become one of the great biographical anecdotes of the French Occupation. But the same small briefcase also contained another fragment, this time an un-titled typescript that led researchers in the Némirovsky archive to the complete version of Fire in the Blood.

Robert Salisbury

How to ruin a country

As Zimbabwe celebrated its independence in April 1980 President Nyerere of Tanzania had a piece of advice for Robert Mugabe: ‘You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.’ At first, it seemed that Mugabe would take his fellow socialist’s advice. His address to the nation on the eve of independence gave all Zimbabweans hope that, white and black, they could together rebuild the country after the miseries of the guerrilla war. Guguletho Moyo and Mark Ashurst quote the speech in full at the beginning of their useful compendium, and Martin Meredith reminds us that, after an initial interview, Ian Smith himself reported that he had found Mugabe not ‘the apostle of Satan’ but ‘sober and responsible’.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Conservative iconoclasts required

Having been a monarchist all my life, it was a bit embarrassing the other day to have to admit to a television interviewer that I could not remember the reasons why I had become one in the first place. In truth, of course — as I explained — I became a monarchist as a matter of course, pretty well by instinct; everybody was doing it. So I did it. The interviewer was not impressed. ‘Sounds like prejudice to me’, he said, putting me to shame. Now, along comes the highly cerebral prison doctor, Theodore Dalrymple to assure me that I was wrong to be ashamed.

Deborah Devonshire

The full-blown country-house look

It is not given to many for their surname to be turned into an adjective immediately recognisable by a section of society. ‘Fowlerised’ meant a house transformed by John Fowler to his (and the owners’) taste. In spite of having known John for many years, I had little idea of the extent of his work and influence until I read this book. Dedicated to looking and learning, he dealt with all dates and styles of buildings through scholarship and his prodigious memory. He was born in 1906, a one-off in his family with artistic talents that took him to painting furniture for Peter Jones in 1934, earning £4 a week. He was refused a rise in wages so he and his colleagues downed brushes and set up on their own. They struggled on till 1938 when John joined Lady Colefax.

Anthony Blond

A master of self-invention

When I announced, in London in 1962, that I was going to publish The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins replied, ‘Everyone here has already read it.’ ‘Here’ was the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, and The Carpetbaggers had hit the international jet set before the book arrived in England. But of course there were hundreds of thousands who hadn’t read it, with 35 shillings to spend on guaranteed sexy entertainment. (When we opened an envelope containing seven five-shilling postal orders from a factory in the Midlands, we knew we were on to something big.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 15 December 2007

Who is Cleo Birdwell?’ begins the flyleaf text of this book. ‘The simple answer is that she’s a New York Ranger, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, who becomes the hottest thing in hockey.’ Well, not quite. The simplest answer is that she’s Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, Underworld and Falling Man, publishing pseudonymously early in his career. Amazons is a woman’s first-person confessional account written covertly by a man. Not content to stop there, DeLillo makes this a book almost entirely about sex (there is very little hockey in it).

Saturday

Philip Ziegler

All passion spent

Sargent’s portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked the middle-class touch, he lacked even the upper-middle-class touch. He would have viewed the Forsytes with mild disdain; the rich industrialists of the Midlands and North, who every year played a more significant role in Conservative affairs, were an alien breed.

Elfreda Pownall

A choice of cookery books

Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Chatto & Windus, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking: there are more than 400 recipes based on fruit and vegetables. It is not vegetarian — she uses fish and meat too — but vegetables and fruit are to the fore. Raven’s recipes are simple, practical and enticing, and there isn’t one I don’t want to cook.

Christopher Howse

Recent books of photographs

In England by Don McCullin (Cape, £35) is, as might be expected, more gritty than pretty. Yet it is approachably humane compared with his famous war photography, where from Vietnam to Beirut the horrors are as terrible as Goya’s. McCullin escaped the London gangland of Finsbury Park by means of the photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book. It shows The Guvnors, a gang of young men with whom he had grown up, posing in the sun in their sharp Fifties Sunday suits and thin ties on the beams of a half demolished house. One of them was hanged after a policeman was knifed; McCullin sold his picture to the Observer, and set off into a wider world of war.